The place of Henk Sneevliet in the national and international labour movement

Henk Sneevliet was an intriguing personality. He was an impressive trade union leader, leader of the NAS (National Labour Secretariat) from the early 1920s until the war. He was also a party leader, leader of the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), later of the Revolutionary Socialist Workers' Party (RSAP) and of its illegal continuation during the occupation, the Marx Lenin Luxemburg Front (MLL-Front), until his arrest in 1942.

The RSAP was a special party. It was not a small propaganda group, but it was not a mass party either. It was somewhere in between.

In a certain respect Henk Sneevliet was one of the most significant figures in our tradition, alongside Trotsky and the Russian Soviet communists. To outline his importance: Sneevliet can be seen as the co-founder of the revolutionary socialist movement in the Netherlands, but also of the communist movement in Indonesia and the communist movement in China.

Sneevliet was born at the end of the nineteenth century (1883) in Rotterdam. He came from a Catholic proletarian milieu. His father was a cigar maker and there was poverty in the home. Nevertheless Sneevliet was enabled to attend the HBS (a secondary school for the middle classes). After school he joined the Railways.

With his ambition and intelligence he saw in those early days opportunities to develop himself in the trade union movement, in his case in the Association of Railway and Tramway Personnel, which had to be built up again after the general railway strike of 1903, so dramatically lost.

Sneevliet's conduct was strongly influenced by the fortunes of the Dutch labour movement. In those fortunes in the first half of the twentieth century five phases could be distinguished:

1. The period of expansion until 1913/1914;
2. The struggle of the revolutionary forces against the war;
3. The period of the revolutions 1917-1920;
4. The appeal of the developing Soviet Russia until 1923/1924;
5. The long decline of revolutionary socialism, interrupted by flare-ups in the early 1930s, ending in isolation and malaise under the influence of Stalinism and fascism.

Sneevliet's stance in each of these periods was as follows.

In the years up to 1914 the forces matured that formed the precondition for the consolidation of the reformist character of the Dutch labour movement.

• Under the influence of late, slow industrialisation from 1895, an expansion and renewal of the working class took place.
• Economic growth coincided with the long upward economic wave of 1895-1913 and brought real improvements, a rising level of education and the establishment of the first social legislation.
• Favourable election results gave the Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP) the opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of its policy, particularly at municipal level.

These developments strengthened the reformist nature of Dutch social democracy. A characteristic that was already present in embryo when the SDAP broke away in the 1890s from the anti-capitalist, anarchist-inspired 'old movement'. From the outset the SDAP was strongly parliamentary in orientation, reform-minded, anti-radical and anti-revolutionary.

The far-reaching adaptation of the party to the bourgeois milieu (think of the school question and the willingness to cooperate with the liberals) aroused aversion in a small group of intellectuals around the monthly De Nieuwe Tijd. Figures such as Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek, Henriette Roland Holst and Pieter Wiedijk invoked a Kautskyan Marxism and set themselves fiercely against the lawyer from Friesland, Piter Jelles Troelstra. Somewhat later the Tribune group also joined the opponents, mostly young people led by David Wijnkoop, Willem van Ravesteyn and Jan Ceton, who gave a practical consequence to the theoretical criticism of the De Nieuwe Tijd group. The young Sneevliet, who joined the SDAP in 1902, was inspired by both groups.

When the Tribune group was forced in 1909 in Deventer to break with the SDAP, Sneevliet, like his kindred spirit Henriette Roland Holst, decided not to go along. They regarded the group, from which the Social Democratic Party (SDP) emerged not long after, as too sectarian, too sterile and too isolated. It was indeed a small group of Marxists that let itself be split off from the mainstream without appreciable experience in the class struggle and without a substantial working-class base. Until 1917 it concerned at most a few hundred people, too few and above all too little proletarian to form a promising alternative for Sneevliet.

He preferred to remain with the SDAP for some time longer, where the mass of workers was found in connection with the Dutch Confederation of Trade Unions (NVV) and where not all the fire of the opposition had yet been extinguished. This was evident, for example, from the rejection of participation in government in 1913, the criticism of the policy of a wartime 'civil truce' (godsvrede) and the support for the attempted revolution in 1918. Only after the split of the Independent Socialist Party (OSP) in 1932 did the SDAP definitively end up in stagnant reformist waters.

