The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

colonies, particularly Java. The growth of profit went together with ‘indigenous’ revolts against forced labour
and starvation: Java, from 1825 to 1830, and Sumatra till 1837. In 1830, the governor-general Van den Bosch
introduced the enforced labor, the so-called ‘culture system’ (cultuurstelsel), which required Javanese farmers to
grow a certain amount of crops for export (coffee, sugar, spices and indigo), which were sold through the NHM.
The profits gave large budget surpluses till 1870 to the Dutch State and an extra fortune for the king, shareholder
of the NHM. The “culture system” gave enormous profits to the state capital: 39 millions of florins per year.
Nevertheless, with less rice to feed farmers, greater poverty and famine took a firm hold round 1845-50. Revolts
broke out. Dutch military expeditions spread over the Archipelago. The most important revolt was the 1873
Atjeh (Aceh) war in North of Sumatra, which lasted round 30 years.
Dupted by the king – who invested in colonial speculation rather than in modern industry – the Dutch
bourgeoisie, despite its long history, was still playing a secondary role up to 1870, on both the economic and
political levels.
The decline of the commercial bourgeoisie, its inability to develop an industrial capital, its search for speculative
investments in the soil, all these factors explain the economic backwardness of the Netherlands in the middle of
the 19 th century. While Belgium, after its independence from the Dutch kingdom in 1830, independence
sustained by France and Britain, knew an industrial boom, the Netherlands remained in a status of economic
stagnation. Per capita economic growth was close to zero in the Netherlands up to the 1850s, despite the growing
importance of foreign trade. Thus in 1849, 90% of the Dutch national product came from agriculture. While 75%
of the population lived in towns, the majority vegetated in a state of permanent unemployment, and lived off
alms provided by the wealthy and the churches. In 1840, 8,000 of Haarlem’s 20,000 inhabitants were registered
as ‘poor’, a figure that completely under-estimated the real situation. The physical degeneration of this subproletariat
was such that, in order to build the first railways, the Dutch capitalists had to call upon the English
workforce. In her study Kapitaal en arbeid in Nederland, the socialist theoretician Henriëtte Roland Holst-van
der Schalk noted that: “Since the second half of the 18 th century, our country has entered into a state of
decadence, then of stagnation and abnormally slow, defective development. In the space of a few generations,
our proletariat has degenerated physically and spiritually.” 1 Engels analysed 19 th century Holland as “a country
where the bourgeoisie feeds off its past grandeur and where the proletariat has dried up”. 2 This opinion seemed
partly right. 3
This relative decline could explain verbal ‘radicalism’ during this period when the bourgeoisie vegetated under
the domination of the state, as well as an initial (and short) interest for Marxism among some of its number. This
interest quickly disappeared with the first serious class confrontations. Russia, where the liberal bourgeoisie was
weak, produced its local versions of people like Struve 4 , ‘legal’ Marxists, aiming to develop national capital. It
was not the case in The Netherlands: with the strong growing of industrial capital in the Netherlands, after 1850-
1870, developed a bourgeoisie more conscious of its political class interests. Soon, it was the beginning of the
expansion of the Philips Company after 1891, which became one of the major international producers of light
bulbs.
In the wake of the Constitutional monarchy of 1848, the Liberals of Johan Rudolf Thorbecke (1798-1872) had
played an important role to conciliate monarchy and conservative liberalism in several governments (1849-1853,
1 This book was originally published in 1902; the 4 th improved and enlarged edition was published in 1932 [reprint
Nijmegen: SUN, 1971]. The quote is from M.C. Wiessing, Die Holländische Schule des Marxismus. Die Tribunisten:
Erinnerungen und Dokumente (‘The Dutch School of Marxism. The Tribunists: Memories and Documents’) (Hamburg:
VSA, 1980). [Mathijs Wiessing (1906-1987), architect, ‘orthodox communist’, has lived in the USSR and died in Moscow.]
2 Marx-Engels Werke (MEW), Vol. 3 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag), pp. 335-336.
3 In 1890, The Netherlands were twice more rich (per capita) than Great-Britain, three times than France.
4 Piotr Struve (1870-1943) was one of those Russian liberals who at the end of the 19 th century developed a passion for
Marxism, which he saw as no more than a theory of the peaceful transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism. Their
brand of ‘Marxism’, known as ‘legal’ Marxism because it was tolerated and even encouraged by the Tsarist censorship, was
an apology for ‘modern capitalism’. Struve soon became one of the leaders of the liberal Cadet party (Constitutional
Democrats, or KD) and was in the front ranks of the white counter-revolution after 1917.
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