The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

different trades. The mechanics, engine drivers and permanent way workers all had their own unions. Each union
could start strikes, without any of the others joining the struggle. The unions’ careful protection of each other’s
trade specificity created a barrier against the mass unity of the workers over and above differences in
qualification. 44
A wildcat strike against these conditions broke out on 31 January 1903, starting from the rank and file of the
railwaymen, and not from the trade unions. It appeared as a mass strike: not only did it hit all the transport
trades, it spread throughout the country. It was also a mass strike in starting, not on the basis of specific
demands, but in solidarity with the workers of Amsterdam harbour who were out on strike. The transport
workers refused to act as strikebreakers by continuing to work, and so blocked the bosses’ attempts to move their
goods by rail. This movement of solidarity, characteristic of mass strikes, then snowballed: the bakers and
rolling stock engineers gave their support. 45 But there is no doubt that the originality of the movement – which
did not succeed in spreading to other sectors of the Dutch proletariat – lay in the creation of a strike committee,
elected by the rank and file and not designated by the transport union and the SDAP, even if their members
participated in it. 46
All these characteristics meant that the mass strike ceased to be a purely trade, economic strike; little by little,
through its direct confrontation with the state it became political. On 6 th February, a decree of the Dutch
government’s war ministry declared the mobilisation of the army; it also created an organism, within which the
Catholic and Protestant unions were active, to regroup the strike-breakers. 47 This bourgeois offensive culminated
on 25 th February with the proposition of a law against the strike: the strikers were threatened with imprisonment,
and the government decided to set up a military transport company to break the strike.
But, worse than all the threats and government measures, the strike was undermined from the inside by
Troelstra’s SDAP. On 20 th February, at a meeting representing 60,000 strikers, and which – unlike the strike
committee – was not held in open session, Troelstra proposed the creation of a ‘Defence Committee’ (Comité
van Verweer) made up of different political and union organisations. This committee was made up of Vliegen, a
SDAP revisionist, the transport boss J. Oudegeest, the NAS, and anarchist followers of Nieuwenhuis, the latter
having refused to take part in such an organism. Its orientation was to prove damaging for the conduct of the
proposed strike against the government’s measures. Vliegen declared that the strike could not be called, because
the religious (Calvinist, Lutheran, and Catholic) Abraham Kuyper government had not yet published its decrees.
In fact, the attitude of this ‘Defence Committee’, self-proclaimed by different organisations, and by the SDAP in
particular, rapidly revealed itself as negative. Not only was the committee paralysed by the opposition between
Nieuwenhuis libertarian followers and the Social-Democrats, the overbearing weight of Troelstra, who although
he had initiated the committee was not a member, meant that it remained an organism outside the struggle. 48
44 These craft unions, a vestige of the artisan period of the workers’ movement, were progressively replaced by industrial
unions. The latter regrouped all the workers in an industrial branch, whatever their trade. The development of the mass
strike at the beginning of the century was however to show that, in the open struggle against capital, organising by industrial
branches had been superseded by the massive organisation of the workers of all branches. The idea of ‘One Big Union’
advocated by the American IWW was quickly shown to be inadequate, since it foresaw only an economic struggle in this or
that branch, whereas the mass strike tended to become political, through the confrontation of a whole class, and not lust
some of its parts, with the state.
45 See: A. de Jong, De spoorwegstakingen van 1903 (Leiden, 1935; reprint: The Hague, 1953). Anarchist view of the
railway strike. Albert de Jong (1891-1970) remains an important figure of the antimilitarist anarchist movement, particularly
active in the IAMV and IAK organisations between 1922 and 1934. From 1936 to 1940 he animated the NSV, anarchosyndicalist
union.
46 Pannekoek speaks in a very lively manner on the strike, from a Marxist point of view, in his Herinneringen (‘Memories’),
already quoted, pp. 86-93. He shows very well the spontaneous appearance of the strike committee and the fast extension of
the movement.
47 A. de Jong, op. cit., pp. 17-19.
48 The anarcho-syndicalists were by far the most determined in the strike, but they remained prisoners of their theory of the
‘General Strike’. In practice, the attitude of the anarcho-syndicalist NAS in the strike committee fluctuated, and proved
more ‘to the right’ than its rank-and-file membership.
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