Socialism from below
Encyclopedia
Socialism from below founded in 1997 and disbanded in 2007, was one of two socialist groups in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 based on the International Socialism
International Socialist Tendency
The International Socialist Tendency is an international grouping of unorthodox Trotskyist organisations based around the ideas of Tony Cliff, founder of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain...

 tradition of the Trotskyist movement. It was affiliated to the International Socialist Tendency
International Socialist Tendency
The International Socialist Tendency is an international grouping of unorthodox Trotskyist organisations based around the ideas of Tony Cliff, founder of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain...

 led by the SWP
Socialist Workers Party (Britain)
The Socialist Workers Party is a far left party in Britain founded by Tony Cliff. The SWP's student section has groups at a number of universities...

 in Britain.

Its origins lay in a small group of former members of Lutte Ouvriere who left that group in 1974 expecting to join a larger group, Union Ouvrier, which had broken from LO the previous year. They found that UO had already disintegrated, its members going in many directions. Therefore they formed a group of their own, initially named Combat Communiste.

Some members of Combat Communiste were won over to the positions of the International Socialists (UK) (as the SWP was then called) and sought to win other militants to their views before launching an independent group of their own. They joined the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR) to further that aim and later left to found the Socialisme International
Socialisme International
Socialisme International was a small French revolutionary socialist organisation, founded in 1985 and publishing its magazine until 2009....

 group.

During the 1990s, Tony Cliff
Tony Cliff
Tony Cliff , was a Trotskyist who was a founding member of the Socialist Review Group which went on to become the Socialist Workers Party...

, leading theoretician in the British Socialist Workers Party
Socialist Workers Party (Britain)
The Socialist Workers Party is a far left party in Britain founded by Tony Cliff. The SWP's student section has groups at a number of universities...

 encouraged Socialisme International to follow the successful example of Linksruck
Linksruck
Left Shift was a Trotskyist group in Germany, which was the German affiliate of the International Socialist Tendency...

 (which entered the youth section of the SPD
Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Social Democratic Party of Germany is a social-democratic political party in Germany...

 and grew substantially) and join the French Socialist Party. This caused a split, with some members founding a small group called Socialisme, some leaving entirely, and the remainder renaming themselves Socialisme Par En Bas. In the event the tactic was disastrous and SPEB left the Socialist Party again shortly afterwards.

SPEB grew somewhat during the radicalisation in France in the late 1990s around the anti-capitalist movement, but was still too small to take full advantage. It joined ATTAC en masse, but when the latter began to lose the initiative and stall in the aftermath of 9/11, it started to concentrate its efforts on building Agir Contre La Guerre (Act Against the War). Following the relatively good showing for the far left in the French presidential elections in 2002, SPEB advocated the 'unity of the revolutionary left', and applied to join the LCR as an official faction. This move was supported by the British SWP
Socialist Workers Party (Britain)
The Socialist Workers Party is a far left party in Britain founded by Tony Cliff. The SWP's student section has groups at a number of universities...

, which at that time was starting to develop closer relations with the LCR.

In late January 2004 SPEB, then numbering approximately 50 militants, was permitted to join the LCR as a faction. Socialisme International
Socialisme International
Socialisme International was a small French revolutionary socialist organisation, founded in 1985 and publishing its magazine until 2009....

(the Socialisme group renamed), by then much smaller, had joined the LCR some months previously. SPEB disbanded in early 2007.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK