The working class will rise again!

 
Workers' Liberty
the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class

                                     Workers Liberty Australia

Newsletter November 1999-January 2000



Indonesia: workers' revolution or 'democratic coalition'?
By Martin Thomas

Where demonstrators in Indonesia used to chant for 'reform', now they cry 'revolution'. The new government includes several army officers but is fronted by the Islamicist president Wahid and former anti-Suharto figurehead Megawati Sukarnoputri. It is a grand coalition of Indonesian bourgeois politics. It can deploy great resources for deception and repression to stifle the growing assertiveness of the Indonesian workers and students. But if it fails, revolution is indeed the next step.

What sort of revolution? Australia's largest revolutionary-left group, the Democratic Socialist Party, which has great influence with Indonesia's main left party, the PRD (People's Democratic Party), argues that Indonesian socialists should aim for a two-stage revolution. In the first stage they should propose a 'democratic [or people's] coalition government', to include the PRD alongside such parties as Megawati Sukarnoputri's PDI-P. The DSP claim that this policy is 'Leninist'. They say that alternative Marxist policies which would instead aim for a workers' and farmers' government in Indonesia are wrong because they are based on Leon Trotsky's theory of 'permanent revolution'. According to the DSP, Trotsky's theory is false.

The DSP's general theory is expounded in a book published last year - Trotsky's Theory of Permanent Revolution, A Leninist Critique, by Doug Lorimer* - and its application to Indonesia in an article by James Vassilopoulos in Green Left Weekly of 25 August 1999. To discuss these views, I will look first at Lorimer's book, which will involve me in a long digression on Russian history before I get back to Indonesia.

Trotsky's real views
Lorimer's book says nothing at all directly about Indonesia, or any other country in the world today. Although it is plainly intended to guide current politics rather than just historical research, it concerns itself almost exclusively with Russia in the early years of this century.

It claims to be a 'pioneering essay'. It is not. All its main ideas were developed in 1981-2 by Doug Jenness, a writer for the Socialist Workers' Party of the USA, to which the DSP was then close**. Jenness in turn relied heavily on allegations against Trotsky repeated for decades by the Stalinist movement. Trotsky 'underestimated the peasantry'. He wanted to push aside or ignore such issues as land reform, political independence, and representative democracy. He insisted on putting direct socialist demands up-front.

Trotsky's real views were different. In his Transitional Program of 1938, he summarised them: 'It is impossible merely to reject the democratic program: it is imperative that in the struggle the masses outgrow it. The slogan for a National (or Constituent) Assembly preserves its full force for countries such as China or India. This slogan must be indissolubly tied up with the problem of national liberation and agrarian reform.

'As a primary step, the workers must be armed with this democratic program. Only they will be able to summon and unite the farmers. On the basis of the revolutionary democratic program, it is necessary to oppose the workers to the 'national' bourgeoisie. Then, at a certain stage in the mobilisation of the masses under the slogans of revolutionary democracy, soviets [workers' councils] can and should arise.

'Their historical role in each given period, particularly their relation to the National Assembly, will be determined by the political level of the proletariat, the bond between them and the peasantry, and the character of the proletarian party policies. Sooner or later, the soviets should overthrow bourgeois democracy [i.e., not abolish bourgeois civil liberties, but take power from a bourgeois government]. Only they are capable of bringing the democratic revolution to a conclusion and likewise opening an era of socialist revolution'.

Lorimer quotes this passage, but claims that it does 'little to clarify', because it 'could' be interpreted to mean that as soon as the soviets had come to power 'this would be the conclusion of the democratic revolution and its transformation into a socialist revolution'. Clarity, for Lorimer, is only possible with a scheme which neatly marks off a whole era of 'democratic revolution' headed by people's coalition government from a subsequent socialist revolution.

Trotsky argued that, in countries where a modern industrial working class coexists with landlord or colonial domination in vast areas of pre-capitalist peasant economy, no such neat division is possible. The democratic revolution will be merged into a worker-led revolution with socialist aims - or, rather, it can be thus merged, if the workers are sufficiently bold and assertive. If it is not, and the leadership against archaic oppression falls to the bourgeois parties, then 'the struggle for national liberation' will not stop - but it 'will produce only very partial results, results directed against the working masses'. (The Permanent Revolution).

Russia 1917
Lorimer does not contest the notorious fact that Trotsky and Lenin had no substantial differences on worker-peasant relations, interrelation of democratic and socialist demands, and speed of socialist advance, between the opening of the Russian Revolution in February 1917 and Lenin's last illness and death in 1922-4. Together they opposed the initial majority line of the Bolsheviks, for critical support to and pressure on the bourgeois Provisional Government (a 'democratic coalition government', if ever there was one!) established after the Tsar was ousted in February 1917.

