Date: Mon, 18 Nov 1996 09:18:38 +0100 (MET) From: malecki-AT-algonet.se (Robert Malecki) Subject: M-G: Indonesia (part 2) Lessons of 1965 In 1965, the PKI was the mass party of the Indonesian proletariat and the largest Communist party in the capitalist world. But basing itself on the Stalinist schema of revolution in "stages"--first a revolution limited to (bourgeois) democracy, to be followed only later by a fight for socialism--the PKI counterposed to the program of workers revolution the call for unity with Indonesia's bourgeois-nationalist rulers. In 1952, PKI chairman D.N. Aidit raised the slogan "Long Live Sukarno! Long Live the PKI!" and called on Sukarno's Nationalist Party to form a "united national front, including the national bourgeoisie" which would carry out "not socialist but democratic reforms" (see "How Maoist Strategy Sabotaged Indonesian Revolution," Young Spartacus Nos. 36 and 37, October and November 1975). In the 1950s, when nationalist demagogues had some room to maneuver between U.S. imperialism and the Soviet Union, Sukarno's "non-aligned" posturing was a constant irritant to Washington. With the full backing of their Stalinist mentors in Moscow and especially in Beijing, the PKI implemented the policy of gotong royong--"national unity"--with the "progressive" bourgeoisie and its military. The PKI gained a number of cabinet posts in Sukarno's government, embracing his strategy of "Nasakom"--an alliance of bourgeois nationalists, Islamic groups and "Communists." This regime was an example of a popular front, a class-collaborationist coalition in which the proletariat and oppressed are chained to the class enemy, in this case through the instrument of the PKI. Groveling before Sukarno and the reactionary Muslim clerics, the PKI organized work brigades to build mosques. Again and again, the PKI banned strikes, suppressed militant peasant movements and courted imperialist investment, preaching confidence in Sukarno and his generals. The PKI even denounced an uprising it had led at Madiun in 1948 and elevated the general who suppressed it to its pantheon of "Heroes of the Working Class." Raising the slogan "For the Maintenance of Public Order, Help the Police," and pledging to enforce "the co-operation between the people and the Armed Forces, in particular the Police Force," the PKI served to strengthen the very repressive apparatus which was later to come down on it. The immediate precursor to the 1965 military coup was a botched attack on top army officers in late September. Sukarno may in fact have encouraged the move against the officers, in which six were killed, although he quickly disowned it, leaving the PKI to bear the brunt of the subsequent repression. Following the attack, Sukarno appointed General Suharto "responsible for restoring security and order." As hundreds of thousands of PKI supporters were massacred by Suharto's troops and Muslim rightists, Sukarno called for exterminating the Communist "rats." But even as they sat in prison cells awaiting execution, PKI leaders continued to pledge their loyalty to the "democratic" military and the "progressive" Sukarno! On the eve of Suharto's counterrevolutionary October 1965 coup, the PKI was an enormously powerful force, with a membership of three million and over 14 million additional supporters organized in PKI-controlled labor unions, youth, women's and peasant organizations. But the PKI's treacherous policy of class collaboration bartered the political independence and revolutionary mobilization of the exploited for maneuvers with their oppressors. When the generals struck, the PKI, politically disarmed and militarily unprepared, was paralyzed. Even as the remnants of the PKI in exile issued a "self-criticism" of its failure to adopt "an independent attitude toward Sukarno," they refused to break from the disastrous stagist politics that paved the way for the massacre: "By correcting the mistakes made by the Party in the united front with the national bourgeoisie it does not mean that now the Party need not unite with this class...our Party must work to win the national bourgeoisie over to the side of the revolution." In an article headlined "Indonesia: Lesson in Betrayal" (Spartacist No. 5, November-December 1965), we wrote that "the working people of Indonesia are now paying with their blood" for the PKI's betrayal in "helping administer Indonesian capitalism while suppressing the struggles of the Indonesian workers and keeping them wedded to Sukarno's police-state." Imperialist Rivalry Over Indonesia The U.S. was up to its neck in the Indonesian bloodbath. The CIA provided the Indonesian generals with a hit list of 5,000 Communists, and U.S. embassy officials ticked the names off as they were hunted down and murdered in 1965-66. The mobilization of reactionary Islamic fundamentalists against the PKI was also promoted by Washington. In 1950, John Foster Dulles, later to be Eisenhower's secretary of state, explained how the "spiritual beliefs" of "the religions of the East...cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us and our task is to find and develop it." That "bond" was cemented in the blood of the Indonesian workers and peasants, and later in Afghanistan. With the "Communist menace" eliminated in this strategic Pacific Rim country, Washington felt emboldened to massively escalate its ground invasion of South Vietnam. At the same time, the consolidation of Indonesia as a bastion of "free world" anti- Communism created the conditions for the later development of a defeatist wing of the American ruling class, who felt that the U.S. could safely withdraw from its losing war in Indochina without jeopardizing its strategic interests in Southeast Asia. The imperialists have continued to assign a key role to Indonesia in their counterrevolutionary ambitions in Asia. Indonesia is the central player in ASEAN, the anti-China bloc which now encompasses virtually every nation to China's south and east. Vast amounts of military equipment and funds have been provided by the U.S. and Britain to prop up Suharto's generals and crush internal dissent. Last December, Australia agreed on a wide-ranging military alliance with Indonesia, described as "an effort to free