The Workers and Peasants' Socialist Party (Parti socialiste ouvrier et paysan, PSOP) was an ephemeral socialist organisation in France, formed on June 8, 1938 by Marceau Pivert. Its youth wing was the Workers and Peasants' Socialist Youth (Jeunesses Socialistes Ouvrières et Paysannes - JSOP).
It developed out of a left-wing faction that was expelled from the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), and named itself Gauche Révolutionnaire ("Revolutionary Left"). Alongside moderate Marxists, the party grouped Trotskyists (as an outcome of the French Turn) and Luxemburgists (such as René Lefeuvre). Another well-known leader beside Pivert was Daniel Guérin, a figure of Libertarian Socialism.
Internationally, PSOP was an affiliate of the London Bureau of left-wing socialist parties, which also included the British Independent Labour Party and the Spanish Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM).
Appealing to a minority dissatisfied with both the SFIO and the French Communist Party (PCF), PSOP was a revolutionary socialist party, and had between 8,000 and 10,000 members. It edited the paper Juin 36, named in memory of the 1936 general strike that caused the split between Pivert and the Popular Front government.
The PSOP collapsed at the beginning of World War II, when it was outlawed by the Vichy regime. Most of its former members joined the French Resistance, in groups affiliated with either the SFIO or the PCF or in L'Insurgé, an independent group around Lyon.
Famous quotes containing the words workers and, workers, socialist and/or party:
“In former times and in less complex societies, children could find their way into the adult world by watching workers and perhaps giving them a hand; by lingering at the general store long enough to chat with, and overhear conversations of, adults...; by sharing and participating in the tasks of family and community that were necessary to survival. They were in, and of, the adult world while yet sensing themselves apart as children.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“... work is only part of a man’s life; play, family, church, individual and group contacts, educational opportunities, the intelligent exercise of citizenship, all play a part in a well-rounded life. Workers are men and women with potentialities for mental and spiritual development as well as for physical health. We are paying the price today of having too long sidestepped all that this means to the mental, moral, and spiritual health of our nation.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.”
—Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931)
“This will not be disloyalty but will show that as members of a party they are loyal first to the fine things for which the party stands and when it rejects those things or forgets the legitimate objects for which parties exist, then as a party it cannot command the honest loyalty of its members.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)