Together they worked for 'All Power to the Soviets'. Together they agreed on emphasising democratic demands - land reform, self-determination for the oppressed nationalities, peace, a Constituent Assembly. Together they supported the Bolsheviks' bid to reach out to the peasants with a pledge to support the demand of the Social Revolutionaries (the party with most peasant support) for peasants to have the right to acquire their own individual plots by division of the large landholdings, and a call to the peasants to start enforcing that right by immediate action. Together they linked the democratic demands with socialistic ones (workers' control, nationalisation of the banks, state control of large industries), and explained the aim of making the Russian revolution into a socialist one with the aid of the workers of more-industrialised countries.

Together they led the workers to power in October 1917, and called it the workers' socialist revolution. Together they supported the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, reckoning that the soviets represented a higher democratic principle when there was a clash between soviets and Constituent Assembly. Together, over the next few years, they argued for the Bolsheviks to keep sober reckoning of the poverty of Russia, and to understand that the pace of socialist measures must be slow.

In those years, Trotsky and Lenin differed on many other issues. Neither was slow to speak his mind. But so far was Lenin from any idea that Trotsky was an inveterate 'underestimater of the peasantry' that he praised Trotsky highly as the organiser of the mainly-peasant Red Army which fought off a brutal assault on the new workers' government by Russian counter-revolutionaries, backed by forces from no fewer than 14 other countries.

Lorimer, therefore, cannot and does not claim that Lenin and Trotsky actually proposed different perspectives in the Russian Revolution. He tries to prove only that, in writings before and after, they gave different interpretations of the same perspective. His argument is already abstruse - because it evaluates current policies not directly, but by way of disputation about other policies, in another country, many decades ago, which are deemed to 'encode' those current policies - but this twist makes it even more obscure and indirect.

Lorimer's claim is that according to Lenin the Russian workers' socialist revolution did not take place in October 1917 at all. In October 1917 there was only a democratic revolution. The soviet government was not a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' (workers' state). Rather, it corresponded to an awkward formula used by Lenin in pre-revolutionary debates among Russian Marxists - a 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry', i.e. a provisional revolutionary government taking radical democratic measures, and with the participation of working-class representatives, but unable to go further because of the predominance of the property-minded peasantry.
Russia's socialist revolution (claims Lorimer) was not made until June-July 1918. Trotsky was in error because he confused the proper descriptions of the two stages. Lenin separated them, and thus correctly guided socialists towards a two-stage perspective, with a democratic program in the first stage and socialist sequels only in the second stage.

Lorimer's main effort is to glean bits of text from Lenin's writings to give colour to this view. In doing so he flatly ignores Lenin's own statement in his April Theses of 1917: 'A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split in the soviets between the proletarian elementsÉ and the small-proprietor or petty-bourgeois elementsÉ The person who now speaks only of a 'revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry' is behind the times, consequently he has in effect gone over the petty-bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle; and that person should be consigned to the archive of 'Bolshevik' pre-revolutionary antiques (it may be called the archive of 'old Bolsheviks')É' Trotsky himself said what needs to be said about the quotations from Lenin in chapter 5 of his 1928 book, Permanent Revolution. More importantly, the Lenin-according-to-Lorimer version flies in the face of at least two big facts.

One: the Bolsheviks - not Trotsky alone, but Lenin and all the rest of them - always dated their revolution to October 1917. It was then that Lenin addressed the Congress of Soviets with the words: 'We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order'. That was the precedent they urged workers in other countries (including the most advanced, where there was no question of 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry') to follow. 'October' became a shorthand for 'workers' socialist revolution'. No Bolshevik ever suggested shifting the anniversary celebrations to June or July.

Second: many important shifts happened in June-July 1918, but none of them amounted to a social revolution, i.e. a new ruling class replacing an old one. The counter-revolutionaries' civil war, which had begun in a small way before the end of 1917, acquired force. The sabotage of industrial production by the capitalists became such that the soviet government, conceding to demands from the factory workers, had to nationalise much more industry than it intended at that stage. Soon the Bolsheviks would be driven to a state-directed economic policy of 'war communism'.

The Left Social Revolutionaries, who had been junior partners in coalition government with the Bolsheviks, went into opposition. This was not, as Lorimer vaguely implies, because the Bolsheviks suddenly turned left, championing worker demands where previously they had limited themselves to general democratic concerns. The Left SRs' complaint was the Bolsheviks' decision to sign a peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk with imperialist Germany. In general, the soviet regime became more reliant on the peasantry in mid-1918, not less so. Now it had to urgently contest every patch of countryside with counter-revolutionaries trying to rouse up the peasants against the godless, Jewish, communist, Red government - where without the civil war it might have been able to rely on a gradual consolidation of its power, radiating out from the cities where it had solid support to the countryside.
In any case, no government was overthrown in June-July 1918.

