On 1 July 1890 in Amsterdam, the centre of the socialist labour movement, an association building was opened in celebratory style by Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, the leader of the Social Democratic League of the Netherlands (Sociaaldemocratische Bond, SDB). The necessary funds had been scraped together with great difficulty; in the end, the financing had only just been managed thanks to a hefty loan from the feminist Wilhelmina Drucker. At the opening, the building was christened Constantia (‘tenacity’). It would become the focus of the SDB, which had been founded in 1881 and sported the proud letterhead: ‘Not ratified by Royal Decree of 23 March 1884’. The fact that the SDB had been refused corporate rights was a symbol of its uncompromising struggle against capital, the state and the bourgeoisie.

The SDB was engaged in a struggle with the world, but also within itself. Not only were there mounting internal differences regarding the party’s direction and course, but the SDB was also becoming isolated at the international level. Nieuwenhuis increasingly distanced himself in particular from the German labour movement, the largest in Europe. The Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany had been founded in 1875, and renamed itself the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, spd) in 1891. Despite all the pressure of Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Laws, the spd had managed to win almost 20 per cent of the vote in 1891. The party’s success made little impression on its Dutch comrades, however, as was shown at a congress of the Second International in Brussels in the summer of the same year. On 15 October, Nieuwenhuis reported on the congress in the Constantia building. He declared that success at the polls was causing the Germans to stray ever further from the revolutionary path. After all, little could be expected from parliament; the air alone there was ‘contaminated’: ‘Whilst the speaker himself is not inclined to exaggerate, there can be no solution other than to tread the path of force (applause)’.

Nieuwenhuis then addressed the decisions that had been made in Brussels. He dwelled for some time on a resolution on militarism, and also spoke at length on the question of whether piecework was acceptable or not.