Herman Gorter

Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN) Left communism Netherlands Netherlands 1864–1927 ○ Natural causes

Dutch poet and left-communist theorist, author of the Open Letter to Comrade Lenin

The leading poet of the Dutch Tachtigers, famous for his epic Mei (1889), Gorter joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1897 and became the orator and propagandist of its Marxist left. He co-founded the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the Tribunist split of 1909 and stood with the Zimmerwald Left during the First World War. After 1918 he became a theoretical leader of the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD), and in 1920 his Open Letter to Comrade Lenin attacked the Comintern's parliamentary and trade-union tactics.

Activities and affiliations

Career Timeline

The Open Letter to Lenin and the KAPD

When the war broke out, Gorter wrote Imperialism, the World War and Social Democracy in October 1914, defining the war as imperialist, proclaiming the death of the Second International and calling for a new revolutionary International. The pamphlet was translated into German at once and hailed by Lenin. In the Zimmerwald Left he worked with Lenin to regroup the revolutionary opponents of the war, and he translated Lenin's The State and Revolution into Dutch. In The World Revolution (1918) he praised the workers' councils as the newly discovered form of revolutionary power, valid not only for Russia but for the whole world.

But as the revolution failed to spread westwards, Gorter parted ways with the Comintern's tactics. Leading the opposition to Wijnkoop's leadership in the Dutch Communist Party, he devoted himself more and more to the German movement and became the theoretical leader and mentor of the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD), which split from the KPD in April 1920. When Lenin attacked the Dutch and German left in "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder that year, Gorter replied with his Open Letter to Comrade Lenin. The proletariat of Western Europe, he argued, stood alone, without the possibility of an alliance with the peasantry as in Russia, and therefore needed different tactics; he criticised the Comintern's turn to parliamentary work and activity in the reformist unions. The letter became a founding text of the Dutch-German communist left, and Gorter went to Moscow as a KAPD delegate to defend his positions before the Comintern Executive.

In 1921 Gorter led the founding of the Communist Workers' International (KAI) to unite the left-communist forces internationally, but the venture rested on a pessimistic judgement that most of the world's workers were hostile to the revolution and had no future. When the KAPD split in 1922 he first sided with the Essen tendency, soon broke with it and worked for the reunification of the two factions. He died in Brussels on 15 September 1927.