China and Yugoslavia
Consider the policy for future revolutions indicated by Lorimer's reinterpretation of 'Leninist policy' in 1917. In the period of mass ferment and crisis of the old order, the working-class revolutionaries should explain that they have no immediate wish for anything socialist. They only want to work with petty-bourgeois forces to push through bourgeois-democratic revolution. They do not aspire to win power themselves. Instead they want a coalition government with the petty-bourgeois forces.

Having got into that government, the working-class revolutionaries should bide their time until they have 'consummated' the bourgeois-democratic revolution and strengthened their own position. Then - about nine months later, if Russia is a model - they should throw their petty-bourgeois coalition-government allies aside, declare socialist revolution, and rally the poor peasants in their support against the richer ones. This Lorimer calls 'uninterrupted revolution'. The switch to the socialist stage would presumably have to be sudden, and the preparations for it secret. If not, why would petty-bourgeois parties, and better-off peasants, ever accept coalition with the socialists in the first stage?

Where Marx wrote that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the workers themselves, Lorimer indicates that the emancipation of the working class is a cunning trick carried out by clever revolutionaries once they have levered themselves into power by pretending to want no more than democratic reform. The perspective does not come from Lenin. It comes from Stalin.

It was Stalin who set up 'people's democracies' in Eastern Europe after World War 2. They were 'democratic coalition governments' where Stalinist parties controlled decisive ministries but hapless bourgeois politicians were figureheads. It was Stalin, likewise, who gave the signal for those Stalinist parties to evict the bourgeois front-men and establish full-fledged totalitarian police states - i.e. to build 'socialism' on the model of the USSR. The same model, with the building-up of popular-based guerrilla armies in battle with the old order doing what was done for Stalin by the advance of the Russian army, was copied by revolutionary Stalinists. Tito's first government in Yugoslavia was a coalition with Subasic, Castro's in Cuba, a coalition with Urrutia.

Lorimer's one reference to revolution since 1917 is relevant here. He states that 'the Stalinists transformed the Chinese CP into a petty-bourgeois revolutionary peasant party that was independent of the big bourgeoisie'. He claims that this refutes Trotsky's claim that the peasantry could not create a powerful political party independent both from the bourgeoisie and from the working class. It is only half-true. The Chinese Stalinist military machine used peasant support to defeat Chiang Kai Shek, but it was not a peasant party organically tied to peasant interests. Its later forced collectivisation of agriculture would prove that. Aid from the USSR autocracy - an increasingly weighty and independent social force - enabled the Chinese Stalinists to develop their own independent bureaucracy.

Lorimer explains that Mao's victory in 1949 was not immediately followed by large nationalisations - most big industrial enterprises had already been nationalised by Chiang Kai Shek - and concludes: 'It was only in 1953, i.e. after the bourgeois-democratic agrarian reform had been completed throughout mainland China, that the Mao regime mobilised the Chinese working class to crush the resistance of the Chinese bourgeoisie to the regime's program of wholesale expropriation of capitalist property'.

What mobilisation of the working class? By 1953 the Chinese working class was under totalitarian control, denied even the most minimal openings for free self-organisation. The 1949 revolution was followed not by working-class emancipation but by full-scale repression of the working class.

Lorimer's axiom here is that a full-scale state-monopoly economy is by definition a workers' state - whatever the position of the actual living workers within it - and thus that the Maoists' large-scale nationalisations of the mid-1950s by definition created a workers' state. That the axiom is false can be shown by critical analysis of the USSR and other state-monopoly economies*** - but also by looking at the strange conclusions drawn from it. The general scenario drawn by Lorimer from his reinterpretation of Lenin in 1917 is that the workers' revolutionary party should first get its feet under the government table by a limited democratic program and coalition with the petty bourgeois party, then kick the table over once it gets strong enough. But in this Chinese version the same party plays both key roles. The Chinese CP is both the revolutionary peasant party which sets the limits of the first stage of the revolution - and, by some miraculous self-transformation, the workers' party which later pushes aside those limits and goes on to the socialist stage.

