The Communist Party of the Netherlands ( , CPN) was a Eurocommunist party in the Netherlands. The party was founded in 1909 as the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and merged with the Pacifist Socialist Party, the Political Party of Radicals and the Evangelical People's Party in 1991, forming GroenLinks. Members opposed to the merger founded the New Communist Party of the Netherlands.
History
Foundation In 1907, Jan Ceton, Willem van Ravesteyn, and David Wijnkoop of the Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP) founded ("The Tribune"), a magazine in which they criticized the party leadership. They maintained orthodox Marxist views and expected a proletarian revolution. They opposed the leadership of the SDAP, who were more oriented towards more a revisionist ideology and a parliamentary and reformist political strategy. At a party congress in Deventer held on 14 February 1909, SDAP leaders demanded that they stop publishing De Tribune or be expelled from the party. Wijnkoop and Ceton refused; they and their supporters, including the poet Herman Gorter and the mathematician Gerrit Mannoury, left to form a new party. This was the first such split in a Western European socialist party, although others followed. There had already been a split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, and between the Bulgarian Workers' Social Democratic Party and the Tesnjaki ("Narrowist") group. On 14 March 1909 the dissenters founded the new Social Democratic Party (SDP). They had a membership of around 400 spread across different cities: Amsterdam (160), Rotterdam (65), The Hague (45), Leiden (56), Utrecht (25), Bussum (15).
1909–1922 In the 1910s, the SDAP paid much attention to attacking the newly formed SDP. The mobilization for World War I, which the SDAP supported and the SDP opposed, further strengthened the differences between the parties. In the 1917 general election the SDP was still unable to win any seats. In May 1918, the left wing founded the journal De Internationale, uniting four opposition groups within the SDP, with groups in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague plus the Zimmerwald Left Propaganda Union. This group did not favour the parliamentarianism of the majority.
The Russian Revolution fractured most European parties between their revolutionary and reformist factions; this had already happened in the Netherlands, but it profoundly changed the SDP. Previously a party of orthodox Marxist intellectuals with little working class support, the SDP saw an influx of members coming from the free socialist organisations, primarily the NAS. pp. 149-150
The SDP entered the election again in July 1918, winning two seats that were occupied by Willem van Ravesteyn and Wijnkoop; Wijnkoop assumed the leadership of the party. The SDP formed a revolutionary parliamentary party with the League of Christian Socialists and the Socialist Party, both of which had one seat. In 1921, Willy Kruyt, the MP for the League of Christian Socialists, joined the SDP while the MP for the Socialist Party left the revolutionary parliamentary party.
As the German Revolution (and the related Brussels Soldiers' Council) developed across the borders in November 1918, the Netherlands was also affected by strikes and mutinies. On 10 November, the SDP called for the formation of soldiers' and workers councils with a view to forming a popular government. A week later at their Leiden Congress, the party name was changed to Communist Party Holland (CPH), to stress its identification with the workers councils. The following year, on 10 April 1919 the CPH joined the Comintern, which helped transform the party from a mix of anarchists, syndicalists and orthodox Marxists into a tightly-knit Leninist community.
In 1920, prominent left communists Gorter and Pannekoek left the party to form the Communist Workers' Party of the Netherlands which advocated council communism. In the 1922 general election the CPH retained its two seats. One of its unsuccessful candidates that year, Tan Malaka, was the first subject of the colonial Dutch East Indies to run for office in the Netherlands.
1922–1945 Before the 1925 general election, Wijnkoop was replaced as party leader by Louis de Visser under the pressure of the Comintern; this was the cause of heavy internal division within the party. Jacques de Kadt had already left the party in 1924 to help set up The League of Communist Struggle & Propaganda Clubs. In the background of several of these divisions was the conflict in the Soviet Union between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. Wijnkoop, Henk Sneevliet (a prominent international communist and an ally of Trotsky), and other prominent members, were expelled from the party. Sneevliet founded the Revolutionary Socialist Union, which later became the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP). In 1926, the entire Rotterdam branch was expelled. These expellees joined Wijnkoop to form a separate Communist Party of Holland-Central Committee. All three, the RSP, the CPH-central committee and the old CPH (which ran under the name "CPH – Dutch section of the Communist International"), contested the 1929 general election and both CPHs won one seat each, whilst the RSP failed to win any. In 1930, the CPHs were forced to merge by the Comintern.
After the mutiny on the Zeven Provinciën in the same year, the independence of the Dutch Indies became an important theme at the 1933 general election. The party performed particularly well at this election, doubling its seats to four. Among those elected was the Indonesian nationalist Rustam Effendi, the first subject from the Dutch Indies to enter parliament. At the 1937 general election, the party was able to retain its seats.
