Summary

This study attempts to solve a number of problems raised by the evolution of the socialist and communist movements in Indonesia: its beginnings in a backward country with a very small industrial working class (1914); the rapid development of a certain mass basis after 1917; the negligible role of the intelligentsia; international isolation; its easy liquidation from above (1927, 1948, 1965) after promising upswings; and the predominance of Java.

This complex of problems would require a thorough analysis of Javanese and Indonesian society within a broad historical and comparative frame of reference. The limited scope of this essay however permits only a rough indication of a number of contradictory factors making for continuity and change.

The central theoretical issue is the “Asiatic mode of production” as an analytical model, as opposed to the more open Western European feudal mode, reduced to its essentials: the predominance of bureaucratic state power which centralizes the social surplus drawn from the mass of agricultural producers. The latter live in isolated village communities that are exploited collectively, such that the individual producer is not directly confronted with the ruling aristocrat; nor does he have direct relations with the market. Thus, social relationships work against the development of autonomous classes of (feudal or other) landlords, of an urban bourgeoisie and, hence, of a proletariat. Within this model, important variations have developed: China, with an extremely high level of development of productive forces in an agrarian context, with a more or less unified polity making for a progressive development of social contradictions; India, with a differentiation between the agrarian heartland and a highly developed commercial capitalist (coastal) margin; Southeast Asia, – that is, the rural, wet rice centres of Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, North Vietnam, Java – socio-economically much weaker, slower in its development, and continually functioning in the shadow of far stronger Asian neighbours. There, from the start, the most strategic positions in international trade were dominated by aliens; a fundamental fact which strengthened the already existing Asiatic tendency towards socio-economic stagnation. Western penetration intensified this situation, in particular in the Indianized zone, whereas in China the interaction between internal contradictions and foreign capitalist penetration had a more revolutionizing character.

Within the Indianized zone, Java represented a combination of traits common to this zone as well as more specific characteristics: under the impact of Islamic (commercial and ideological) expansion after the 14th century, differentiation – more marked than in India – between the agrarian (Javanese) centre at Kedjawen and the commercial-maritime periphery and its hinterland (Pasisir) deepened, thus providing the basis for the permanent antagonism between Javanism and Islam. Islam penetration into Java proper was stopped halfway by a reaction of syncretic assimilation and partial rejection of orthodox Islam and its proto-bourgeois bearers. The dichotomy was a permanent one: the aristocratic and bureaucratic Javanese elite in and around the central state apparatus, with its diffuse grip on the Javanist abangan mass, were the dominant element; the Muslim (santri) elite were the permanent minority in opposition, sometimes resisting but without success. The latter – economically the most dynamic – sector was not only marginalized – as was the case in many parts of Asia – but marginalized in the form of a sociocultural, communal schism, where by the mass of the producers were divided into two worlds.

The specific character of Dutch colonization consisted in a combination of intense exploitation and administrative action on the one hand and the freezing of traditional society on the other; that is, an artificial strengthening of factors making for stagnation. Geertz overestimates the specific nature of this factor, but it is true that in the Philippines and Vietnam foreign capitalism and rule objectively played a more progressive role in revolutionizing social relations. Up to the present day, the Indonesian state has remained the dominant socio-economic element, functioning in a more or less Asiatic way as the static basis for neoprijaji bureaucratic rule, and without an inherent impulse toward dynamic accumulation of capital. The state tended to develop a dependency relationship with Chinese and other foreign capital. The private capital sector, roughly identical with the Muslim elite, remained extremely weak. Periods of antagonism – to a large extent the product of the Dutch colonial legacy – could hardly conceal this basic relationship. Military rule did not alter the essential socio-economic functioning of the state; for the militarization of the state also meant the assimilation of the military elite into the neoprijaji layer.

Change was slow owing to the lack of industrialisation and the enormous capacity of the Javanese village for social absorption. However, the process of capitalist penetration (especially after 1965) and social differentiation has continued. It first took the form of deepening aliran (pillar) antagonism, based on the triad santri/abangan/prijaji, which in itself already represented a pre-capitalist class differentiation. Secondly, and simultaneously, this process undermined the traditional village community and the more or less vertical aliran segmentation. Comprador bourgeoisie emerged within the ruling bureaucracy, providing Java and Java-dominated Indonesia, for the first time, with a ruling class (the Asiatic aristocracy not having been an autonomous class). At the bottom of the social hierarchy, in the village, the growing antagonism between a layer of relatively well-off peasants and landlords (partly absentee) and the mass of the landless peasants, sharecroppers and rural workers gradually ended the remnants of traditional village community and its “shared poverty”, adding a massive rural proletariat to the swelling urban mass. The long absence of a tangible social polarization – the prijaji layer just being privileged bureaucrats but not owners of capital – was one of the major obstacles preventing the emergence of an autonomous class movement from below.

Mass discontent and resistance were thus oriented against foreign and Chinese capital and colonial rule and were channelled into communal strife or other traditional forms of protest.

The communist movement both stimulated the slow process of development of societal contradictions and tended to accommodate itself to certain traditional relationships and forms of resistance. It could relatively easily mobilize the urban and, later, also the rural abangan masses because of the great distance between the urban elite and these masses (particularly the rural ones) and partly also because of the relative openness of abangan society and culture. The modern proletarian basis of the communist party, however, remained weak: the industrial working class was small and scattered. When it came, revolt was based on traditional Muslim resistance. During the national struggle after World war II the elite consolidated its political and military position in 1948, when this second clash between the PKI and the rulers again failed to take the form of a class confrontation.

The easy comeback of the PKI points up the isolated social position of the elite, but the new upsurge was realized within the context of an alliance with and subordination to the neoprijaji nationalist elite and its foremost representative, Sukarno. These partners were not considered to be an opposing class or elite to be overthrown, but as a progressive ally, cultural and political elements in the struggle of the Javanese masses against foreign rule, alien capital, and the Muslim elite and its ally, the extreme pro-Western wing of the neoprijaji intelligentsia.

In their struggle for supremacy, Sukarno and the neoprijaji elite needed the PKI. Sukarno first tried to integrate the communist movement into a corporate state structure under semi-dictatorial rule leaving almost no margin for autonomous class action from below. Sukarno and the neoprijaji elite were unable to develop a dominant nationalist mass movement under their direct control, so for the development of his position as a populist and Bonapartist leader, Sukarno had to fall back on the PKI. This party behaved in many respects as a nationalist movement, as the populist mass base for Sukarno. The aim of Aidit cum suis was in fact the classical reformist one of coming to power by the parliamentary road. This was the more illusory because the PKI was not even able to function as a classical social-democratic movement by protecting the elementary economic interests of the working masses.

The enormous quantitative expansion of the PKI, despite its reformism, was considered to be a threat, even though it was paralleled by a simultaneous rise of the military wing of the neoprijaji state. A gradual counterrevolutionary regrouping took place under the protection of the army, while Sukarno’s base among the social elite became more and more eroded. The final suppression of the PKI was only a matter of time. To discuss the degree of participation (“guilt”) of the PKI in the 30.10.’65 affair is, social-historically speaking, largely irrelevant.

The harsh military rule that was established also expressed the sped-up process of social polarization. The objective conditions for the prevailing situation of aliran balance and impasse are in a process of dissolvation. However, in order to break through the historically determined impasses active intervention by subjective factors would be required.