Much else is garbled. Lorimer's argument that the decisive switch-point between the bourgeois-democratic and socialist stages of 'uninterrupted revolution' is set by the organisation of the poor peasants against the richer peasants is designed more to chime in with the allegation that Trotsky 'underestimated the peasantry' than to make sense. Poor peasants are as much property-oriented and unsocialist as rich peasants. The difference is that, once mobilised, they can be more radically democratic, and be more inclined to accept an alliance with the working class, because they do not employ workers themselves and are more likely to have wage-worker relatives. That explains why organising poor-peasant support was decisive for the Bolsheviks in the civil war. It does not explain the Bolsheviks' socialist policy.

In fact, in the Stalinist social overturns which are Lorimer's real model, the process by which the Communist Parties gained strength to oust their bourgeois front-men was not one of organising the poor peasants, but of consolidating control of the secret police! Despite land reforms and national independence, the supposedly consummated 'bourgeois-democratic stages' of the Stalinist revolutions were anti-democratic as regards the aspects of democracy most important for working-class politics.

Nicaragua
Lorimer is not a Stalinist. He is an ex-Trotskyist with his politics pulled out of shape by the distorting logic of decisions by his political forerunners in the 1940s and early 1950s. Thinking that the Stalinist parties, with their links to the supposed 'workers' state' in the USSR, must be workers' parties, only with weak and bureaucratic policies, the Trotskyists of the 1940s denounced Mao for advocating a 'democratic coalition government' with Chiang Kai Shek (On coalition government, 1945) and later with the small anti-Chiang bourgeois parties. Such policies, they declared, would make the Stalinist CP a prisoner of the bourgeois parties. Then Mao swept those bourgeois politicians aside - and simultaneously crushed the working class.

The proper conclusion was that the Trotskyists should have been denouncing the bureaucratic military machines headed by Mao and Tito for the social danger they posed to the working class in their own right. When, however, most of the Trotskyists failed to draw that conclusion, and instead defined the new Stalinist states as 'workers' states', then their previous criticisms of Mao or Tito looked foolish. Whatever was wrong with Mao and Tito, it was certainly not that they did not know how to see off Chiang Kai Shek, the anti-Chiang Chinese bourgeois parties, or Subasic.
For thirty years the Trotskyist movement lived with an unresolved tension on this point. In 1979-81, events prompted a section of it - headed by the Socialist Workers' Party of the USA, and including the forerunners of the DSP - to resolve the tension by, in effect, accepting the Stalinist notion of necessary alliances with bourgeois forces in the first stage of revolution. The events in question were the revolution in Nicaragua.

In June 1979 the Sandinista guerrilla movement overthrew the corrupt and decaying Somoza dictatorship. The Sandinistas' political background was Castroism. On overthrowing Somoza they established a coalition government fronted by anti-Somoza bourgeois dignitaries, and simultaneously set about consolidating their own grip on the main axes of power - notably, a reconstituted army - and pulling the population into mass organisations under their control.
The sequel would show that some Sandinista leaders had learned from the experiences of Stalinism, and genuinely sought a more democratic model than Castro's Cuba. Others, at the very least, wanted to maintain enough liberalism and openness to give themselves a chance of winning wider international support and deterring an onslaught by US imperialism. Although the Sandinistas quickly dumped their initial bourgeois front-men, they never came close to the Stalinist 'second stage'. Independent trade unions continued to operate, the Sandinista trade unions had some real autonomy from the government, opposition newspapers continued to publish. None of this stopped the USA organising and funding a murderous counter-revolutionary war. In the end, the Sandinistas, knowing that they had few other real options, accepted defeat in a general election, and subsequently split. Only a working-class policy, mobilising the Nicaraguan workers as a genuinely independent force and reaching out to workers elsewhere in Central America and in Mexico, could have opened up better alternatives - and even the best of the Sandinista leaders did not think that far afield from their Castroite origins.

In 1979-82, however, that was all in the future. All the SWP-USA could see was a revolution which looked to have good chances of following the Cuban model and thus reinvigorating a 'process of world revolution' disappointingly stalled elsewhere. This time, the SWP-USA leaders resolved, they would not spoil their chances and isolate themselves from the 'revolutionaries of action' by formalistic criticisms. They unceremoniously dumped their previous policy (critical and dismissive of the Sandinistas to the point of downright sectarianism) and declared that coalition with anti-Somoza bourgeois figures was 'obviously the correct, intelligent and revolutionary policy'. To exclude bourgeois ministers would be 'sectarian'. When a small and impetuous band of Colombian Trotskyists tried to intervene in Nicaragua by turning up there, arms in hand, under the name 'Simon Bolivar Brigade', the SWP-USA supported the Sandinista authorities' decision to jail them and then expel them from the country.