up the two countries to pay more attention to the rise of China" (International Herald Tribune, 11 June). And while Washington postponed the sale of nine F-16 fighter planes to Indonesia to placate critics after the recent repression, it made clear its intention to proceed with the sale as soon as the dust settles. With an eye not only to China but also to instability in Indonesia and interimperialist rivalries with Japan, the U.S. and Australia have agreed to joint military exercises which will bring 17,000 American military personnel to northern Queensland next March. The post-Soviet world is marked by intensified interimperialist rivalry. U.S. imperialism, with its Australian junior partner in tow, is vying with Japan over who will dominate the region. Indonesia is the largest supplier of oil to Japan outside the Near East, and 90 percent of Japan's oil imports pass through Indonesian waters. The Japanese imperialists recognize that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and its military buildup in the Persian Gulf is aimed at reinforcing U.S. control over Near East oil. Japan's ruling class has never forgotten the U.S. naval blockade of oil which impelled Japan's entry into World War II. This reinforces the appetites of Japanese imperialism to include Indonesia as a key component in a new "Greater East Asian Co- Prosperity Sphere." Indonesia's rich natural resources--oil, gas, timber, gold, silver, copper, etc.--are being plundered by international capital at an ever-increasing rate. Foreign investment, principally Japanese and American, totaled $40 billion in 1995 alone. For the world's imperialist overlords, Indonesia is a rich source for capitalist profits, where impoverished workers labor in the textile and shoe factories, the oil fields and rubber plantations, under conditions of brutal exploitation. Typical is the Nike shoe factory in Serang, where the cost of labor for a pair of athletic shoes which sells for $100 is only $2.60. Even the government itself admits that the minimum wage of $2 a day (and many workers, especially women and children, receive far less), will not buy enough to feed one worker, let alone a family. The changes brought about by capitalist development have brought new misery for the toiling masses, with peasants thrown off their land and driven into urban shantytowns where they cannot but notice the massive chasm between rich and poor. At the same time, industrialization has created a growing working class, young and not weighed down by the horrendous defeat of 1965. More than 20 million workers now live in urban areas like the Jakarta- Bogor-Tangerang-Bekasih industrial belt where strike activity has been centered. Meanwhile, there is widespread resentment among the new middle classes at the nepotism, cronyism and corruption of the ruling Suharto clique. Suharto's six children have utilized their family connections, cheap state loans and subsidies and state monopolies to build up business empires worth more than $4 billion, spanning telecom franchises, petrochemical complexes, transport and trading monopolies. Foreign capitalists seeking to invest in Indonesia are forced to set up joint ventures with Suharto family members, ceding them controlling interests in exchange for their political influence. The Indonesian rulers consciously foster national and communal divisions to ward off multiethnic class struggle and to jack up the rate of exploitation. Chinese Indonesians, who include a fabulously wealthy elite, have been a particular target for racist attacks. Ethnic Chinese were singled out by anti- Communist mobs in 1965, and during the strikes in Medan two years ago, efforts were made to divert militancy into attacks on Chinese shops. But in Indonesia as in all Southeast Asian states, there are many poor and working-class Chinese, who are class brothers in the struggle against capitalism. The need for proletarian internationalism is underlined by the fact that increasing numbers of Indonesian workers are compelled to cross the straits to Malaysia and Singapore, where Chinese are respectively 30 percent and 78 percent of the population. There they often replace Chinese, Malay and Indian workers in the lowest-paid, hardest and dirtiest jobs. Ethnic and religious divisions are consciously fostered by the capitalist exploiters to keep working people from uniting against their common foe. One of the factors in the violence against Chinese Indonesians is that many of them are Christians, as are the East Timorese. Islamic fundamentalist groups have been growing recently in Indonesia, though not as spectacularly as in other countries. Some of the largest of these have been loosely aligned with the pro-Megawati opposition. It is necessary to fight for the separation of state and religion and against theocratic reaction while opposing discrimination against all religious minorities. Religious fundamentalism is a particular threat to women, who have played an increasingly strong role in strikes and protests. The militant role played by women in the struggle against the Suharto dictatorship is exemplified by the case of Marsinah, a young woman worker militant tortured, raped and killed in east Java in May 1993. Her death, which became an inspiration for new fighters, illustrates the hideous oppression and superexploitation of women workers in Indonesia, who make up a majority of the workforce in the prison-like factories. As in the Russian Revolution of 1917, women are and will be in the forefront of the fight against capitalist and semi-feudal enslavement. As Trotsky said of the Muslim women in the Soviet East: "The Eastern woman who is the most paralyzed in life, in her habits and in creativity, the slave of slaves, that she, having at the demand of the new economic relations taken off her cloak will at once feel herself lacking any sort of religious buttress.... And there will be no better communist in the East, no better fighter for the ideas of the Revolution than the awakened woman worker." -- Perspectives and Tasks in the East (1924) For a Trotskyist Party in Indonesia! The PRD was formed in 1994 as an umbrella group of student, worker and peasant associations. From our limited information, it appears that