Sebald Justin Rutgers (1879 — 1961) was a Dutch Marxist theoretician and journalist who played an important role in the Left Wing section of the Socialist Party of America. He was also a construction engineer who was active in building industry in the Soviet Union.
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S.J. Rutgers was born in Leiden, Netherlands on January 25, 1879. He studied from 1896 to the Technical Polytechnic School in Delft, where he came into contact with socialism. In 1900 he graduated as a civil engineer and took a job for the municipality of Rotterdam, where he worked on the expansion of the port. At the same time, he was active from 1899 in the SDAP. From 1911 to 1915 he was director of public works in Medan, and then buyer for Indian companies in the United States.
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 moving force behind the establishment of a group called the Socialist Propaganda League in 1915, a revolutionary socialist forerunner of the Communist Party of America.[1]
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.
Sebald Rutgers died in Amersfoort, Netherlands on June 14, 1961.