Jenness's reworking of 'Leninist policy', which Lorimer recycles, was an after-the-fact effort to construct theoretical justification for the SWP-USA policy on Nicaragua. Lorimer's actual models are Nicaragua, Cuba, China, Yugoslavia and so on - not Russia. He does not want to say so, because that would expose the heavy Stalinist influence in his arguments both to himself and to his readers. So he leaps over history to find a less embarrassing model in Russia - or, rather, in his reworkings of Lenin's texts about Russia. His approach is markedly out of keeping with the saying from Goethe of which Lenin was so fond: 'Theory is gray, but green is the tree of life'. But the abstruse and abstract character which it gives to the argument suits it admirably to the task of convincing DSP members that there is a great weight of theory, so profound that it escapes common understanding, behind awkward-looking slogans like 'democratic coalition government'.

Lorimer's theory tells the workers of any less-industrial country: in a time of revolutionary tumult, be restrained. Do not press ahead too fast. Do not frighten off the middle class. Do not reject alliances with the bourgeoisie. Trust instead to your representatives to get round the government table with the bourgeois politicians, and then to use that position to lever themselves into supremacy.

However much Lorimer would sincerely criticise Stalinism, his program, in its logic as well as in its unstated models (Yugoslavia, China, Cuba and so on), is one of 'socialism from above'.

Indonesia
According to Vassilopoulos, applying Lorimer's theory to Indonesia:
'The main significance of the Russian Revolution for Indonesia lies in the fact that in Indonesia, like in Russia in 1917, the working class is in a minority. A socialist revolution cannot occur without the active support of the poor peasants'.

'A Marxist party in Indonesia today would need to build a revolution as two stages of one uninterrupted revolution. In the first stage, an alliance would need to be forged between the workers and the whole of the peasantry. It would also have to include campus studentsÉ and the urban poor'.

'The PRD argues that achieving these democratic tasks [of the first-stage alliance] will require the revolutionary overthrow of the existing political system and its replacement by a 'people's coalition government', based on a system of 'people's councils'.

Since Vassilopoulos' article relies heavily on presenting Russia, or an interpretation of Russia, as a model for Indonesia (about half of it discusses Russia rather than Indonesia), we must assume that this second stage is supposed to come by the PRD, after nine months or so of coalition government, kicking over the bourgeois-democratic table and launching some Indonesian equivalent of 'war communism'.

Vassilopoulos does not say this. In fact he says nothing directly about the second stage in Indonesia. It is clear why. The scenario is fantasy. Co-opting hapless bourgeois politicians as front-men may be good policy for powerful militarised Stalinist movements, but not for a small leftist party of workers and students in Indonesia, facing a large bourgeoisie with several formidable political machines of its own. The hinted promise of a 'second stage' is only radical dressing-up for a policy which in fact does not reach beyond the supposed 'first stage'.

Vassilopoulos seeks to brand all opposition to his argument as ultra-left by identifying it with the Australian ISO and the British SWP who, so he says, denounce the PRD as 'radical reformists'. It is possible to recognise the PRD as courageous revolutionaries and yet think that some of their political ideas are wrong. Vassilopoulos further props up his case by suggesting that the only alternative in Indonesia to two-stage revolution and 'people's coalition government' is 'immediate socialist revolution'. 'Should the PRD be calling for an immediate socialist revolution in Indonesia today? Such a call would have no mass resonance because the working class does not have sufficient class-consciousness and organisation to carry it out and the poor peasants are politically inert'.

The choice is false. The DSP does not call for an 'immediate socialist revolution' in Australia. Nor, for that matter, did the Bolsheviks ever call for an 'immediate socialist revolution' in Russia, not even in the days and weeks before they made one. Neither the DSP in Australia, nor the Bolsheviks in Russia, concluded that if they could not call for 'immediate socialist revolution', then they must advocate 'democratic coalition government'.

'Democratic coalition' with whom?
The central idea in all our politics is to pursue the workers' struggle against capital. How can we possibly advocate a 'democratic coalition government' of workers and bourgeois? Vassilopoulos has to use a roundabout - indeed, byzantine - argument to justify 'democratic coalition government' for Indonesia.

The steps of the argument are:
The slogan - or something allegedly close to it - was advocated by the Bolsheviks in Russia, and vindicated in 1917. (The first 40% or so of Vassilopoulos' article is entirely about Russia, not Indonesia).
It was correct for Russia because of peculiarities of the social structure there. Indonesia also has those peculiarities. Therefore it is correct for Indonesia.

I have explained why I reject Lorimer's view that the Bolsheviks' old slogan, 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry', was a good one, and that the Russian workers' revolution represented the triumph of that slogan rather than its demise. But let us accept it for the sake of argument. 'Democratic coalition government' is still not an accurate re-rendering of 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry'!

