Version imprimableOn 20 November, friends and comrades gathered at the IIRE in Amsterdam to share their grief and remember Paul’s life. Alexander van Steenderen, one of Paul’s best friends, described how he met Paul when they were both teenagers in the 1990s and were active in Rebel, the youth organisation of SAP at the time. Paul came from a working-class family and had thrown himself enthusiastically into political activism. He was a flamboyant figure, or as he later described himself, a weird hippie. Confident and intelligent, Paul quickly took on a leadership role in Rebel. These were years of intense activism and close friendships. Later, Paul would look back with some nostalgia on the activism of that time, such as high school activism against neoliberal education policy and large anti-racist protests.
After the turn of the century, Paul was the editor Grenzeloos, the journal of the section. He was also active in the Fourth International on an international level. At educational meetings and at the summer camps organised by the Fourth International, he spoke about Marxism and sexual liberation. As a gay man, this was something that concerned him personally. It was also a theme the political significance of which changed during those years. Paul appreciated the progress that had been made in the struggle for equal rights, but there was still much to be achieved. ‘Gay emancipation is about more than equal rights for a minority; it is about building a different kind of society, one that is more just and less normative,’ he wrote in 2009. Together with Peter Drucker, then working at the IIRE, and other comrades, Paul was active in organising the LGBTQI work of the Fourth International at many different levels and in many different ways. Paul was a left-wing radical queer, but he was also averse to the subculturalism and narrow-mindness that often accompanies radicalism in the Netherlands, Peter recalled.
During those years, the Netherlands liked to see itself as progressive and tolerant, a place where gay liberation was pretty much complete. According to right-wing politicians (and some parts of the left), gay rights were mainly at risk because of Muslims: their supposed intolerance was said to be contrary to “Dutch culture”. Paul wrote and spoke extensively about this homonationalism, the way in which gay rights are being instrumentalized for nationalist purposes. In recent years, the far right has been increasingly returning to its openly homophobic roots, now under the banner of the fight against “woke indoctrination”. Paul was not surprised by this. After all, he had long known that gay rights were merely a pretext for them to attack a minority.
In the early 2000s, Paul and other comrades were active in the Dutch Socialist Party (SP) and he also worked for some time as a parliamentary assistant for the SP faction in the city council of the city where he lived, Rotterdam. In those years, the SP was a different party than it is today, especially in Rotterdam. During the meeting, Leo de Kleijn, who headed the SP’s city council faction in Rotterdam until 2018, described how at that time the SP organised meetings on anti-racism and collaborated with the progressive Muslim party NIDA. Paul was very involved in thinking about the fight against racism and exclusion and in day-to-day practical organising.
In 2016, Paul obtained his PhD in anthropology from the University of Amsterdam. His research focused on how people think about themselves and others as part of a group that belongs somewhere, or does not. Who is considered ’allochtoon’ (’from abroad’) and who is considered ’autochthon’, in the terms that were in use at the time in Dutch politics. Paul opposed the way in which racism was ’naturalised’ as either the inevitable reaction to difference or as supposedly the spontaneous world-view of especially working-class people – and of course not of respectable, highly educated people. But why, after almost two decades in which right-wing politicians had placed the supposedly neglected ’ordinary man’ at the centre of the political debate, did so many people still identify with stories about neglected natives? Why do people ’cling to their feelings of displacement and abandonment’? Paul sought an answer in the way years of neoliberal technocratic rule had excluded people from democratic decision-making. At the same time, after the disappearance of class as a point of reference in politics and society, only ’culture’ remained as a way for them to feel part of a larger whole and interpret their lifeworld.
Paul had a sharp mind and loved to analyse complex phenomena and discuss ideas. From 2019 onwards, he worked as a lecturer at University College Utrecht. Paul was very committed to his students. For him, teaching was not just about passing on knowledge and skills, but just as much about encouraging curiosity and a critical spirit. It meant a lot to him when students voted him teacher of the year. Paul had a talent for making friends. Everywhere he went, whether for his academic work or as a political activist, he made new friends. He was also extremely funny. He constantly made shamelessly corny puns and came up with nicknames for the people around him. Despite his many friendships and his wit, things were not always easy for Paul. He had become politically active in the 1990s, during the heyday of capitalist triumphalism. History had come to an end and the Dutch Labour Party and the right-wing VVD parties were enthusiastically working together on the neoliberal transformation of the Netherlands. Calling yourself a revolutionary socialist in those days, in a conformist country like the Netherlands, took guts. Paul was used to swimming against the tide. But as the neoliberal dream fell apart, the Netherlands has shifted further to the right over the past quarter of a century. It was inevitable that Paul would occasionally wonder whether all his work and activism were making a difference. At the meeting on 20 November, Leo de Kleijn brought up out how the gap between the world we want as socialists and the world as it is can lead to alienation.
Paul was a scholar and he was also a romantic. Not for nothing did he love socially conscious, often melancholic folk music, such as that of Dar Williams and Joan Baez. He believed that socialists should dare to dream and cherish an utopian horizon. His aversion to capitalism was motivated by deep indignation at poverty and hunger in a world where the material resources to solve such problems exist. But he was also sensitive to how, in neoliberal societies such as the Netherlands, everything is reduced to quantities that can be expressed in numbers, and thus in money and turned into commodities.
One of Paul’s favourite films was Ken Loach’s Pride, about the British miners’ strike in the 1980s and the solidarity organised by Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. The memory of a lost struggle can be an inspiration as well, and this story contained many elements with which Paul, the gay working-class socialist, could identify. He particularly liked the scene in which people sang Bread and Roses. The lyrics described what Paul stood for: ’Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too’.
23 November 2025
