Introduction:
Sixty years ago, on October 1, 1965 the Indonesian army set in motion its plans to seize power from president Sukarno and to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), one of the main forces supporting the president. In the article below, dated November 1965, Mandel criticizes the political approach of the PKI in the preceding period.
The PKI saw its task as building a ‘united national front’ of the workers, the intellectuals, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. This ‘national bourgeoisie’ proved to be elusive. The fifties and sixties did see the rise of an Indonesian bourgeoisie that was tightly linked to and partly grew from the military, what the PKI called ‘bureaucratic capitalists’.
When Sukarno in the late fifties introduced his authoritarian system of ‘Guided Democracy’, the PKI only initially opposed this. But the party quickly realized that opposing the popular president would lead to a loss in support and political prominence, maybe even to a banning of the party. The memory of the bloody repression of the party after Madiun uprising in 1948 (what Mandel referred to as ‘the ‘‘putschist’’ and ‘‘adventurist’’ errors’ of the previous PKI leadership) certainly played a role in this. The army leadership, increasingly interwoven with the capitalist class, was hostile, as were the large landowners who felt threatened by the party’s proposals for land reform. Against these powerful enemies, the party sought a powerful protector: Sukarno.
Seeing Sukarno as a representative of a ‘national bourgeoisie’ that supposedly could be a strategic ally in the struggle against imperialism, the party limited itself to demands and activities that were acceptable to him. In the interests of class collaboration with a ‘national bourgeoisie’, it sacrificed the struggles of workers and peasants. Sukarno never gave real political power to the PKI. The formulation used by Mandel, that the PKI ‘joined a coalition government’ actually suggests their influence was larger than it really was: PKI representatives in the government had a mostly ceremonial role.
The protection provided by Sukaro however fell away after the botched September 30th Movement. The movement started out as an attempt by pro-Sukarno forces to remove several high-ranking officers hostile to him. The movement was in contact with small number of PKI-leaders, most importantly with party-leader D.N. Aidit. When the movement derailed into the murder of seven army officers and contradictory radio-announcements, the army leadership had the long hoped for pretext for its attack on the PKI. As the army began hunting down and murdering (supposed) PKI-members and symphatizers, Sukarno was gradually sidelined. When approached by loyal officers with the question if they should mobilize to resist the creeping coup against him, Sukarno refused.
Through its close association with president Sukarno, the PKI had grown into a mass-party. But it did as party supporting the incumbent government. A recurring, tragic element in the testimonies of surviving supporters of the movement is their utter surprise at the violence of the army after October 1 and their dismay at suddenly being labelled ‘rebels’. After all, all they had ever done was support the government of president Sukarno. The PKI had become large and influential enough to be seen as a threat by the right-wing but was without means to defend itself, or even prepare for evasion.
Mandel focuses his criticism of the PKI’s strategy on its view of the ‘dual-character’ of the Indonesian state under Sukarno and its argument that the ‘progressive aspect’ of this state was growing. When surviving members of the PKI leadership in September 1966 issued a self-criticism of the party’s line, they they singled out this theory as the ‘climax’ of deviation from ‘Marxism-Leninism’; ‘the state is an organ of the rule of a definite class which cannot be reconciled with its antipode (the class opposite to it)”.
The violence wiped away the Indonesian left. Not only the PKI and its mass organisations was targeted, all left-wing groups were attacked. Also destroyed was the Fourth International’s section in Indonesia, the Partai Acoma. This organisation began in 1946 as a group of young radicals who disagreed with the PKI’s support for compromises with Dutch colonialism and with the Indonesian bourgeoisie. It was heavily influenced by the ideas of the famous revolutionary Tan Malaka and rejected the supposed need for a ‘national’ phase of the revolution. The Partai Acoma’s most prominent leader was the trade-union leader and member of parliament Ibnu Parna. The Partai Acoma had joined the Fourth International as a section at the1961 World Congress.1
The issues taken up by Mandel in his article were further developed in 'The Lesson of Indonesia', a Fourth International statement issued on March 20, 1966.
In November 1965, the number of victims of the army numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A conservative estimate is that in the period between October 1, 1965 and March 11, 1966, when general Suharto assumed executive power, the Indonesian army murdered a million people. In addition, there were hundreds of thousands of victims of imprisonment, torture, sexual assault. The Indonesian army’s campaign of mass violence was one of history’s greatest crimes and a stark reminder to what lengths the rule of capital will go to assert itself.
(Alex de Jong)
Lessons of the Defeat in Indonesia
The international workers movement, the colonial revolution, have suffered a terrible defeat in Indonesia. Since October 1965, thousands of militants belonging to the Communist party and other left groupings have been murdered in a veritable white terror. This sweeping massacre has met with hardly a word of disapproval in the Western press, so ‘humanist’ and so sensitive when it comes to defending the ‘sanctity of the human being’ when a victorious revolution eliminates butchers who have committed unspeakable crimes, as occurred at the time of the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959.
