Socialism from below

Socialism from below (Socialisme par en bas, SPEB), founded in 1997 and disbanded in 2007, was one of two socialist groups in France based on the International Socialism tradition of the Trotskyist movement. It was affiliated to the International Socialist Tendency 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, leading theoretician in the British Socialist Workers Party encouraged Socialisme International to follow the successful example of Linksruck (which entered the youth section of the German Social Democratic Party (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.

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