The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

While remaining weak in numbers, the SDP became a political force to be reckoned with, especially during the
war (see Chapter 3).
The struggle against the war had been a constant concern of the Tribunist movement even before the formation
of the SDP. In a 1907 article by Van Ravesteyn, the Tribunists rejected the 2 nd International’s distinction
between ‘defensive’ and ‘offensive’ wars. Wars could no longer be ‘progressive’; history had changed, and it
was no longer possible to use the schema of ‘bourgeois revolutions’ of the 19 th century: “The proletariat can
draw this conclusion from history, for its action today: as long as class society and national antagonisms exist, it
will always be impossible to establish a clear distinction between offensive and defensive wars. War, every war,
must be fought by every means possible.” 118 This position, directly opposed to the conceptions of Jaurès, was
wholly in accord with that of Luxemburg and the German left.
In November 1912, the SDP sent Gorter and Wijnkoop as delegates to the Extraordinary Congress in Basle,
Switzerland, to put forward a determinedly internationalist resolution against the imminent threat of war. To do
so, Gorter prepared a speech against militarism and imperialism, parts of which were included in a pamphlet
written by Gorter in October 1914 (see Chapter 3). It demonstrated not only the imperialist nature of all states –
the same position as that defended by Luxemburg at the time – but also the danger of the pacifist current in the
International. Significantly, its conclusion was on the unity of the international proletariat created by
imperialism, a theme which was constantly taken up later by left communism. The SDP proposed an amendment
to the Congress resolution, which was rejected. The amendment called for a protest strike should world war
break out, and was careful to distinguish this position from the idea of a ‘general strike’ put forward by the
anarchists. However, debates on this question were banned during the Congress, and Gorter’s speech could not
be delivered. 119
The Basle Manifesto did not say a word on the question of ‘defence of the fatherland’, nor on Jaurès’ distinction
between ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ war. In the religious atmosphere of Basle cathedral, heightened by the
ringing of bells, the revolutionary voice of the SDP found no echo in the International; it was drowned out by the
impassioned pacifist speech of Jaurès.
The SDP and the colonial question – The Tribunists and Sneevliet in Indonesia
As in most of the industrialised European countries, the Dutch workers’ movement was confronted very
concretely with the colonial question. The ‘jewel’ of the Dutch colonial empire were the Dutch East Indies (now
Indonesia), whose exploitation assured the Dutch bourgeoisie a substantial profit. Some 100,000 Europeans (on
a total population of 50 million) were settled in Indonesia. The Dutch proletariat was faced with a bloody
colonial expansion, whose one major episode was the long and bloody Atjeh [Ace] war (Northern Sumatra), led
by Muslim people, that came to an end in 1910 and cost 60,000 Acehnese lives, plus over 12,000 Dutch soldiers
killed or dead from disease. For the Dutch Capital, it was vital to control the Malacca Strait, after the opening of
the Suez Canal in 1869. Dutch colonial wars from 1904 to 1910, of which objective was to control all the islands
(Ceram, Borneo, Celebes, Flores, Timor, Bali), took place till the eve of World War I.
118 W. van Ravesteyn, ‘Angriffskrieg oder Verteidigungskrieg? Jaurès über den Ursprung des deutsch-französischen
Krieges’, in: Die Neue Zeit, 1907-1908, Vol. I, pp. 388-389. Like Van Ravesteyn, Luxemburg condemned the opportunist
positions defended by Jaurès in his book L’Armée nouvelle (1911): “Here again, we find as the basis for every political
orientation the well-known distinction between defensive and offensive war, which once played an important part in the
foreign policy of the socialist parties, but which, in the light of the experience of the last decades, should be purely and
simply abandoned” (from the Leipziger Volkszeitung, 9 June 1911).
119 See Gorter’s October 1914 preface to his pamphlet: Het imperialisme, de Wereldoorlog en de Sociaaldemocratie
(Amsterdam: Brochurehandel Sociaal-Democratische Partij).
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