But innumerable victims have fallen in the wave of terror that has swept Indonesia. Sukarno himself has officially admitted 87,000 dead. At the Tricontinental Conference Fidel Castro spoke of 100,000 dead. Western observers in Indonesia have put the figure at 120,000 to 125,000 murdered workers and militants, and certain sources even speak of 150,000 to 200,000 dead.
Journalists of conservative right-wing newspapers like the special correspondents of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the London Sunday Times and the Basel National-Zeitung have given detailed descriptions of the terror in certain parts of the country. The report of the special correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on the events of Bali, the island formerly considered to be a Communist fortress, is terrifying. He tells about bodies lying along the roads, or heaped in pits, of half-burned villages in which the peasants dare not leave the shells of their
huts. There is likewise a nightmarish account of the hysterical fear that has caught up large numbers, so that people suspected of being Communists have killed their alleged comrades with their own hands in order to show the ferocious army men that ‘they were not Communists.’
In addition to the dead, there are innumerable other victims of the repression. The figure has been given of 250,000 militants or sympathizers of the extreme left in prison. At the beginning of October 1965, certain trade unions tried to react timidly against the counter-revolutionary wave of terror. Every worker who went out on strike was summarily fired. According to the Sunday Times, in the north of the island of Sumatra, 4,000 workers and functionaries in the public services were fired on suspicion of being Communists. A monstrous purge has eliminated all the ‘suspects’ in the ministries, the press, enterprises playing a vital role in the country's economy. In a country where endemic unemployment and growing misery reign, the firing of these workers condemns their families to actual famine. One hundred thousand families in mourning, several hundred thousand reduced to desperate straits, this seems to be the provisional balance sheet of the wave of ‘white terror’ that has swept the Indonesian archipelago since October 1, 1965.
In face of such a massacre and such a repression, the first duty of every socialist, of every human being who has a minimum of feeling for humanity, is to protest with all his energy against the collective murder now going on in Indonesia of Communists and other people of the left. The war in Vietnam has begun to stir public opinion because of the atrocities being committed there by the imperialists. But it must be stated that many more victims have fallen in a few weeks in the counter-revolutionary repression in Indonesia than in several years of the civil war in Vietnam.
This shows once again that in face of an enemy determined to resort to all means, including the most barbarous, to maintain class rule, the most rational course is to resort to revolution, including an armed revolution. Even on the purely humanist level this holds true because human lives can be saved (not to mention the fact that in the former case, the victims died for nothing, while their people sink deeper and deeper into misery; while in the latter case, the sacrifices of the people at least make it possible to build a new society and to emerge from centuries of prostration and ferocious exploitation).
Let all the defenders of the rights of man raise their voices vehemently against the massacre of Communists in Indonesia. Let them make a not less vehement denunciation of the perpetrators of these crimes, and those partially guilty, like Sukarno. One notes without much surprise that most of these ‘humanists’ and these ‘liberals’ of the West have remained silent up to now. And one notes, too, that not a few Communist parties are to be found among those who have remained silent up to now.
But our reaction in face of the fearsome terror unleashed on the Indonesian people cannot be limited to denouncing those responsible for the massacre and to demanding that the prisoners be freed (beginning with Njono, the president of the Indonesian trade unions, who has just been tried in Jakarta and given the death sentence) and the murderers given the punishment they deserve. We must also consider the cause of this terrible defeat which the international workers movement has suffered in Indonesia. Because the Indonesian militants and workers will have died in vain if in their own country and in other countries, the workers movement does not draw all the lessons of this defeat and does not alter its tactics, taking into account the lessons of Indonesia.
The first question that comes to mind is how a Communist party having 3,000,000 members and more than 10,000,000 sympathizers organized in all kinds of ‘mass organizations’ (groupings of youth, of women and of peasants, as well as trade unions led by the PKI [Partai Kommunis Indonesia] could be crushed overnight, in October 1965, by an adversary that was certainly weaker in numbers.
The answer involves essentially two points: the reactionary enemy was able to utilize surprise; that is, the masses were not systematically prepared for this inevitable confrontation with the reactionary army. And the initiative was left to the reactionary enemy; that is, the PKI leadership did not utilize the innumerable mass actions during recent years to organize a systematic offensive aiming at the conquest of power by the working class and the poor peasants.
Underlying this erroneous tactic is a false theoretical concept of the conditions for victory in the colonial revolution and of the nature of the state that has arisen in the colonial countries that have won political independence but which are not yet freed from exploitation.
