{{No references, date=September 2022
Socialism from below (''Socialisme par en bas'', SPEB), founded in 1997 and disbanded in 2007, was one of two
socialist
Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the ...
groups in
France
France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...
based on the
International Socialism
Proletarian internationalism, sometimes referred to as international socialism, is the perception of all communist revolutions as being part of a single global class struggle rather than separate localized events. It is based on the theory that ...
tradition of the
Trotskyist
Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Ukrainian-Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and some other members of the Left Opposition and Fourth International. Trotsky self-identified as an orthodox Marxist, a ...
movement. It was affiliated to the
International Socialist Tendency
The International Socialist Tendency (IST) is an international grouping of unorthodox Trotskyist organisations espousing the ideas of Tony Cliff (1917–2000), founder of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain (not to be confused with ...
led by the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP) 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 (IS, forerunner of the SWP) 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 group.
During the 1990s,
Tony Cliff
Tony Cliff (born Yigael Glückstein, he, יגאל גליקשטיין; 20 May 1917 – 9 April 2000) was a Trotskyist activist. Born to a Jewish family in Palestine, he moved to Britain in 1947 and by the end of the 1950s had assumed the pen na ...
, leading theoretician in the British
Socialist Workers Party encouraged Socialisme International to follow the successful example of
Linksruck
Left Shift (german: links=no, Linksruck) was a Trotskyist group in Germany, which was the German affiliate of the International Socialist Tendency (the network founded by the British Socialist Workers Party). In September 2007, Linksruck forma ...
(which entered the youth section of the German
Social Democratic Party
The name Social Democratic Party or Social Democrats has been used by many political parties in various countries around the world. Such parties are most commonly aligned to social democracy as their political ideology.
Active parties
Fo ...
(SPD) 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
Anti-capitalism is a political ideology and movement encompassing a variety of attitudes and ideas that oppose capitalism. In this sense, anti-capitalists are those who wish to replace capitalism with another type of economic system, such as ...
, but was still too small to take full advantage. It joined
ATTAC
The Association pour la Taxation des Transactions financières et pour l'Action Citoyenne (''Association for the Taxation of financial Transactions and Citizen's Action'', ATTAC) is an activist organisation originally created to promote the e ...
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, 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 (the Socialisme group renamed), by then much smaller, had joined the LCR some months previously. SPEB disbanded in early 2007.
International Socialist Tendency
Trotskyist organizations in France