The Bolsheviks' slogan revolved around the possibility of a revolutionary alliance between the workers' party and a radical peasant party independent of the bourgeoisie. Megawati Sukarnoputri, a wealthy, well-connected lady whose favourite pastime is reportedly shopping, is no more an independent revolutionary peasant leader than Cheryl Kernot or Hillary Clinton. Her party, the PDI-P, has a solid base in sections of the Indonesian bourgeoisie. Many poor people vote for it - but mostly in the cities.

Megawati explained her program to Business Week magazine like this: 'The first priority is to get the people to believe in their governmentÉ And then, after that, give the IMF a chance to solve the problems of the people of Indonesia'. On all the evidence, Megawati was in fact the preferred candidate of big capital to replace Habibie as president. John Howard explicitly supported her. The Dow Jones news service quoted an Indonesian banker: 'Everybody's expecting stability to come back to Indonesia if reformist parties like the PDI-P come to power. Nobody really expects stability will be regained with Golkar'.

Megawati represents not revolutionary peasants, but the liberal bourgeoisie. Even on Lorimer's account, the Bolsheviks were relentlessly hostile to the liberal bourgeoisie in Russia. Their slogan of the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry' was not a long-winded way of saying 'democratic coalition government with the liberal bourgeoisie', but sharply counterposed to it. Read Lenin's lips: democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.

Some DSP members, though not Vassilopoulos, justify the 'democratic coalition government' slogan by explaining that they do not really want such a government. The demands they put on it would make it impossible for Megawati's or similar parties to join such a coalition, so the slogan is merely a device to expose Megawati and other liberal bourgeois leaders as not truly democratic. But it is possible to put specific democratic demands on the liberal bourgeois parties, to expose their class nature, without the fantastic and illusion-breeding demand for a 'democratic coalition government' with them. Lenin certainly thought so. Although the pre-1917 Russian liberal bourgeoisie was more vigorous in opposition to Tsarism than Megawati has ever been in opposition to the militarised state in Indonesia, Lenin never called for a 'democratic coalition government' with them, and sharply opposed the policy of some Bolsheviks in early 1917 to give 'critical support' to and 'put pressure' on the liberal-bourgeois Provisional Government.

Vassilopoulos himself writes that in Indonesia today 'the poor peasants are politically inert'. There is no trace of a revolutionary peasant party. Even if the slogan of the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry' was fine for Russia, and even if the social structure of Indonesia today were essentially similar to that of Russia in 1917, the slogan would not be immediately usable in Indonesia today for lack of the necessary political elements for it. What the DSP in fact proposes, on the pretext that it is essentially similar to Lenin's 'democratic dictatorship' slogan, is its polar opposite.

Indonesia, Russia, Germany
Lenin's 'democratic dictatorship' slogan has been garbled in the DSP's 'translation' of it from Russia 1917 to Indonesia 1999. And for good reason. Vassilopoulos' equation of the social structure of Indonesia in 1999 with that of Russia in 1917 is false.

The equation, let us remember, rests on this idea: 'The main significance of the Russian Revolution for Indonesia lies in the fact that in Indonesia, like in Russia in 1917, the working class is in a minority. A socialist revolution cannot occur without the active support of the poor peasants'.

In Russia in 1917, only 2% of the population (three million out of 150 million) lived in the big cities of Petrograd and Moscow. The working class 'in all branches of labour, both city and country' numbered 10 million, 25 million with their families, or about 17% of the population. 80% of the population worked in agriculture, some as wage-workers, but a very large number as peasants under semi- or quarter-feudal landlord domination. The figures come from Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution.

Although Indonesia today is one of the world's less-industrialised countries, 38% of the population live in cities. 13% live in cities of more than one million. Jakarta has 9 million people, Surabaya 2.7 million, Bandung 2.4 million. 40% of the labour force is in agriculture, 56% in industry and services. Those figures come from the World Bank. Vassilopoulos gives similar figures. He reports that the agricultural labour force is mostly workers on large estates (rubber, sugar, palm-oil, tea, tobacco) or small land-owning farmers. In neither case are the economic relations feudal or pre-capitalist. Vassilopoulos writes: 'before the 1997 economic crisis, there were some 86 million employed workers out of a population of 200 million in Indonesia'. Add on those wage-workers' families, and the wage-working class, on Vassilopoulos' own figures, is a majority in Indonesia. The urban, industrial working class is, of course, a minority - but a large one.

