The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

Using the pretext of the struggle against ‘anarchist adventurism’, Troelstra came out against a political strike: he
claimed that if the workers were to decide on a political strike in reaction to the ‘scandalous laws’, this would
only make them worse in Parliament. This was written in the Social Democrat daily without any reference either
to the Defence Committee or to the Party authorities. 49 This undisciplined act was clear proof that the revisionist
leadership did not consider itself accountable, either to the workers or to the party militants. It acted
autonomously, the better to place itself on the terrain of conciliation with the bourgeoisie. Through Pannekoek’s
pen, the Left vigorously criticised this behaviour, which was the beginning of a long series of betrayals of the
struggle: “Your flabby and hesitant conduct cannot but serve the possessing class and the government”,
Pannekoek wrote against Troelstra. 50
This betrayal came out into the open during the second transport strike, in April. The government had carried the
vote in favour of its anti-strike laws, forbidding all stoppages in public transport. Instead of adopting an
energetic attitude, the Social-Democrat leaders on the committee, such as Oudegeest, came out against a general
strike to include all workers throughout Holland. And yet, at that very moment, strikes had broken out, creating a
social context far more favourable to the class struggle than it had been in January and February: in Amsterdam
the barges, blacksmiths, road workers, navies and engineers were all out on strike, while the municipal workers
had walked out in sympathy.
On 8 th April, the general strike was called, under pressure from the rank and file. Its initial weakness lay in the
fact that the railway workers’ meetings were held in secret, and were therefore closed to workers from other
industries. Despite the occupation of the stations and tracks by the army, which should have developed the
spreading of the strike, it failed to become general. The movement to extend the struggle was nonetheless
spontaneous: in Utrecht and Amsterdam, the engineers and masons joined the solidarity movement. Neither the
presence of the army, nor the threat of five years prison for ‘agitators’ and two for strikers, provided for by the
new laws, were enough to cool the ardour of the striking workers, who since January had experienced ‘the joy of
the struggle’. 51
The workers’ impetus and fervour were broken by the decisions taken by the Social-Democratic leaders of the
‘Defence Committee’, which claimed to be directing the struggle. On the 9 th of April, Vliegen forced the
decision to halt the strike movement. Faced with the transport workers’ fury and incredulity, the Committee
disappeared. At a mass meeting, the workers shouted down Vliegen with cries of “He’s betrayed us!”. Even the
Left was prevented from speaking: the workers made no distinction between Marxists and revisionists, and
Roland Holst’s speech was met with the cry of “Strike!”. The attitude of the revisionist leaders was thus to
provoke a long-lasting rejection by the Dutch working class of the whole social democracy, including its Marxist
wing, to the profit of anarcho-syndicalism. 52
The 1903 transport strike did not have purely ‘Dutch’ roots; it marked a turning point in the European class
struggle. It broke out as a spontaneous mass strike, becoming a conscious force capable of pushing back the
bourgeoisie politically, and giving the workers an unquestionable feeling of victory. But its failure was that of a
general strike launched by the unions and parties.
This strike fell within a whole historical period marked by a combination of political and economic strikes, and
culminating in the Russian revolutionary movement of 1905. As Rosa Luxemburg emphasised, “only in a
49 Article titled ‘Wat nu?’ (‘What now?’), in: Het Volk of 17 th March 1903.
50 Pannekoek’s reply to Troelstra, in: Het Volk of 26 th March 1903. Without using the word of treason, Pannekoek
denounced this “crime against unity”, the “damage done to the workers’ movement”, and the “dishonour to the party”.
51 H. Roland Holst emphasised this joy in struggle as a characteristic of the mass strike: “More than organisation, or skill in
struggle, at the beginning of the 20 th century in The Netherlands there was among the workers a pleasure in struggle”,
expressed in “a spontaneous resistance on both a small and a large scale” (see: Kapitaal en Arbeid). In 1903, she wrote a
pamphlet which avoided any critic to the SADP for its attitude towards the strike: De groote spoorwegstaking, de
vakbeweging en de S.D.A.P. (The Hague: Stuffers, 1903).
52 The survival of anarchism and the spread of revolutionary syndicalism were – according to the theoreticians of the Marxist
left – the “price paid for the development of opportunism within the socialist workers’ movement”. However, in The
Netherlands, as in France, Spain, etc., many revolutionary syndicalists were to rally to the Communist Party after 1919.
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