On 15 May 1940, immediately after the German occupation, the party decided to organize an underground movement. In the first few months of the war however, party leadership, led by Paul de Groot, at first attempted to operate legally, and after negotiations with the occupier one last edition of two party periodicals were allowed to appear in which the party blamed the war on British imperialism and the Dutch bourgeoisie and called for a "correct stance" towards the occupying Germans.
Nevertheless, in July 1940, the Nazi occupation force banned the CPN; the party continued illegally. In 1940, together with the much smaller anti-Stalinist communist Revolutionary Socialist Party, the only pre-war organisation that had protested against the anti-Semitic measures by the German occupiers, it founded a resistance movement called Raad van Verzet ("Resistance Council"). It published a resistance newspaper called De Waarheid (The Truth). Both took part in the February strike in 1941, the largest act of resistance in the Netherlands. Many Dutch communists would go on to fight in the Dutch resistance, of which a large amount, including most of the pre-World War II party leadership, would perish.
1945–1963
After the war, the party was led by Paul de Groot, who had a strong grip on the party's organization. Initially, De Groot had wanted to organise into the Union of Friends of De Waarheid (Vereniging Vrienden van de Waarheid) movement, which was to aid in building a new broader progressive political party. However, under pressure from many Dutch communists and the Soviet Union, which had earlier condemned the CPUSA's erstwhile leader Earl Browder for dissolving his party, the party was refounded on 23 June 1945.
In 1945 the CPN's Gerben Wagenaar was offered the position of minister without portfolio in the Schermerhorn–Drees cabinet, mainly because of the CPN's role in the Dutch Resistance. The CPN refused, demanding instead the position of Minister of Food Supply, Agriculture and Fisheries for Paul de Groot. In the 1946 general election, the CPN received nearly 11% of the vote and won 10 seats in the House of Representatives. The CPN also won seats in the Senate for the first time. This electoral success was linked to the role of the CPN in the resistance.
The following period was characterized by decreasing popularity for communism, the rise of internal divisions, and the methodical isolation of the CPN by other parties.
With the rise of the Cold War, the party began to lose popularity. The 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état tainted the reputation of Communism. In the 1948 general election, the party lost two seats. In 1949, a group of Frisian Communists were removed from the party ranks; they founded the Socialist Union, but they were unable to play a significant role in Dutch politics. In the 1952 general election, the party lost two additional seats. In 1956, the CPN lost votes again; however, because of the expansion of parliament it won an additional seat. The party supported the Russian intervention against the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. After the invasion, the party office, in Felix Meritis in Amsterdam, was attacked by opponents of the invasion.
Meanwhile, internal dissent against the strict leadership of De Groot was rising. In 1958, the Bruggroep ("Bridge group") left the CPN in a conflict over the role of the communist Unity Trade Union Federation (Eenheidsvakcentrale). Leaders of the Bruggroep were prominent Resistance figures like Gerben Wagenaar and Henk Gortzak. The General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) claimed to be behind the split, while the CPN leadership claimed that the dissenters were agents working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The Bruggroep founded a new party, the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP). In 1957, the Pacifist Socialist Party was founded. The PSP united former members of the CPN, including members of the Socialist Union, and the Labour Party (PvdA), and other left-wing independents. In the following 1959 general election the CPN lost all but three seats, while the PSP won two seats, and the SWP was unable to win any seats. Many SWP members, like Gortzak, later joined the PSP.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the CPN was methodically isolated by other parties. Civil servants were forbidden to become members of the CPN and from 1948 was not alloted airtime during the Zendtijd voor Politieke Partijen for political broadcasts on public radio or television due to the CPN's opposition to the Dutch political system. The party's unequivocal support for decolonization of the Dutch East Indies isolated the party in parliament. Because of its anti-NATO and European Economic Community stances the party was blocked from the Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Nuclear Energy committees in parliament. The AIVD kept close tabs on the party. All other parties in parliament were deeply anti-communist, especially the social democratic PvdA.
In the 1963 general election the party gained one seat. The developing students' movement was an important impetus for the party. In 1964, the international conflict between the People's Republic of China and the USSR also split the CPN. A group called Communist Unity Movement of the Netherlands (Marxist–Leninist) left the CPN in that year. They went through several intense splits based on ideological and personal conflicts. In 1971 one of the small groups formed the Socialist Party, which became a successful political party from the mid-1990s. The CPN took a rather ambiguous stance in the conflict between the USSR and the PRC.
1967–1989