Always active but rarely influential: who were the Dutch Trotskyites?
Dutch Trotskyism has a long history. Trotsky and his allies founded the Fourth International in 1938, and in that same year a Dutch group joined. The current survived the nazi-German occupation, was active in the 1950s and played a role in the nascent youth movement of the 1960s. The decades that followed saw a sustained attempt to establish a mass workers’ party, and although this ultimately failed, groups inspired by Trotsky’s ideas still play a significant role in Dutch social movements and protests.
We provided a first full overview of the history of Dutch Trotskyism in Een banier waar geen smet op rust: De geschiedenis van de trotskistische beweging in Nederland. Here, you can read the book’s introduction. A discussion of the early Trotskyist movement in the Netherlands can be found here and here.We discussed development of Dutch Trotskyism during the 1950s and early 1960s in Generational transfer in the Dutch Trotskyist movement during the ‘long 1950s.
You can find an overview of all my research publications on this website.
