The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

was obliged to include in the preamble to the statutes two phrases containing the words ‘duty’ and ‘right’ as well
as ‘truth, morality and justice’, but I placed them in such a way that they could do no harm.” 90
At the same time, Gorter replied vigorously to the accusation that the morality of the proletariat meant attacking
individual capitalists without any concern for human feelings. The morality of the proletariat was essentially a
fighting morality which sought to defend its interests against the bourgeois class, as an economic category and
not as a sum of individuals. It was a morality which aimed to abolish itself in a classless society, leaving in its
place a real morality, that of humanity as a whole liberated from class society.
After this polemic, a split was inevitable. It was what Troelstra himself wanted, in order to rid the party of any
critical Marxist tendency. In a letter to Vliegen on 3 rd December he wrote: “The schism is there; the only
recourse can be a split”.
The split at the Extraordinary Congress of Deventer (13 th –14 th February 1909)
In order to eliminate the Tribunists and their periodical, the revisionist leaders proposed a referendum to
examine the question of suppressing De Tribune at an extraordinary congress. The party committee was hesitant
about and even opposed to such an extraordinary measure. Troelstra went over the committee’s head and
through a referendum obtained the two-thirds vote needed to convoke a congress. It thus became apparent that
the great majority of the SDAP was gangrened with revisionism; the rank-and-file was even more revisionist
than the leadership.
Furthermore, the Marxist elements who had come out of De Nieuwe Tijd and had collaborated with De Tribune
capitulated to Troelstra. During a conference held on 31 st January, to which the main Tribunist editors were not
even invited, Roland Holst and Wibaut 91 declared that they were ready to quit the editorship of their periodical in
order to run a future weekly supplement (Het Weekblad) to Het Volk, the SDAP daily. The new publication
would be free of any Marxist critique of revisionism. Instead of acting in solidarity with their comrades in
struggle, they made an oath of allegiance to Troelstra, declaring themselves in favour of “a common work of
loyal party comradeship”. 92 They proclaimed themselves ‘Marxists for peace’, trying to take refuge in a centrist
attitude of conciliation between the right and the Marxist left. In the Marxist movement in Holland, Roland Holst
constantly maintained this attitude. The Tribunists were not slow to reproach Roland Holst for this capitulation;
it was an attitude that only made more certain the split that the revisionists wanted.
It is true that, for its part, the Marxist minority was far from homogeneous about taking the struggle inside the
SDAP to its ultimate conclusion. Wijnkoop, Van Ravesteyn and Ceton, who constituted the real organising head
of the minority, had already resolved on a split before the Congress, in order to keep De Tribune going. Gorter,
on the other hand, who was not formally a member of the editorial board, was much more cautious. He distrusted
this triad’s impetuosity and did not want to precipitate a split. He hoped that Wijnkoop would moderate his
position and that the Tribunists would stay in the party, even at the price of accepting the suppression of De
Tribune if they failed to prevent this happening at the Deventer Congress. In a letter sent to Kautksy on February
16, two days after the end of the congress, he summarised his position: “I have continually said against the
editorial board of De Tribune: we must do everything we can to draw others towards us but if this fails – after we
have fought to the end and all our efforts have failed – then we will have to yield.” 93
90 Quoted by R. Dangeville, op. cit., p. 92. The publication in 1913 of Marx and Engels’ correspondence, including this letter
to Engels, strikingly confirmed Gorter’s argument. The latter was to quote the letter in De Tribune of 13 th December 1913.
91 See: Cahiers over de geschiedenis der CPN, No. 7, Sept. 1982, ‘De ideologische en organisatorische aspecten van het
Tribune-conflict 1907-1909’.
92 See: Vrij Nederland, 18 Feb. 1984, ‘Het Deventer Congres’, pp. 14-15.
93 The letter can be found in the Kautsky Archives at the IISG in Amsterdam (D XI 241). Quoted by H. de Liagre Böhl,
op. cit., p. 45.
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