The Unfinished Revolution

Submitted by Anon on 30 June, 1998 - 4:43

The Indonesian revolution has begun. The fall of the 32 year old Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia has created big openings for independent working class politics to emerge among the island group’s 200 million people. Whether the revolution goes beyond a bourgeois democratic revolution depends on whether the workers and students are able to develop their own independent programme and fight for it. Though it has its peculiarities, Indonesia is not a feudal economy making the transition to bourgeois society. There is a massive peasantry, but also a maturing and substantial working class. It is a developing capitalist country.

Indonesia’s industrial working class has grown enormously since the 1980s. The country has become a major centre for light manufacturing, including clothing and footwear production for multinationals like Nike. Manufacturing production grew 10% per year between 1985 and 1995, and is now a quarter of total output. Of the country’s workforce of ninety million, 10.5 million are in manufacturing. (About half the workforce are still in agriculture, mostly as wage-workers or smallholders.)

The industrial minimum wage was set at the equivalent of about £1.50 a day in 1997. With the recent collapse of the international value of Indonesia’s currency, that is about 45p. And many bosses do not pay the minimum wage anyway. Indonesia’s wages are much lower than those in South Korea or Taiwan or most major Asian economies except China.
Up until recently a lid was kept on the discontent of workers and the poor by the weight of the all-stifling army regime, but now socialist action, with the industrial working class leading the rural poor and sections of the peasantry, is possible.

So far, however, the movement has been for “people’s democracy” or “people’s power”. This reflects the populist legacy of Indonesian Stalinism (see box). But this new mass movement is not over. It is only beginning. It arises directly from the economic catastrophe that is engulfing south-east Asia.

Since January riots and street demonstrations have shaken the regime. Huge price rises decreed on 4 May, and then partially withdrawn, fired up the opposition to the level which made Suharto resign.

Several factors came into play. The industrial working class has become increasingly strong and assertive. There was a big wave of strikes in 1995-6, quelled only temporarily by arrests of labour leaders in mid-1996. University campuses have grown even faster, and became semi-tolerated centres of dissent. The bravest of the students have organised in the PRD, the most radical of the opposition parties, and linked up with the workers. Other students are more in tune with the middle-class opposition to Suharto, which is also real.

First the workers and peasants in the provinces protested and rioted over food price increases and inflation (an increase of 30% since January). Then students in the country’s capital, Jakarta, protested and demonstrated. They called for democracy, blaming the economic crisis on the “crony capitalism” and corruption of the Suharto regime.

Students in Jakarta have debated their political orientation through a group called the City Forum. Following the shooting of students at Trisakti University on May 12, the Forum met to decide tactics. The militants proposed to mobilise workers, who were ready to join the students, for a demonstration on May 20. The moderates argued that this risked provoking more riots. The moderates won the day. During May 20, the moderate student group set up security to check that people entering the parliamentary compound had student ID cards. This was carried on with the agreement of the armed forces on guard at the parliament.

The middle class opposition has been boosted by the clearly signalled desire of the United States — and, in fact, almost every government on Earth except Australia’s — to see Suharto replaced by a less corrupt and brutal regime which, so the USA hopes, will be more stable and cheaper to do business with.

Revolt by oppressed nationalities like the East Timorese against “the Javanese empire” has also weakened the regime.

The immediate cause of the mass revolt against Suharto was the effects of the Asian economic crisis and the IMF package agreed by the government last October as a result of the crisis.

These are all cynical and desperate measures to abate the growing unrest and discontentment of millions of workers, students and peasants. The reforms are widely seen for what they are — window dressing, sops. Protests continue in cities all over Indonesia.
Indonesia is in a major economic crisis. Its currency has been devalued by 70% in the last eleven months. As it is in all east Asian countries, unemployment is growing fast. The government itself said on 2 June that unemployment would reach 15 million this year. Inflation is running at about 50% per year, while the minimum wage is frozen. Already millions of people are in extreme poverty because of droughts and forest fires. Production is diminishing, inflation climbing. This continues to fuel the tremendous political ferment. New political parties are being set up. Student and worker protests continue. There are demands for and threats of retribution against the many companies and businesses linked into the vast network of the Suharto family plunder.

Suharto’s “crony capitalism” channelled vast fortunes to capitalists chosen not by skill or luck in the market but by government favour. The wealth of Suharto’s own family has been estimated by Forbes magazine at $46 billion. He has squeezed an amazing $230 out of every child, woman and man in the country. Many business people and professionals resent the corruption and cronyism. In the days before Suharto resigned, there was even a demonstration of stockbrokers to demand that he should go.

