Henriette Roland Holst: The ‘Blonde Madonna’ of the Second International

“I’ll be a poet anyway,” is what Henriette Roland Holst said in response to her uncle reminding her that she had to comply with her parents’ wishes and become a lady. This kind of ‘no’, a ‘no’ that cannot be split from a ‘yes’, marked out her life’s work: rejecting settling for any constriction of humanity in favour of actively engaging in expanding the possibilities for life for all. Born in 1869 in Noordwijk to a liberal Christian family, Roland Holst became one of the most important figures in international socialism, and one of the few Dutch socialists who enjoyed an international reputation. Her desire to be a poet was not and could not be an atomised ‘turn inwards’, her poetry spoke to society. On the advice of fellow poet and socialist Herman Gorter, she read Das Kapital in order to understand how society works. Proficient in French, German, Italian and English (as well as her native Dutch), she also later acquired reading knowledge of Russian.

Joining the Dutch Socialist Party (SDAP) in 1896, Roland Holst swiftly became an editor of De Nieuwe Tijd (The New Age), the Dutch movement’s paper. She also contributed regularly in German to Die Neue Zeit, garnering her the attention of Lenin and Kautsky (the latter encouraged her to write a book about the General Strike and Social Democracy, and wrote the foreword for it). Rosa Luxemburg sensed her political potential, writing to her in 1904: “But a personality like you, my blonde Madonna, could have a great effect”, praising her ability to convey “the living spirit of the movement”.

Yet Roland Holst was very much a product of a troubled labour movement that lacked the political self-confidence and unity (however brittle) of German Social Democracy. The start of 1903 saw a highly successful strike of the Dutch railroad workers, where they won the right to unionise from their employers, after conducting a solidarity strike with dock workers. The conservative government, headed by Abraham Knuyper, responded by introducing repressive laws which banned strikes in public services. The more radical elements of the labour movement attempted a general strike in an effort to defeat the law, even as they were conscious of their own weakness. By April 1903, the time of the general strike, the mood was significantly different amongst the railroad and dockworkers. Whilst there were some high points, such as the unexpected solidarity strike by Rotterdam dockworkers, the General Strike failed. Authorities had received prior warning, and employers and the Catholic trade unions had built up the ranks of strikebreakers since January. The strike was far too weak to obstruct the passage of the laws and ended as soon as the laws became operative (although thousands of trade unionists faced repercussions nonetheless). As Roland Holst observed in her article for the Neue Zeit: “insufficient organisation, a lack of political insight, an overestimation of their own power — these were the fatal flaws in the workers’ movement, and our proletariat must now pay for them dearly”. Yet the strike also unveiled tensions within the SDAP, the party leader Troelstra came out against calling for a general strike, which the Left criticised as wavering — even if they stopped short of calling it a betrayal as the anarcho-syndicalists within the union movement did. Faced with the concrete prospect of a mass strike, Dutch Social Democracy was caught out and visibly floundered.

The SDAP’s internal divisions continued to grow — in 1905, the party made the decision to endorse liberal candidates who supported universal suffrage, a victory for the revisionist wing of the movement. At the same time, the Marxists within the SDAP grew more organised, setting up the paper De Tribune in 1907, which sharply attacked the SDAP leadership for its reformism and over-reliance on parliamentary means. The leadership’s response was to expel the grouping around De Tribune in 1909, and many of Roland Holst’s allies such as Herman Gorter stepped into the ranks of the newly founded Social Democratic Party (SDP). However Roland Holst did not immediately follow. Her article for Die Neue Zeit in 1909 highlights her ambivalent feelings towards the split. She hoped for the prospect of the “remaining Marxists in the party to succeed in regaining the measure of freedom of expression and criticism that is essential for the promotion of our outlook” which would effectively remove the conditions that led to a split, whilst arguing it was dependent on political developments “outside our borders” . The other outcome, which she hoped to avoid, was the revisionist majority being able to maintain their suppression of dissent and “the old party would be lost to Social Democracy”.

Later on, in 1911, she left the SDAP, without joining the SDP. Her ambiguous attitude attracted the criticism of Luxemburg: “I was strongly opposed to your staying in the party at the time when others left it. … Fragmentation of the Marxists … is fatal. … The worst working class party is better than none”. Luxemburg’s point was that Roland Holst’s political demoralisation could not be resolved in isolation — she had to be working within the ranks of the movement, whatever form it took.

The advent of the First World War disoriented and reoriented socialists across Europe, including Roland Holst. Importantly, it provided the resolution to her ambivalence around organisation. She delegated herself on behalf of her own organisation, the Revolutionary Socialist Union, which had only existed for a few months, to the Zimmerwald Conference, as the only Dutch participant. The Zimmerwald Conference marked the first serious attempt of anti-war socialists across Europe to work out ‘what next?’ in the context of the subsumption of major socialist parties into supporting their nation’s war efforts. The manifesto, unanimously agreed by the conference, called for a “struggle for peace — a peace without annexations or reparations”. Whilst Roland Holst, alongside Trotsky, took a centrist position at the time of the conference, in the months following she moved closer to the Zimmerwald Left, who called for “civil war, not civil peace” and aimed to build a new International, joining the Zimmerwald Left group in January 1916.

Her aptitude as a political operator is best demonstrated by her attempts to take the Zimmerwald Manifesto (which served as a ‘call to action’ to the working class) to the Dutch labour movement. Whilst neither the SDAP or the SDP were enamoured by its contents, she printed over ten thousand copies of the Zimmerwald Manifesto and organised meetings to make its political arguments. She also became editor of Vorbote in 1916, a bulletin of the Zimmerwald Left, in which she outlined her political position on the struggle for the adoption of the Manifesto in Holland. Responding to criticisms from the Dutch SDP, in particular on the Manifesto’s commitment to the ‘right of nations to self-determination’, Roland Holst argued that she agreed that such a formula was not satisfactory and instead “we should plainly say to the proletariat that self-determination is a petty-bourgeois utopia that can’t be realized in the imperialist period and is redundant in socialism”. For her, the only positive revolutionary content contained in the formula as it appeared in the Manifesto was that it represented a rejection on the part of the German opposition to annexation politics. This located her firmly in the tendency of the Dutch Left in principle, differentiating her from both Lenin and Trotsky. However, significantly, her disagreement with the political formulae of the manifesto did not negate the need she perceived to build a movement on its basis: she recognised its positive potential as a rallying point for militant workers.

This is what differentiated this “comrade who stays in the middle position between Marxists and opportunists”, in the words of Lenin, from the more formally Marxist SDP, whose leaders rejected collaboration with Zimmerwald on account of the manifesto’s supposed opportunism. Roland Holst recognised the significance of the historical juncture: the first attempt to construct a socialist opposition to the war in practice. Her own criticisms of the Zimmerwald Manifesto demonstrate that she was not simply being swept along, but was acting in accordance with her obligations as a socialist: seriously engaging with really existing movement. Standing aloof was not an option for her.

What underpinned Roland Holst’s political activity in this critical moment for the future of socialism was faith: the kind of faith that really signifies courage. It takes courage to throw in your lot with any truly liberatory movement. It doesn’t hinge on a conviction of a mechanical victory, but belief in the capacity of people to fight for each other. Her words in 1921 summarise this best: “This task is: to lead the masses to where they will no longer need the example and the leadership of a specially organized group … The communists labor in order to prepare for their own disappearance”. Communism can be an absolute affirmation in the potential of humanity to humanize ourselves.