The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

imposed to form an organised fraction, and not an opposition in the party. The Bolsheviks were the first to
understand this, even though they too were late in doing so.
It is clear that the Tribunists would have found it extremely difficult to have had an organised activity, apart
from in the sections – like that of Amsterdam – where they had a majority. Driven out of the central organs by
the revisionists, they conceived their struggle as essentially theoretical. The theoretical contributions of the
Marxist Tribunist current from 1907 to 1909 were moreover extremely important and decisive in the constitution
of an international communist left (see Chapter 2).
But the political fight – with the publication of De Tribune which made no concessions in its struggle against
revisionism – very quickly hardened and soon posed the question of a split in the party. An anti-Marxist witchhunt
began. In Rotterdam, the revisionist leaders dismissed the Marxist editors from the local press, just after the
Arnhem Congress (19 th -21 st April 1908) which had rejected Troelstra’s proposition to ban De Tribune. After this,
the process of banning other Marxist local publications became widespread. 81 There was open crisis in the party;
it was to gather pace with Troelstra’s public intervention against Marxist positions in parliament and before the
bourgeois political parties.
The question of the period and the crisis
The confrontation with the Tribunists took place in the autumn of 1908 when Troelstra took up certain positions
in parliament: namely, he denied publicly the necessity for workers to understand the evolution of capitalism in a
theoretical way, within a Marxist framework; he maintained that there was “no need for abstract logical theory”
in the class struggle. 82 Finally, he defended the idea that “capitalism would lead of itself to socialism” 83 –
without the necessity of a revolution, and therefore in a peaceful and automatic manner. It was tantamount to
saying that socialism was no longer determined by the existence of the objective conditions of the crisis and the
proletariat’s maturation of consciousness; it became a mere religious belief. De Tribune responded to these
affirmations in a very violent and biting manner against Troelstra, the symbol of revisionism in the party:
“A practical politician of social democracy must also understand theory, he must know it and has be able to
defend it. For a ‘bourgeois’ it is perhaps a heavy task, but the working class demands no less of its leaders. This
knowledge, this socialist science, is certainly very often easier for a worker to understand than for a man coming
out of the bourgeoisie. The worker can understand immediately from his own life what socialism means, whilst
the bourgeois must first of all understand the theory; for example, what isn’t yet clear for Troelstra: that the
economic gap between the classes must always widen [...] If the possibility exists that the gap between the
classes doesn’t become deeper, then our socialism dissolves into a belief; certainty becomes passive hope. The
workers are already sufficiently swindled with ‘hopes’ and ‘beliefs’. They don’t need socialism for that. The
church also supports them in the belief that all will be better in heaven and the good liberals and democrats hope
that it will be better soon.” 84
But what was most important in the Tribunist denunciation of revisionism was the theoretical affirmation of the
historic course of capitalism towards a world crisis. In this, the Dutch left – with the exception of Pannekoek
much later on – joined up with Rosa Luxemburg’s position which she expressed in 1913: “The so-called
‘prophecy’ of Marx is also being fully realised in the sense that modern capitalism’s periods of development are
growing shorter and shorter, that in general ‘crises’ as a force of transition from strong production to weak
81 See the chapter “De Tribune in de SDAP” in Van Ravesteyn’s book: De wording van het communisme in Nederland
(1907-1925) [‘The Birth of communism in the Netherlands’] (Amsterdam: P.N. van Kampen en Zoon, 1948).
82 Die Gründung der SDP, op. cit., p. 28.
83 Ibid.
84 Op. cit., p. 29.
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