The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

Marxism’s first struggles against revisionism
As so often in the history of the workers’ movement, the struggle for the defence of revolutionary principles was
engaged at first on a practical terrain. The struggle against opportunism in the Dutch party centred around two
problems which, with historical hindsight, might seem of little importance today: the peasant question, and the
school question.
The importance of the peasant question was obvious in a country like Holland, whose commercial capital
invested in the colonies was accompanied by archaic social structures in the countryside. Apart from its livestock
sector, and although beginning to develop, Dutch agriculture remained backward, with a still large mass of
equally backward peasants, especially in Friesland, Troelstra’s ‘fiefdom’. Alongside the peasants, a mass of
landless farm workers hired out their labour power to peasants, landlords and farmers. To attract the peasant
vote, which sent a substantial proportion of the SDAP’s deputies to parliament, in 1901 a modification was
proposed to the Party’s programme. Instead of the abolition of the existing order through the socialisation of the
land, and therefore the abolition of private property, the new programme proposed to regulate the “tenant farm
contract”. 34 Worse still, from the standpoint of the socialist programme, was the point devoted to the agricultural
workers. Instead of linking up their struggle to that of the workers in the factories and emphasising their
common interests with the rest of the proletariat, the programme proposed nothing less than to transform them
into peasant freeholders. “2. The provision of land and agricultural equipment at a fixed price for landless farm
workers, to ensure them an autonomous existence.”
These slogans launched by the Troelstra leadership were a clear declaration of reformism, which proposed not to
abolish, but to improve capitalist society. As the left of the party pointed out: “these two slogans are in
contradiction with society’s development in a socialist direction”.
However, at the Hague Congress of 1905, under pressure from the left, and with the support of Kautsky who at
the time held a left-wing position on the agrarian question, 35 these two points were struck from the Party’s
agrarian programme: “It was Marxism’s first conflict, and its first victory. But also its only victory”. 36
The struggle against reformism was indeed only beginning, and entered a new stage with the debates in the
Dutch parliament on the subsidies to be accorded to schools based on religion. For obvious ideological reasons,
the lay governors wanted the state to support the religiously based schools financially. The Marxist struggle
against this manoeuvre of the liberal bourgeoisie had nothing in common with the anticlericalism of the
contemporary French radicals and socialists. As Luxemburg noted, the latter was a diversion, “one of the most
effective means of distracting the working masses’ from social questions, and exhausting the class struggle”. 37
34 For the struggle of Marxism against revisionism, see the pamphlet by Gorter, Pannekoek, and Van Ravesteyn, published
by Pannekoek in Berlin (1909), Die Gründung der ‘Sociaal Democratische Partij in Nederland’ (SDP). French translation
in : Histoire de la Deuxième Internationale, Vol. 20, ‘Congrès socialiste international, Copenhague 28 août – 3 septembre
1910. Rapports d’activité soumis au congrès par les organisations et partis ouvriers et socialistes’ (Geneva: Minkoff
Reprint, 1982).
35 See: K. Kautsky, The Agrarian Question (1899) [Reprint: London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.] This book is a fighting work
against Bernstein’s revisionism, and a remarkable study of the evolution of classes in the countryside. It combats the
concessions to the petty-bourgeois strata of the peasantry, to the detriment of the poorest ones.
36 See: Die Gründung der ‘Sociaaldemokratische Partij in Nederland’ (S.D.P.). Adresse an die Internationale (Berlin,
1909), pp. 4-5.
37 R. Luxemburg, Le socialisme en France (Paris: Belfond, 1971), p. 213. In France, by contrast, the bourgeoisie’s radicalsocialist
fraction made full use of the ‘anti-clerical card’ in order to counter the development of the workers’ and socialist
movement. It hoped thereby to drag socialism onto treacherous ground, by using the popularity of ‘anti-clericalism’
amongst the workers and the petty bourgeoisie.
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