As regards urbanisation, industrialisation, and the spread of capitalist economic relations in the countryside, the Indonesia of 1999 is less close to Lenin's Russia than to Rosa Luxemburg's Germany - the country which Marxists of the time cited as the epitome of high industrial development. Only 3% of Germany's 65 million people (around 1910) lived in the one city with over one million people, Berlin. If we take 300,000 as the minimum size for a big city (on the grounds that Germany's population in 1910 was one-third of Indonesia's in 1999), then 11% of the German people lived in big cities, still fewer than Indonesia's 13%.

35% of the German labour force was in agriculture. There were 5.4 million smallholdings of less than 20 hectares, on which must have worked a substantial proportion of the 34% of the labour force reported as self-employed or working for their families. Although economic relations on the large landholdings were moving towards the norms of capitalist wage-labour, many of those employed there worked under the Gesindeordnung - abolished only in 1918 - which put them in semi-feudal subjection to the landlords, the Junkers. These details come from Volker Berghahn's Imperial Germany (Providence RI, 1994).

The remnants from feudalism, or other archaic pre-capitalist modes of production, and the social weight of the peasantry, were greater in 1910 Germany than there are in 1999 Indonesia. Lenin often indicated that the alternative in Russia to a radical democratic revolution made by a worker-peasant alliance was 'the Prussian road'. By that, he meant the course of development followed by Germany after 1848, when, under the domination of Bismarck's Prussia, bourgeois social and economic relations were established bureaucratically, gradually, from above. Indonesia has had its Bismarck, and his name was Suharto. In his study Indonesia: the rise of capital (Sydney 1986), Richard Robison shows that after 1965: 'The result may be seen as revolutionary rather than counter-revolutionary in that it broke out of the decaying colonial stage and lifted the capitalist revolution to a new stage of development'. Capitalism has not stood still since 1917, waiting for Doug Lorimer to rediscover the secret of anti-capitalist revolution in Lenin's old texts. It has changed and developed.

I do not propose replacing Lorimer's and Vassilopoulos' scheme, Indonesia 1999 = Russia 1917, with an almost equally anachronistic and false one, Indonesia 1999 = Germany 1910. There are huge differences. For a start, the Indonesian working class still has no sector even remotely comparable to the Berlin metalworkers - long educated in socialist ideas and highly conscious of their significance as the active force of production in a sector central to world as well as German industry - who struck in wartime for peace and the liberation of Karl Liebknecht, and then were central in the revolutionary ferment of 1918-19.

Nor do I suggest that the peasantry is unimportant for revolutionary strategy in Indonesia. Vassilopoulos' statement: 'A socialist revolution cannot occur without the active support of the poor peasantsÉ', is true of Indonesia in 1999 - just as it was true of Germany in 1918. Rosa Luxemburg used a substantial part of her speech to the founding conference of the German Communist Party, in December 1918, to make exactly that point.***

In fact, however, Vassilopoulos uses an artificially inflated 'peasant question' to argue (claiming Lenin's authority for it, via Lorimer) that Marxists must have some sort of 'mixed' or 'coalition' program in Indonesia. Then, in the absence of actual autonomous peasant politics (admitted by Vassilopoulos himself), he smuggles the liberal bourgeoisie in to the 'coalition' space he has created for non-worker politics.

Working-class politics in a democratic revolution
There is nothing specially 'peasant' about the proposal for a 'democratic coalition government'. And the PRD's 1996 program (printed in the pamphlet Dita Sari speaks) has too little rather than too much 'peasant'. In four pages of detailed demands, there are only three references to peasant questions - and, given that every bourgeois or Stalinist government in the Third World has promised, and to one extent or another, implemented 'land-to-the-tiller' reforms, they cannot be seen as more than vague, repetitious and perfunctory. 'To encourage agrarian reform to create a cooperative and modern system of land ownership and agriculture in the villages'; 'Land ownership by the tillers, and assistance to improve productivityÉ', 'The state must ensure distribution of land to the tillers'.

Vassilopoulos implicitly tries to 'improve' the PRD on this point by suggesting, additionally, that in an 'initial land reform', 'the plantations and large landowners' lands [should be] confiscated by landless and poor peasants'. If Vassilopoulos means, as he seems to, that the large capitalist estates (rubber, sugar, palm-oil, tea, tobacco) should be broken up and converted to peasant subsistence farming, his proposal is no improvement at all. Such a measure would be economically regressive. The progressive alternative is workers' control and social ownership, preserving and extending the technical advances of capitalism.