The countries that were formerly colonies, which have just won their political independence, are the product of a special historical development. While modern industry and a modern proletariat exist there, the classical historical tasks of the bourgeois-national revolution (for example, the revolution in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, the English revolution in the seventeenth century, the American and French revolutions in the eighteenth century) have not been carried out. There is no genuine national unity, but only a conglomeration of regions, if not tribes, strongly affected by particularism. The land does not belong to the peasants, but is more or less in the hands of foreign plantation companies and indigenous semi-feudal or capitalist landlords. A considerable part of the rural population suffers from underemployment and unemployment. Thus there is no domestic market permitting extensive industrialization to be realized. The axis of the country's economy is the export of a few raw materials or agricultural products to the world market, involving a considerable transfer of value (a considerable super exploitation) from the country to the profit of the industrialized countries.
But in these underdeveloped countries, the real master is foreign imperialism and its indigenous agents. There is no ‘national’ bourgeois class capable of leading a resolute struggle to victory against imperialism, of adding economic independence to political independence, of assuring genuine economic growth, of providing full employment. The numerical and economic weakness of the indigenous possessing classes, and their close ties with landed property, makes them incapable of carrying out a genuine agrarian revolution. And without an agrarian revolution, industrialization is impossible.
Without exception, the experience of half a century bears out the following: Either the freedom movement of the former colonial countries remains under the leadership of the indigenous possessing classes, or of petty-bourgeois groups unable to break resolutely with the capitalist economy-and in this case the fundamental tasks of the colonial revolution, above all the agrarian revolution, remain unsolved and the country is condemned to continue stagnating in misery and incessant social crisis; or the freedom movement is conquered by the working class in alliance with the poor peasants, the revolution is continued up to the expropriation of imperialism and the indigenous possessing classes, the agrarian reform is completely carried out-and in this case the bourgeois state must be replaced by a state based on the toiling masses, and construction of a socialist economy must be begun.
Wherever the leadership of the revolution has remained in the hands of ‘national fronts,’ directed in actuality by the ‘national’ bourgeoisie or by petty-bourgeois groups, there has been no radical agrarian revolution, the state has fundamentally remained a bourgeois state, and the reaction was able to break the front at any moment and unleash a ferocious repression against the workers. Wherever the revolution has come under a proletarian leadership basing itself on the poor peasantry, it proved necessary to destroy the bourgeois state and create an entirely new state if only to carry out a genuinely radical agrarian reform (China, Vietnam, Cuba).
The leaders of the PKI did not assimilate these lessons of history. Deeply affected by the ‘putschist’ and ‘adventurist’ errors committed by their predecessors - the PKI leaders of the period of the ‘Madiun incident’ of 1948 - they wished at any cost to stick with the Sukarno group representing the national bourgeoisie. Consequently they followed the policy of a ‘united national front.’ They accepted Sukarno’s partial suspension of democratic freedoms at the beginning of the sixties. They joined the NASAKOM (national front composed of the Sukarno nationalists, the Muslim grouping, a reactionary formation that has been in the vanguard of the anti-Communist terror since October 1965 and the PKI). They joined a coalition government which included in particular the ultra-reactionary head of the army.
Their political line for the past five years has been defense of this national front formula and not propaganda for a workers and peasants government. They did not stand for the conquest of power by the masses but for the slow conquest of state power ‘from within.’ And this policy was based on a false characterization of the nature of the state apparatus, a characterization formulated as follows by D. N. Aidit, the head of the PKI:
‘At present, the state power in the Republic of Indonesia includes two antagonistic sides, one representing the interests of the people (in support of the people) and the other the interests of the enemy of the people (the opposition to the people). The side supporting the people is becoming stronger day by day, the government of the Republic of Indonesia has even adopted revolutionary anti-imperialist measures.’ (D. N. Aidit. The Indonesian Revolution and the Immediate Tasks of the Indonesian Communist Party. Foreign Languages Edition, Peking, 1965. pp 137-38 of the French edition.)
For a Marxist, every state apparatus, no matter what its antagonistic sides, always serves the fundamental interests of one class ruling over another. The state, said Frederick Engels, in the final analysis is a group of armed men. What class interests did the Indonesian state and the Indonesian army serve? The events of October 1965 do not leave the least doubt as to the answer that must be given this question - the interests of the so-called ‘national’ bourgeoisie.
Naturally there are many contradictions between the ‘national’ bourgeoisie, the newly independent peasants and imperialism. The workers movement is not indifferent to the conflicts arising from this; it engages resolutely in the anti-imperialist struggle. It was correct of the PKI to first support the struggle of the Indonesian people against Dutch imperialism and then against Greater Malaysia. But it was wrong to deduce from these struggles that a permanent united front must be made with the ‘national’ bourgeoisie, involving in actuality subordination to the bourgeois leadership of Sukarno and failure to criticize it at all. It was wrong to abstain for years from any struggle in behalf of the demands of the populace of Indonesia on the domestic economic and social level, deliberately subordinating these to maintenance of the ‘national front’ with those who were responsible for the misery of the masses.
