The Dutch Left in the Comintern (1919–20)

chapter 4 The Dutch Left in the Comintern (1919–20) In January 1919 a letter was sent to the various recently formed communist parties, and to the revolutionary fractions or oppositions within the old Social- Democratic parties, inviting them to a congress of the ‘new revolutionary Inter- national’. The original idea was just to call an ‘internationalist socialist conference’, to lay the basis for the Third International rather than to convoke a congress. The conference was to have been held before 1 February, either in Berlin or in the Netherlands, and it was to have been clandestine.1 The plan had to be changed because of the crushing of the January insurrection in Berlin, and the conference was finally held in Moscow from 2–6 March 1919. The Dutch Communist Party received an invitation. It had already decided at its congress in November 1918 to send a delegate once the convocation of the congress of the Third International was definite.2 However the attitude of the cph leadership was exactly the same as it had been at the three con- ferences of the Zimmerwald movement. Although he had been given all that was necessary to make the journey to Moscow, Wijnkoop did not ‘manage’ to start out. This was, in fact, a refusal on his part. To explain his refusal, always camouflaged behind some sectarian remark or other, he had published art- icles by the British journalist Arthur Ransome, who made out that the congress of the Third International was no more than a ‘purely Slav undertak- ing’.3 In the end, the Dutch Communist Party was represented indirectly and only with a consultative vote at the First Congress of the new International. Its representative, Rutgers, did not come directly from the Netherlands; he had left the country in 1914 to go to the United States where he became a member of the American League for Socialist Propaganda.4 Arriving in Moscow via Japan, 1 See the editor’s introduction, pp. 27–38, of Broué (ed.) 1974, a complete set of texts; in English, Degras (ed.) 1971; see also Broué 1997 and Adibekov, Shakhnazarova and Shiriniya 1997. 2 Wiessing 1980, p. 44. 3 Ransome 1992, quoted in De Tribune in September 1919 by Wijnkoop. Arthur Ransome (1884– 1967) was a journalist in Russia when the Revolution broke out in 1917. He spoke perfect Russian and became a close friend with many of the Bolshevik leaders. He is the well-known author of Swallows and Amazons and a score of children’s stories. 4 The American League for Socialist Propaganda was formed in Massachusetts in 1916, inside the Socialist Party and against the party-leadership’s line on elections. It published The © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004325937_006 178 chapter 4 he in fact represented only this American group and had no mandate. It was thanks to him that the Dutch left was known in the usa. His friend Fraina,5 one of the leaders of American left-communism, was strongly influenced by Gorter and Pannekoek. The Dutch Communist Party ended up joining the Third International in April 1919. Rutgers was associated with the work of the Executive Committee. 1 The Left-Currents in the Comintern (Communist International) in 1919 The left developed in the Third International during 1919 because of the influ- ence of the German Revolution. For all the left-currents this represented the beginning of the proletarian movement in industrialised Western Europe. In spite of the defeat suffered in Berlin in January 1919, when the proletariat was crushed by the Social-Democratic government of Noske and Scheidemann, the world-revolution had never seemed so close. A Soviet Republic had been established in Hungary as well as Bavaria. The situation in Austria remained revolutionary. Large mass-strikes were shaking Britain and were breaking out in Italy. Even the American continent was shaken by the revolutionary wave from Seattle to Buenos Aires.6 The proletariat in the most developed countries Internationalist which opposed the majority’s orientation towards pacifism in 1917. In 1919 it began calling itself ‘the left wing of the Socialist Party’ and in Boston published, under the direction of Fraina, the weekly Revolutionary Age. In its theses in 1919 it declared itself in favour of leaving the Second International and joining the Third International, in order to eliminate the reformist demands contained in the platform of the sp. 5 Louis Fraina (1894–1953) was born in the south of Italy and migrated to the usa with his parents at the age of two. At the age of 15 he became a member of the DeLeonist slp, which he left in 1914. He became a member of the American sp and, with John Reed, was active in its left wing, which decided to split at a conference in June 1919. This split gave rise to both Reed’s Communist Labour Party and Fraina’s Communist Party of America – which was the most developed theoretically – in September 1919. After the Amsterdam conference in February 1920, he took part in the Second Congress of the Comintern after he had been cleared of the suspicion that he was an agent provocateur. From 1920–21, under the pseudonym ‘Luis Corey’, he became the head of the Pan-American Bureau of the Comintern in Mexico, with Katayama and the American Charles Philipps. In 1922, he ceased militant-activity and became well-known as a journalist, using the same pseudonym. He became a university-professor in economics, after which he was known mainly for his works on economics. See Buhle 2001. 6 The iww led the Seattle strike which spread to Vancouver and Winnipeg, in Canada. In the same year, 1919, powerful strikes broke out among the metalworkers of Pennsylvania. These.

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