The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

On the eve of the war, the SDP – after a crisis of sectarian isolation – had undeniably developed an activity in
the Dutch proletariat which was not without its fruits. The SDAP’s evolution towards ‘ministerialism’ (id est:
participation in bourgeois governments), and its acceptance of ‘national defence’, had undoubtedly confirmed
the analysis of the Marxist current. But given the very unfavourable conditions of the Deventer split, this current
remained very weak numerically: 5,000 members as opposed to 15,000 in the SDAP, which had the further
support of the 60,000 members of the NVV, although it is true that the SDP had considerable influence over the
10,000 members of the NAS union. Its electoral influence was to all intents and purposes non-existent, and this
fact contrasted with its growing influence in the class struggle allowed the development after 1918 of a strong
anti-parliamentary and anti-electoral tendency, greatly strengthened by the events in Germany.
The Dutch Marxist current had a much wider audience outside little Holland. In Indonesia, though very
ambiguously and thanks above all to the personality of Sneevliet, the Tribunist current gained a growing
influence among the ‘indigenous’ proletarian masses. In the 2 nd International, and above all in Germany in
contact with the German Marxist left, the Tribunist current contributed decisively to the birth of an embryonic
communist left. This weight of the Marxist left in Germany – and so in the International – was certainly due in
part to Pannekoek’s intense activity in Germany. But, like Gorter in Holland, Pannekoek as an individual
crystallised more than a decade of organised party struggle against revisionism and reformism. Without this
party struggle, on the organisational and theoretical levels, the action of Pannekoek and Gorter cannot be
understood. This is why we cannot reduce the history of the Tribunist SDP to that of its best-known members.
The history of the SDP during the war was to show that this little party was not immune from opportunism, and
that it could not avoid the political battles born of the world war and the Russian revolution.
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