After Deventer it took another two years before Sneevliet broke with the SDAP in 1911, namely after the loss, or more precisely after the sabotaging, of the Dock and Seamen's strikes in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. A repeat of 1903 was a bridge too far for Sneevliet; he resigned his membership and joined the SDP. He did not develop much activity there, because, as for many who got stuck in the homeland, Indonesia beckoned as a refuge with prospects.

In conclusion, one can say that the intelligent, ambitious Sneevliet was above all a practitioner; he had an activist, somewhat workerist streak. As a trade unionist he preferred working with large groups to sterile opposition. Searching for a substantial mass of workers was dearer to him than being shut up in a pure, but hardly influential little chapel. It is telling that he did not leave the SDAP in 1909, but only two years later, in the wake of an Amsterdam Dock Strike broken by SDAP and NVV leaders. He did become a member of the SDP, but he preferred to continue his life in Indonesia. Becoming involved in the fruitless, in his eyes, oppositional work of the Marxist Tribune group did not tempt him.

From 1913 Sneevliet is to be found in Indonesia. He would remain there for six years until he was expelled in 1919. He gained important experiences there. He became active in the railway union, was at the cradle of the Indonesian Social Democratic Association (ISDV), the later Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), fought against colonial domination and contributed to the radicalisation of the Sarekat Islam, the Islamic nationalist mass movement.

After a short interlude in the Netherlands — Sneevliet was banished from Indonesia in 1919 for revolutionary propaganda — the Russian revolution opened the gates to Asia for him once again. At the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920 he was elected, alongside Lenin and the Indian Roy, secretary of the Commission on National and Colonial Questions, and from then on continued his revolutionary work in the service of the Comintern under the party name Maring.

Better than anyone Sneevliet understood the importance of the Asian national democratic movement. He was one of the first to study the emergence of a broad national movement based on the peasantry. In Indonesia and a little later also in China. Many of his ideas about semi-colonial and colonial countries were integrated into the international revolutionary movement. He emphasised the importance of literacy and he came to learn the significance of religion; he opposed an arrogant attitude towards Islam and had understanding for its potentially revolutionary, anti-imperialist dimensions in many Asian and African countries.

Sneevliet played a pioneering role and to many problems he gave first answers. In doing so Sneevliet made mistakes, and according to some even serious ones. It was from him, for example, that the idea came that the Chinese communists should organise themselves within the Kuomintang (KMT); the idea flowed from the tactic of communist parties joining forces with revolutionary nationalist mass movements under bourgeois or petty-bourgeois leadership in an anti-imperialist united front.

Trotsky did not oppose the anti-imperialist united front, although he did turn against giving up the independent communist organisation and the independent communist trade union work. It would condemn communists to being a helpless appendage of the KMT. When Sneevliet adjusted his ideas in response to Trotsky's criticism, he became less acceptable to Moscow. Moscow at that moment placed great trust in the KMT and its leaders Sun Yat-sen and, a little later, Chiang Kai-shek, and feared that they would see in an independent communist organisation a sign of distrust. Sneevliet was removed from China and placed at the Eastern Bureau in Moscow. There he witnessed the unfolding struggle of the Left Opposition against the Stalin faction. He developed sympathy for Trotsky there.

To summarise, it can be said that Sneevliet was one of the first to ask for attention to colonised countries. He called Western, Eurocentric Marxism, with its exclusive orientation to the working class, into question and defended attention to revolutionary nationalist, peasant-based movements. In doing so he recognised the revolutionary utopian potential of Islam. This too showed that Sneevliet was above all focused on the self-organisation of the masses and that he tied his political fate to promoting it.

After the frustrating experiences with the Comintern, Sneevliet returned to the Netherlands in 1924 and set to work in the NAS, the National Labour Secretariat, the radical, syndicalist trade union movement to the left of the NVV. He was elected paid chairman.

In this period his ambivalence towards Soviet Russia came to the fore. On the one hand he continued to believe in the potential possibilities of this post-capitalist country. On the other hand he was troubled by the authoritarian tendencies in the country, although he kept his criticism to himself for the time being.