many of its members are young university students who became labor activists, organizing trade unions and strike struggles; a number were arrested in the course of recent strikes and protests. Earlier this year, PRD militants played leading roles in organizing strikes and anti-government demonstrations in several key industrial centers. In the wake of the recent wave of repression, the PRD is reportedly reorganizing to operate clandestinely, while supporters overseas are broadcasting their statements into Indonesia via fax and e-mail. The courage of these young militants is epitomized by imprisoned union activist Dita Indah Sari, president of the PRD- affiliated Indonesian Center for Labor Struggles (PPBI). She has often been imprisoned for her work in organizing strikes and for participation in protests such as the December 1995 demonstration against the occupation of East Timor. During the July 8 rally of 20,000 strikers in Surabaya, she was arrested for "spreading hatred against the government." But along with this courageous work, she also exemplifies the central political weakness of the PRD: its support for and illusions in Megawati and the PDI. Dita Sari is described by the PRD as involved "also actively in organizing actions for the Indonesian oppositions and for Megawati's supporters," including as a regular peaker at public forums organized by pro-Megawati dissidents at the PDI headquarters. The government's claim that the PRD is fomenting communist insurrection is far from reality. PRD leader Budiman Sudjatmiko insists his party is "leftist in the socio-democratic sense," which is confirmed by the limited material available to us on the PRD's political work. The PRD describes its program as aimed at "achieving a multiparty democracy, with the right to freedom of organisation for workers, peasants and all oppressed sections of society," explicitly calling for class-collaborationist alliances "with the two legal non-government parties--the United Development Party (PPP) and the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI)--and with all other democratic forces." A PRD manifesto issued after the July arrests sums up its "immediate demands," calling for raising the daily minimum wage to 7,000 rupiahs (about $3), for a referendum for the people of East Timor, and for the nomination of Megawati as a presidential candidate. Together these reflect the reformist and popular- frontist outlook of this group, as it seeks to channel the vast popular hatred for the regime into minimalist economic demands and support for the bourgeois opposition. Megawati, meanwhile, has disassociated herself from her supporters' "violence" and has called "to guarantee public order." Megawati is often compared to the Philippines' Cory Aquino, who was promoted by Washington as a successor to the venal Marcos regime. While Megawati is less effective than Aquino, there are certain parallels: both wholeheartedly defend the interests of the capitalist class they represent and both have been backed by leftists who mislead the workers movement into the trap of popular-frontist betrayal. While the PRD has been active in protesting the genocidal Indonesian occupation of East Timor, it refuses to call for independence, instead demanding "a peaceful resolution and no military intervention in East Timor, and recognition of human and democratic rights for the East Timorese nation." Meanwhile, the PRD's "democratic" heroine Megawati endorses the expansionist aims of the military regime, calling for incorporation of East Timor as the 27th province of Indonesia. Among the Australian reformist left, the PRD's publicity agents in the Democratic Socialist Party call for "liberating" East Timor through the intervention of the Australian jackal imperialists, who are themselves deeply complicit in Suharto's slaughter of the East Timorese. The PRD not only looks to Megawati and her bourgeois PDI to oppose Suharto, it also makes a veiled bid for a split in the Indonesian military and fosters illusions in the "democratic" appetites of U.S. imperialism. An August 12 statement released by the PRD's overseas office in Australia appeals to generals who "are indicating support for the democratic movement" and continues: "The U.S., which has become the pillar of anti-communism, considers we have entered the New World Order where issues of human rights, democracy and economic development have become the priority for all world nations. And this principle has given birth to a wave of democratisation everywhere." Belief in the "democratic" intentions of the imperialists who sponsored the 1965 massacre and in the "progressive" military is a fatally dangerous illusion. Such a policy will lead these courageous young militants into the same kind of bloc with bourgeois nationalists that led to the slaughter of a generation of leftist militants in 1965. Successive generations of the Indonesian working class have demonstrated their determination to rise up against their exploiters. What is lacking is a leadership which can point the way forward to a victorious struggle for power. Such a party must be based on the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution: the combative proletariat leading the toiling peasant masses in the struggle not only to overthrow the venal, repressive rule of the generals, but to expropriate the factory and plantation bosses-- both the Indonesian exploiters and the imperialist overlords they serve. Such a party must, like Lenin's Bolsheviks, be a tribune of the people, championing the rights of the subjugated women, the restive youth, the myriad oppressed nationalities, the religious and ethnic minorities. The proletarian vanguard must look not to suicidal alliances with the class enemy, the "democratic" bourgeois opposition and their imperialist sponsors, but to linking up with its international class allies, the workers throughout Asia and across the world, in an international party of socialist revolution--a reborn Fourth International. For a Leninist- Trotskyist party in Indonesia! For an Indonesian workers republic, part of a socialist federation of Asia! --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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