The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

the workers’ movement, workers in several big northern industrial cities formed workers’ councils. 204 Although
‘order’ was soon restored, this spontaneous workers’ movement, begun without any instructions from wither the
unions or the socialist party, prefigured in its organisation and generalisation, the Russian revolution of 1905.
The question of the ‘general strike’ and the ‘mass strike’ could henceforth only be understood in its full
international dimension.
Faced with the huge wave of international class struggle, the Dutch SDAP was given the task of presenting a
report on the general strike to the International Congress of 1904, in Amsterdam. The first reason for this was the
experience of the Dutch workers’ movement in two mass strikes in the one-year of 1903. But above all, two
tendencies had crystallised within the SDAP, which were also to be found in the other parties of the
International. The revisionist tendency, expressed by Vliegen and Van Kol, and supported by Troelstra, rejected
the general strike as a means of political struggle: they saw it as an ‘act of despair’ by the proletariat, whose
effect would be to isolate it from the middle classes, and proposed to stick solely to parliamentary action. The
Marxist tendency, grouped around the periodical De Nieuwe Tijd (Van der Goes, Gorter, Roland Holst,
Pannekoek) presented a report for the 1904 Dordrecht Congress which was extremely important in clarifying the
concept of the ‘general strike’. It proposed to replace this notion with that of the ‘political strike’: “The term
general strike is incorrect. That of political strike expresses our meaning better”. 205 This Congress produced a
compromise resolution drawn up by Roland Holst, which was to be as a basis for the international Congress in
Amsterdam.
The resolution for the international Congress, presented by Roland Holst, was a step forward, in that it
proclaimed the ‘possibility’ of general strikes breaking out as “the supreme means for carrying out social
changes of great importance, or of defence against reactionary attacks on workers’ rights”. Classically, the
resolution called on workers to reinforce their ‘class organisations’, as a precondition for the success of the
political strike, and warned against the anarchists’ use of the general strike in an anti-political sense. But Roland
Holst made a concession to the revisionists by declaring – in advance – the ‘impossibility’ of a ‘complete work
stoppage’ at a given moment, because “such a strike would make all existence – that of the proletariat as of
others – impossible”. 206 Only a few months later the general strike in Italy overturned this prediction.
In fact, Henriëtte Roland Holst’s presentation posed the problems raised by the ‘general strike’ much more
clearly. She used the term ‘mass strike’, showing that it had no “economic aim” as such, but was used
defensively “against the capitalist state”. A sign of the confusion existing at the time, however, lay in her
simultaneous use of the term ‘general strike’, to declare that the latter “could not be the social revolution”.
Scarcely months after the Congress’ closure, the Russian revolution swept away in practice all the old
formulations and predictions. The movement of mass strikes in Russia, distinct from the general strike, showed
that a massive proletarian struggle stood as much on the economic as on the political terrain. It was both
defensive and offensive; the workers’ general organisation was not a precondition, but a consequence of the
deepening of the movement; directed ‘against the capitalist state’, it was necessarily a moment of the ‘social
revolution’.
Simultaneously, in January 1905, the Ruhr miners went massively and spontaneously on strike, outside any
instructions from the unions. The union leadership prevented the strike from spreading. In May 1905, at the
Cologne union Congress, the union leader Bömelburg took position against any mass strike, and declared: “to
build our organisations, we need calm in the workers’ movement”. 207 Thus, in the country with the bestorganised
proletariat in the world, not only did the workers’ practical movement come up against the very
204 For the revolutionary events in Italy, 1904, see: R. Paris: Histoire du fascisme en Italie (Paris: Ed. Maspéro, 1962), p. 45.
205 W. H. Vliegen, Die onze kracht ontwaken deed. Geschiedenis der Sociaaldemocratische Arbeiderspartij in Nederland
gedurende de eerste jaren van haar bestaan (Amsterdam: N.V. De Arbeiderspers [1924]), Part 2, pp. 39-40.
206 For Henriëtte Roland Holst’s resolution and the discussion on the mass strike at the Amsterdam Congress of 1904, see:
Histoire de la Deuxième Internationale, Vol. 14 (Geneva: reprint Minkoff, 1978), pp. 320-322.
207 Quoted by C. E. Schorske, Die Grosse Spaltung – Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie von 1905 bis 1917 (Berlin: Olle und
Wolter, 1981), p. 64. Most of the references to the German workers’ movement are drawn from this book, first published in
English in 1955.
73