Socialism from below
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Socialisme par en bas (SPEB) is one of two socialist groups in France based on the International Socialism tradition of the Trotskyist movement. It is affiliated to the International Socialist Tendency led by the SWP in Britain.
Its origins lie in a small group of former members of Lutte Ouvriere who left that group in 1974 expecting to join a larger group, Union Ouvrier, who had broken from LO the previous year. They found that UO had already disintegrated with its members going in many directions. Therefore they formed a group of their own, named Combat Comuniste.
Combat Comuniste existed for a period but as a tiny grouping, it had many problems and was somewhat heterogenous which led to its failure. By this point some of the members of CC had been won over to the positions of the International Socialists (UK) (as the SWP was then called). Therefore they sought to win other militants to their views prior to launching an independent group of their own and joined the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR) to further that aim. After a period they were to leave and found the Socialisme International group.
During the 1990s, Tony Cliff, leading theortician in the British Socialist Workers Party encouraged Socialisme International to follow the successful example of Linksruck (who entered the youth section of the 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 after.
They grew somewhat out of the radicalisation in France in the late 1990s around anti-capitalism, but were still too small to take full advantage. They joined ATTAC en masse, but when the latter began to lose the initiative and stall in the aftermath of 9/11, they started to concentrate their efforts on building Agir Contre La Guerre (Act Against the War). Following the 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 British SWP who were anyway starting to develop closer relations with the LCR themselves.
In late January 2004 Socialisme par en bas, then numbering approximately 50 militants, was permitted to join the LCR as a faction. Socialisme Internationale (the Socialisme group renamed), by then much smaller, had joined the LCR some months previously. Both groups are on the left of the LCR and look towards the SWP(Britain) although SI is more critical. Both groups too are largely composed of young members with only a small leavening of more experienced members.