Date: Mon, 18 Nov 1996 09:18:38 +0100 (MET)
From: malecki-AT-algonet.se (Robert Malecki)
Subject: M-I: 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!




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