Sneevliet felt himself increasingly pushed into a minority position. Two developments underlay this:

• In the first place Bolshevisation gained ground from 1924, that is to say the subjection of the Comintern and the sections affiliated to it to the policy of the Soviet party. Everywhere it led to the expulsion of Trotsky's supporters.
• In the second place the Comintern, on Moscow's orders, changed its trade union policy, in which in the long run there was no longer room for work in the independent revolutionary, syndicalist trade unions. In its pursuit of cooperation with the reformist International Federation of Trade Unions (IVV), the Red International of Labour Unions (RVI), led by Moscow, determined that communists should organise themselves in the NVV.

For critical dissenters à la Sneevliet those developments promised little good. Eventual expulsion and a death blow to the NAS was a prospect Sneevliet naturally could not live with.

Sneevliet enjoyed some respite as long as Moscow considered a working-class base for the Communist Party of Holland (CPH), as the SDP had meanwhile been renamed, in the NAS more important than pushing through at any price a soulless trade union policy of cooperation with the NVV. But when around 1926 the discipline in the International no longer allowed any deviation, Sneevliet's independent position had become untenable and a break drew near.

Concern for the survival of the NAS dictated to Sneevliet the pace at which he shaped his struggle against Stalinism, and one may ask whether Sneevliet did not thereby sacrifice a timely, consistent anti-Stalinist opposition to what historically proved to be a rearguard action, namely the defence of the NAS.

For Sneevliet the NAS seemed to be central. He wanted nothing to do even with a cautious cooperation with the NVV, as proposed by the left NVV official and SDAP member Edo Fimmen. According to him the NVV and SDAP were hopelessly reformist and nothing was to be expected of them; by contrast he regarded the NAS, despite its limitations, as a revolutionary organisation and a factor in the class struggle.

1926/1927 was an eventful year for Sneevliet. For the sake of the NAS he broke with the RVI and the Comintern, in which submission to the line of Moscow had become compelling. Many comrades-in-arms from the first hour, whom Sneevliet had also come to know well personally, were persecuted as Trotskyists in Soviet Russia and elsewhere.

In Indonesia too, on Java, the communist movement ended up in a dead end. The uprising of 1926 was crushed and the communist PKI decimated. In China the same befell the communists. The KMT and Chiang Kai-shek, the privileged ally of Joseph Stalin, revealed themselves as a gang of murderers. These were developments that affected Sneevliet deeply.

From 1927 Sneevliet worked on building an independent political organisation, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), which was strongly influenced by his friendship with Trotsky and his respect for the latter's ideas. The party developed in the direction of a Trotskyist or semi-Trotskyist organisation.

Around that time there seemed to be possibilities for a breakthrough. The official communists, with their social fascism policy that regarded the social democrats as fascists, had little appeal. In and outside the SDAP dissidents, such as Henriette Roland Holst, Harm Kolthek and Roel Stenhuis, were searching for an alternative.

Yet the RSP proved not to be that alternative.

The cause lay in both objective and subjective factors. The 1930s showed in Europe, and certainly in the Netherlands, a reduced combativeness of the labour movement. That limited the possibilities of revolutionary socialists. The RSP and later also the RSAP fell back on the political core in the NAS. And this core, with Sneevliet at its head, had little confidence in cooperating with social democracy. In doing so they closed themselves off not only from left social democrats, but also from oppositional communist currents. These oriented themselves in an overwhelming majority, whether or not on Trotsky's authority, towards the mass trade union movement and not towards syndicalism.

It meant that revolutionary socialism in the Netherlands became politically isolated in the 1930s and that Sneevliet was, as it were, overwhelmed in the fierce struggle for the survival of his movement. In it he had to struggle against bourgeois repression, against the petty reformism of social democracy, against the aggressive Stalinism of the CPN and in part also against Trotsky and the Fourth International founded by him.

In this last, four points of conflict played a role:

• the question of the NAS;
• the entry policy (the French Turn);
• the attitude towards the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM);
• the founding of the Fourth International.

This is not the place to work out all these points, but I do want to go into the difficulties that arose between Trotsky and Sneevliet personally.

In 1936 a conflict broke out between Sneevliet and Trotsky. It is difficult to pinpoint the causes precisely, but undoubtedly Trotsky considered Sneevliet too conciliatory towards others. Sneevliet cherished a deep friendship for the Spanish revolutionary Andrès Nin.

