The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom
The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom
The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom
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confusions after 1914 (see Chapter 3), helped to tarnish the image of the Marxist left, all of which was tarred<br />
with the same ‘sectarian’ brush. <strong>The</strong> most striking personalities were undoubtedly Wijnkoop, Van Ravesteyn,<br />
and Ceton, who stamped their undivided authority on first the Tribunist, then (after 1918) the communist<br />
movements, as their real organisational leaders.<br />
David Wijnkoop (1876-1941) quickly took the lead in the opposition to Troelstra. Son of a rabbi, and a graduate<br />
in literature, he abandoned the literary and student movement to join the socialists. In 1900, two years after<br />
joining the SDAP, he was a delegate to the international socialist student congress in Paris He had a dynamic<br />
personality, with more of the fighter than the theoretician, and rose rapidly to join the leadership (1905) of the<br />
party, which drew strong support from the combative Jewish proletariat of Amsterdam. 29 Though courageous, he<br />
was dictatorial, sectarian, and something of a politician. He was not well liked by either Pannekoek or Gorter,<br />
the latter seeing him during the war as a kind of “radicalised” Troelstra.<br />
Like Wijnkoop, Willem van Ravesteyn (1876-1970) joined the SDAP in 1898, in Leiden, in the same section as<br />
Pannekoek. Van Ravesteyn was a literary historian, later to become a library curator, and translated Jaurès into<br />
<strong>Dutch</strong>. Like Wijnkoop, he was an organiser for the Tribunist movement, then for the <strong>Dutch</strong> CP. Considered ‘dry<br />
and pedantic’ by Pannekoek, he followed Wijnkoop through all his political changes until 1925.<br />
<strong>The</strong> same was true of Jan Cornelis Ceton (1875-1943). A teacher of “simple and clear convictions” according to<br />
Pannekoek, he was a leader of the socialist teachers’ union, and secretary of the revolutionary section of<br />
Amsterdam III. Although not much of a theoretician, he was the real organiser and financier, first of De Tribune,<br />
then of the SDP and the CPH. Together, the three formed the ‘triumvirate’ which was the de facto, if somewhat<br />
dubious, leadership of the Tribunist, then the communist movement in Holland until 1925. From 1917 onwards,<br />
this triumvirate was the sworn enemy of the communist left represented by Gorter.<br />
Despite their firm revolutionary convictions at the beginning of the Tribunist movement, this triumvirate was, in<br />
the long run and during the war (see Chapter 3), to prove opportunist. Its oscillation between a radical<br />
sectarianism and a “centrist” and devious practice helped to weaken the international influence of the <strong>Dutch</strong><br />
Marxist left. Seen from the outside, the latter seemed to form a theoretical and political whole. In reality, it was<br />
more a sum of elements, whose most brilliant and most revolutionary members, like Gorter and Pannekoek, were<br />
in fact at some remove from the centre of political decision-making.<br />
<strong>The</strong> drama of the <strong>Dutch</strong> left at its inception was that internationally recognised Marxist theoreticians like Gorter<br />
and Pannekoek, and even Roland Holst, had little weight in the organisational life of the SDAP. In this they<br />
differed from Luxemburg and Lenin who were both theoreticians and party organisers, with enough political<br />
authority in Russia and Poland to give a direction to their party’s activity. Whereas Wijnkoop was a full-time<br />
party member in both the SDAP and the SDP, neither Gorter nor Pannekoek were full-time ‘professional<br />
revolutionaries’. Despite his dynamism as a militant, Gorter was constantly torn between his activity as a poet –<br />
to which he sometimes devoted himself totally – and his militant activity as a party propagandist and orator.<br />
Hence his occasionally truncated, episodic activity which sometimes led him to disappear from party<br />
congresses. 30 Pannekoek was undoubtedly a militant, but was bound up in both his astronomical research and his<br />
activity as a Marxist theoretician. Although he was active, he never felt himself at ease in the concrete problems<br />
29 See: A.J. Koejemans, David Wijnkoop, een mens in de strijd voor het socialisme, Amsterdam: Moussault’s uitgeverij,<br />
1967. This book has been written by a leader of the CPN, who after1945 was editor in chief of the CPN daily paper De<br />
Waarheid. Anthoon Koejemans (1903-1982) was a collaborator of the CPN publishing house Pegasus. In disagreement with<br />
the ‘political line’, he left the party in 1955.<br />
30 In 1903, Gorter published his individually inspired Verzen. Later, his support for the idea of ‘proletarian’ art led him to<br />
publish ‘socialist’ poems, which were far from having the poetical strength and value of Mei (‘May’). <strong>The</strong> poem Een klein<br />
heldendicht (‘A little epic’, 1906) recounts the evolution of a young proletarian towards socialism. Other poems were more<br />
inspired: Pan (1912) is a story of the emancipation of men and women, while De Arbeidersraad (‘<strong>The</strong> workers’ council’) is<br />
an epic description of the world proletariat’s terrible defeat during the 1920s. Gorter’s poetry swings between personal<br />
lyricism and the didactic socialist epic. Unlike Trotsky, Mehring and others, he considered it possible to develop a ‘pure<br />
proletarian art’. His eight volumes of poetical works have been published by Querido, Bussum–Amsterdam, 1950-52.<br />
27