The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

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