Because of their friendship Sneevliet was inclined to excuse political mistakes of Nin, which were a thorn in Trotsky's side. Sneevliet remained silent about the formation of the POUM through a merger with the 'right opposition' of the Spanish Communist Party and tolerated the adaptation of the POUM to the Popular Front government of the Republic and its attempt to disarm the revolutionary struggle.

It aroused the anger of Trotsky. These were not small tactical differences. It was a matter of principles. Yet we must say that Trotsky overreacted in his response. His criticism was perhaps justified, but Trotsky's judgement of Sneevliet was shameful. He argued that Sneevliet's stance was not accidental, but was the result of his dependence on the NAS. The NAS, so Trotsky reasoned, was bound by a golden chain to the government from which it received subsidies. As soon as war came, Sneevliet would capitulate under material pressure to his own bourgeoisie.

When it came to that, Trotsky's prediction about Sneevliet's capitulation proved worthless. Sneevliet did the opposite of what Trotsky expected. Sneevliet was the first not only to dissolve the NAS and the RSAP, but also the first to go underground under the flag of the MLL-Front. He became an exemplary resistance fighter. In 1942 the Gestapo arrested the entire leadership of the MLL-Front and dragged it before the court. It was the first and only conviction of a revolutionary Marxist tendency during the Nazi occupation.

Trotsky's blunder should be a warning against settling conflicts with sociological explanations.

We look for sociological explanations, especially when we stand face to face with major changes in the class struggle, such as for example the capitulation of the German communists to Hitler. But using the same method in political disputes of small groups is dangerous. It often leads to incorrect and irreversible conclusions. Once someone has been exposed as an 'agent of the bourgeoisie', 'petty-bourgeois opportunist' or 'hopeless sectarian', there is no way back. Who still wants to be in the same party with such a person?

On that special relationship between the RSP/RSAP and the NAS, the following. At the beginning of my argument I remarked that the RSAP was more than a small propaganda group. It was not a mass party, but it was a relatively strong party with a considerable working-class base.

The link with the NAS contributed to this to a considerable extent. It prevented the RSAP from being reduced to one of the many little Marxist propaganda groups, as was the case elsewhere in Europe with the revolutionary socialist movement.

Through the person of Henk Sneevliet this RSP/RSAP/NAS complex acquired its foundation and on that basis Sneevliet could also play a role internationally. But that advantage was at the same time a disadvantage; the relationship with the NAS ultimately stood in the way of cooperation in the Fourth International. In the long run it meant that the RSAP could not benefit from the experiences of revolutionaries across national borders. Combined with the stagnation of syndicalism, characteristic of modern industrial society, that ultimately led to the disappearance of the RSAP.

It confirmed what can also be said of other oppositional currents from before the war. Even though the Leninbund of Hugo Urbahns, the POUM or the German SAP were dozens, sometimes hundreds of times larger than the sections of the Fourth International, the much smaller Trotskyist groups survived, while the large independent revolutionary socialist organisations disappeared. The only explanation can be that these organisations were not able to embody the experiences of revolutions and counter-revolutions on different continents and of different generations. It underlined the importance of the idea of Marx and Engels, of Lenin and Trotsky that capitalism cannot be overcome on a national basis alone and that an international party must therefore be built.

In conclusion

Sneevliet, together with Andrès Nin, was among the most important pre-war European Trotskyists.

His influence was extraordinarily great. Seyss-Inquart realised this too, and he rejected the petition for clemency of, mind you, the very judges who had sentenced Sneevliet to death. Seyss-Inquart let it be known that he 'regarded Sneevliet as the prototype of a revolutionary on an international basis' and further declared that 'his intelligence made him the most dangerous opponent of any state order'. Sneevliet was shot with six of his comrades on 13 April 1942.

Every year this day is still remembered by a group of revolutionary socialists who gather at the cemetery in Velsen where the dead have been reburied. It is a tradition that we must continue, just as we must also keep alive the memory of Andrès Nin, who was murdered in Spain by the Stalinists. We have no difficulty in paying that tribute. For it concerns our tradition, despite all differences of opinion, regardless of Sneevliet's attitude towards the Fourth International. Because they were revolutionaries, they are our comrades.