As I sometimes explain to those who don’t know anything about Dutch politics but who are familiar with such “socialist” luminaries as Tony Blair, George Papandreou, or François Hollande, the Socialist Party’s name is misleading. This is because the SP is, in fact, a party which promotes socialism.

The SP is an unusual organization, perhaps even unique. While its policies might at first glance give the impression of a kind of progressive social democracy, its pervasive grassroots activism reveals a different reality. I was a member of a real social-democratic party, the British Labour Party, for fifteen years, and in all that time I was never once asked to attend a demonstration of any kind by the party’s central leadership. (And that was before the dead hand of Blairism.) Social democracy has usually meant — to paraphrase a poster from Paris ’68 — “you vote, and we’ll do the rest.” Although the SP’s rapid growth holds dangers, it has so far resisted any temptation to abandon the streets, factories and schools, to give up its broad and rich political work for the sterile and single-minded parliamentarianism of the social democrat.

The party began its life in the early 1970s as one of a number of Maoist grouplets, winning some local representation but failing to establish any kind of national presence. In the late 1980s it jettisoned the iconography and language of Marxism-Leninism, exchanging its dogmas for an ecumenical and popular brand of socialism, remaining unabashedly radical yet adopting a singularly pragmatic and unpretentious approach to left-wing politics. Ironically, it was what the party had learned from the key Maoist tenet of the “mass line” that arguably engendered the process of de-Maoization: embedding itself deeply in a number of cities and neighborhoods, electing municipal officials and supporting local struggles over housing, pollution, and workplace issues, the party attuned itself to the needs of its constituents, and its unusually earnest commitment to bread-and-butter working-class issues gradually led it to subordinate doctrine to practical left-wing politics.