It is a fact that the economic situation has been going from bad to worse, that in industry the means of production are utilized to only thirty per cent of capacity, that public funds are wasted in outlays for ‘prestige,’ that the army manages the requisitioned foreign properties as it chooses (that is pillage on a major scale), that the agrarian reform remains on paper, that inflation is raging, that provisions are becoming scarcer and scarcer. With a correct line, the PKI could have stimulated the mass struggle on the basis of their justified immediate demands in order to lead them to the conquest of power. The policy of the ‘national front’ left the initiative up to the enemy until it was too late.
Unquestionably the erroneous views of the PKI leaders were largely inspired by the theories defended by the Soviet leaders from the time of Stalin to that of Khrushchev. All their concepts about the Indonesian state apparatus, the national front, the need for ‘unity,’ are copied from the program of the CPSU [Communist party of the Soviet Union] with its theses on the ‘national democratic state.’ Even after the coup d'etat of the reactionary generals, the spokesmen of the pro-Soviet Communist parties continued to woo Sukarno and to advocate re-establishment of NASAKOM and ‘national unity’ (see in particular the October 24, 1965, issue of Neues Deutschland). They charged the PKI leaders with ‘leftist errors’ while they were guilty of right opportunist errors.
It should likewise be added that a good part of the arms with which the reactionary army massacred tens upon tens of thousands of Indonesian Communists and workers were of Soviet origin. Was it so difficult to foresee that this bourgeoisie and this army, which ‘fights’ so hard, in words, against imperialism, would in practice utilize the bulk of the aid thus received, not against imperialism, but against the popular masses of their own country?
What is significant, however, is that the PKI with its opportunist line based on collaboration with the ‘national’ bourgeoisie, was not part of the Soviet but of the Chinese camp. But the Chinese Communist leaders covered up all their errors, making no public criticism of them. Together with the Soviet leaders, they thus share responsibility for what happened.
Yet, in numerous articles devoted to the history of the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, in numerous criticisms of ‘Khrushchevist revisionism,’ of Togliatti’s opinions, etc., the Chinese leaders have severely condemned the thesis according to which in our time there could be a state that is neither bourgeois nor socialist. They severely condemned the idea of a bloc with the national bourgeoisie, left under the latter’s leadership, the illusion that this bourgeoisie could lead a consistent struggle against imperialism. But the PKI leaders were guilty of all these errors of such fatal import. The leaders of the Chinese CP have maintained silence about this.
Why this unprincipled attitude, in flagrant contradiction with their own ideas?
First of all, because in the struggle within the international Communist movement, the Chinese leaders have sought to get together the maximum number of partisans by applying the principle of abstaining from publicly criticizing those who abstain from criticizing the Chinese CP. Such a ‘principle’ is inadmissible when vital questions of the workers movement, signifying life or death for millions of human beings, are involved.
Next, because the Chinese government-the same as the Soviet government-has sought to gain Sukarno's support for its diplomatic moves, and because it is applying Stalin’s ‘principle,’ according to which the Communist movement must line up completely with the diplomatic maneuvers of the so-called socialist state. The ‘principle’ signifies disaster for the workers movement and is contrary to the practices of Lenin's time.
When Soviet Russia signed treaties with German imperialism - at Brest Litovsk in 1918, at Rapallo in 1921 - the German Communists did not at all conclude from this, in those days, that they ought to soft-pedal the revolutionary struggle against this bourgeoisie. The Chinese leaders are imitating Stalin in this. The Indonesian Communists have paid heavily for it.
Naturally the struggle has not ended in Indonesia. A part of the Communist cadres have been able to go underground. The discontent of the hungry masses is increasing from day to day; the empty stomachs of the workers and peasants are not filled through massacres. The revolt will widen against the corrupt regime. Sukarno understands this and will resume his eternal balancing act; he has just eliminated the most ferocious of the generals from his cabinet. The people will again have their turn. But the 100,000 dead cannot be resurrected. And a correct policy could have averted these very heavy losses and this heavy defeat.
------
1 The claims that Ibnu Parna was killed in the 1965 violence seem to be incorrect. In his study of Tan Malaka and the Indonesian left movement, Harry Poeze writes; ‘Ibnu Parna remained principled, stubborn and dedicated to his ideals. A sign with the hammer and sickle emblem was attached to his house and after the change of regime in 1965 he refused to remove it. The sad result of this was that his house was the target of arson. Ibnu Parna was in shock and needed to be hospitalized. He recovered and passed away in 1968’. Harry Poeze, Verguisd en vergeten. Tan Malaka, de linkse beweging en de Indonesische Revolutie. Deel 3. KITLV Uitgeverij, Leiden, 2007, p. 1759.