“People’s democracy” they think will solve these problems. The students spirited fight, concentrating on a few simple, yet widely supported, demands, gave a focus to the anger and despair of millions of Indonesian workers and peasants. Within days of their protests against the anti-democratic practices and corruption of the regime, Suharto was forced to stand down.

A massive victory for workers, students and peasants! But as yet not enough to guarantee anything, not the so-called “people’s power” or even bourgeois democracy. The workers and students have not won real freedom or control. Suharto is out but his deputy and protégé is there in his place. Suharto’s personal power, his tremendous wealth and the system of patronage he developed over three decades is still intact. The army Suhato personally shaped remains firmly in place to guard the power and wealth of the rich.

To quell further protests Habibie, presenting himself as only a transitional leader, is hastily making reforms. The reforms are a partial freeing of the press, recognition of independent trade unions, legislation for limited civil rights. The influential trade union leader Muchtar Pakpaphan of the SBSI has been released from prison. But Dita Indah Sari, leader of the independent trade-union group PPBI (Indonesian Centre of Labour Struggle), is still in jail for subversion. So are Budiman Sujatmoko, the president of Dita Indah Sari’s party, the PRD (People’s Democratic Party), and other PRD activists.

“People’s democracy” remains the focus of the left. The only mass party of the left, the People’s Democratic Party (the PRD) declared its political objectives thus: “The political programme is a programme to develop people’s power.” They go on to say: “...only a democratic structure will guarantee the consolidation of people’s power,” and that, “this democratic structure can only be institutionalised through a People’s Coalition government.” The PRD works and cooperates with the mass Islamic party, the PPP (United Democratic Party) and with the PDI (the Democratic Party of Indonesia) led by Megawat Sukarnoputri, daughter of one-time President Sukarno. Thus the mass left favours a popular front cross-class national coalition government. The left has a programme for bourgeois democracy, not workers’ democracy. Tremendous chances may be missed. The PRD seems to aim for participation as a junior partner in a coalition with the bourgeois opposition rather than for independent working class politics. Unfortunately, there is much evidence from other countries — Aquino in the Philippines and Mandela in South Africa are only two recent examples — that, in a society where the working class is already the most potent force for change, a bourgeois opposition, even one much braver and more substantial than Indonesia’s, will produce only a botched, unreliable, anti-worker version of democratic reform.

The PRD’s political approach reduces their cutting power against figures like military chief General Wiranto, who has been putting himself forward as a reformer and has also called for a People’s Council to oversee reform which would include representatives from opposition groups like the students. The Army has been a central element of Suharto’s New Order, economically as well as politically, and a radical purge of the top brass and reorganisation of the whole army will be necessary to underpin any real democratic change.

The Maoist-influenced students and workers believe that fighting for the “democratic” revolution now brings them nearer to the socialist revolution at some stage in the future. They neglect the development of independent working-class demands — for workers’ control and the socialist revolution now. Though the Stalinist movement was drowned in a sea of blood when the army took over in 1965-6, its poisonous political legacy survives.

The Stalinist-Maoist programme of “people’s power” will not solve the capitalist economic crisis. At best it can only deliver very limited democratic bourgeois rights — while leaving economic and military power in the hands of those who will, if they find it necessary, once again inflict a blood-bath on the Indonesian workers and their allies.

Workers in Indonesia need to follow the lead of their sisters and brothers in South Korea who have gone beyond legal populism. They need to ask the key question in any class society: Who creates the wealth? Who runs society? In whose interests? What will best serve the interests of the working class? Ask these questions and the answers will not lead you to the vague idea of a “people’s power” in coalition with the lesser capitalists, but to the clear idea of a workers’ government — working class power.

The economic crisis in Indonesia cannot be solved by simple internal democratic reforms, however important and fundamental they are to the working class. Indonesia, like Thailand, South Korea and even Japan, is in the grip of a massive economic slump which has been likened by some bourgeois economists to a regional version of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Winning democratic rights can give workers more freedom to organise and space to fight for their demands. While capitalism remains, it is limited freedom, and it can be taken away, bloodily, unless the workers themselves are armed and able to defend it.

The Indonesian armed forces remain a knife in the hands of the rich pointed at the throat of the people. Workers and students can only achieve real democracy it they formulate a set of demands that appeal to vast numbers of the rural poor and lead them in a fight for workers power and a socialist solution to the economic crisis.

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