Revolutionary Socialist Workers' Party (Netherlands)
네덜란드 혁명적사회주의노동자당
A Dutch left-communist party led by Henk Sneevliet. Founded in 1929 as the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), it merged with the Independent Socialist Party (OSP) in 1935 to become the Revolutionary Socialist Workers' Party (RSAP). Opposed to both the Stalinist Communist Party and reformist social democracy, it dissolved itself the day before the Dutch capitulation in May 1940 and became an underground resistance organisation.
In depth
In 1929 former members of Sneevliet's Revolutionary Socialist Union, a group of dissidents from the Communist Party, and of the syndicalist Socialist Party, close to the anarcho-syndicalist union National Labour Secretariat (NAS), founded the Revolutionary Socialist Party. It won no seat in 1929, but when Sneevliet was arrested just before the 1933 election for supporting the mutiny on De Zeven Provinciën, the party campaigned under the slogan 'From the Cell to Parliament' and won one seat, which freed Sneevliet. About 20,000 of its 48,405 votes in 1933 came from Amsterdam.
In 1935 the party merged with the Independent Socialist Party to form the Revolutionary Socialist Workers' Party, with the OSP leader Piet Schmidt as chairman. A group of former OSP members left that same year, and when Schmidt was expelled in 1936 for publicly criticising the Moscow Trials, Sneevliet took the chair. After it lost its seat in 1937 the government forbade civil servants to belong to the RSAP or the NAS, and the Communist Party attacked it as a 'Trotskyite counterrevolutionary sect'; an ideological conflict with Trotsky also cut it off from its international contacts.
The party aimed at a proletarian world revolution that would replace capitalism with a system of workers' councils, and it called for abolishing the monarchy and the Senate, a workers' militia and the decolonisation of the Dutch East Indies. It had decided secretly in 1938 to dissolve and go underground if Germany invaded; it was formally dissolved on 14 May 1940 and became the resistance organisation Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front, which supported the February strike. Sneevliet's execution in 1942 ruled out a refoundation after the war.