Political Activities
During the world war, Rutgers was a frequent contributor to the Left Wing socialist press in America. His influential articles in The International Socialist Review and other publications supported the antimilitarist Zimmerwald Left movement and helped publicize the ideas of revolutionary socialism to an American audience. Rutgers was the financial force behind the establishment of a group called the Socialist Propaganda League of America in 1915, a revolutionary socialist forerunner of the Communist Party of America.
Rutgers was subsequently regarded as one of the leading theoreticians of the Left Wing of the Socialist Party of America, a tendency which emerged as the Communist Party of America after 1919.
After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Rutgers made his way to Soviet Russia. From 1922-1926, he had the lead in the construction of an international workers cooperative, the Kuzbass Autonomous Industrial Colony in the Kuzbas area of Siberia. From 1926-1938 he lived alternately in the Netherlands, Vienna, and Moscow.
In 1938 Rutgers left the Soviet Union fearing that he might otherwise become a victim of the Great Purge (secret police terror) which was sweeping the USSR.
Back in the Netherlands, Rutgers lived out his life as a respected, but non-influential member of the Communist Party of the Netherlands.
Read more about this topic: S. J. Rutgers, Biography
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