Socialisme International
Encyclopedia
Socialisme International (SI) was a small French
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...

 revolutionary socialist organisation, founded in 1985 and publishing its magazine until 2009.

SI is based on the tradition of 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...

 (SWP) but is not formally a member of 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...

. SI entered into the Revolutionary Communist League in 2000. The group continued to produce a quarterly journal of the same name.

The people around Socialisme International have notably been active in recent years opposing the controversial ban on the wearing of Muslim
Muslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...

 headscarves in schools, (along with an alliance of Muslim and left organisations and individuals) and supporting the idea of a united radical Left candidate for the 2007 presidential elections
French presidential election, 2007
The 2007 French presidential election, the ninth of the Fifth French Republic was held to elect the successor to Jacques Chirac as president of France for a five-year term.The winner, decided on 5 and 6 May 2007, was Nicolas Sarkozy...

.

History

The origins of the group lie in a small group of former members of Lutte Ouvriere who left that group in 1974 expecting to join a larger group, Union Ouvrière, who had broken from LO the previous year. They found that UO had already disintegrated with its members going in many different directions. They therefore formed a group of their own, named Combat Comuniste.

Combat Comuniste existed for a period but only as a tiny grouping, it had many problems and was somewhat heterogeneous which led to its failure. By this point some of the leadership of the group had been won over to the positions of the International Socialists (as the British 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
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...

, the 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...

 who 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
Socialist Party (France)
The Socialist Party is a social-democratic political party in France and the largest party of the French centre-left. It is one of the two major contemporary political parties in France, along with the center-right Union for a Popular Movement...

. This caused a split, with some leaving entirely and others founding a group called Action, then Action à gauche, and finally Socialisme Par En Bas
Socialism from below
Socialism from below , 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...

.

The group that was left after the split renamed themselves Gauche! and later Socialisme before reclaiming the name "Socialisme International". In 2000 SI once more joined the LCR. It was followed two years later by Socialisme Par En Bas. Its members were involved in the foundation of the New Anticapitalist Party
New Anticapitalist Party
The New Anticapitalist Party is a French political party founded in February 2009. Its name was originally intended to be temporary; a vote on the name being held at the founding congress on 6–8 February 2009, where NPA won over "Revolutionary Anticapitalist Party" with 53% of the vote.The party ...

, which is the present policy of the LCR. In 2008, the organisation began to work closely with another group, the Marxistes Unitaires, and closed down their own independent publication.

See also

  • Marxism
    Marxism
    Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

  • Trotskyism
    Trotskyism
    Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party of the working-class...

  • Revolutionary socialism
    Revolutionary socialism
    The term revolutionary socialism refers to Socialist tendencies that advocate the need for fundamental social change through revolution by mass movements of the working class, as a strategy to achieve a socialist society...

  • International Socialist Tendency (IST)
    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...

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