Vassilopoulos' laboured digressions and spurious analogies about the importance of the peasantry are only an exercise in theoretical smoke and mirrors to justify a policy which the PRD itself argues on quite different and more rational grounds. 'The masses have great illusions in Megawati' We can't go against them. We would be isolated..' (PRD leader Dita Sari speaking to Workers' Liberty, WL September 1999). Dita Sari further explains that to most Indonesian workers 'communist' means 'cruel, violent, godless', and 'socialist' means 'wanting everyone to be exactly the same'. It is obviously prudent for the revolutionaries to have democracy, rather than socialism, or communism, or even a workers' government, as the first word on their banners. The PRD does not construct any elaborate theory about first and second stages of the revolution. They just believe that only a 'first-stage' revolution is on the agenda in Indonesia now. They do not want to isolate themselves by going too far ahead.

The PRD is probably right to think that any revolution in Indonesia in the near future will be not socialist but only democratic - limited in its aims to radical changes in the political structure, and not extending to change in the basic social and economic relations of exploitation of the rich by the poor. But the Trotskyist 'permanent revolution' perspective does not in any way require, suggest, or imply that we spurn democratic change, dismiss it as unimportant, or say that socialist revolution is the only change worth having. Independent working-class politics do require us to reject such slogans as 'democratic coalition government', but they do not require us to demand 'immediate' socialism. They oblige us to insist on strict independence from bourgeois politicians like Megawati, but they do not oblige us to denounce Megawati in a shrill way that isolates us from the workers who support her.

Not at all. The Trotskyist perspective indicates (1) that the only sure agent and safeguard of democratic change are the class-conscious workers - so long as the revolution remains under bourgeois leadership its results will be patchy and unstable, even on the limited issues of political democracy; (2) that we strive to mobilise the workers as the leading force for democratic change, fighting with their own methods and their own priorities; at the same time, and as interconnectedly as possible, we also strive to mobilise the workers on their own specific economic and social demands (on unemployment, workers' control, social welfare, etc.); (3) that, by doing so, we aim to maximise the chances of the workers increasing their political strength in the course of the democratic-revolutionary upheavals to the point where they can make the democratic revolution in their own way, linking it to a socialist revolution.

Such a perspective is valid even if we estimate that its maximum immediate results will only be to put the working class in the best position to be a weighty opposition force when a 'people's coalition government' tries to restabilise capitalism during or after a democratic revolution. Karl Marx proposed a similar perspective for the German workers in 1850, even though at the time he considered that the social weakness of the German workers (a far smaller proportion of the population, with much less economic weight, than the wage-workers in Indonesia today) made immediate socialist revolution impossible. As yet, he wrote, 'the workers cannot yet propose any directly communistic measures' - but they could and should strive for the maximum independent political role. His words are worth quoting at length.

'At the present moment, when the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach in general unity and reconciliation to the proletariat, they offer it their hand and strive for the establishment of a large opposition party which will embrace all shades of opinion in the democratic party, that is, they strive to entangle the workers in a party organisation in which general social-democratic phrases predominate, behind which their special interests are hidden, and in which the particular demands of the proletariat may not be brought forward for the sake of beloved peace. Such a union would turn out solely to their advantage and altogether to the disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose its entire hard-won independent position and once more sink down to being an appendage of official bourgeois democracy.

'This union must, therefore, be most decisively rejected. Instead of once again stooping to serve as the applauding chorus of the bourgeois democrats, the workers, and above all the [Communist] League, must work for the establishment of an independent, secret and open organisation of the workers' party alongside the official democrats and make every community a centre and nucleus of workers' societies in which the attitude and interests of the proletariat will be discussed independently of bourgeois influences'.

'In the case of a struggle against a common adversary no special alliance is required. As soon as such an adversary has to be fought directly, the interests of both parties will coincide for the moment, and, as previously, so also in the future, this connection, calculated to last only for the moment, will arise of itself. It is self-evident that in the impending bloody conflicts, as in all earlier ones, it is mainly the workers who will have to win the victory by their courage, determination and self-sacrifice. As previously, so also in this struggle, the mass of the petty bourgeois will as long as possible remain hesitant, undecided and inactive, and then, as soon as the issue has been decided, they will seize the victory for themselves and will call upon the workers to calm down, to return to their work and to guard against so-called excesses, and they will bar the proletariat from the fruits of victory.

'It does not lie within the power of the workers to prevent the petty-bourgeois democrats from doing this, but it does lie within their power to make it difficult for them to prevail against the armed proletariat, and to dictate such conditions to them that the rule of the bourgeois democrats will from the outset bear within it the seeds of its own destruction, and that its subsequent displacement by the rule of the proletariat will be considerably facilitatedÉ During the struggle and after the struggle, the workers must, at every opportunity, put forward their own demands alongside the demands of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers as soon as the democratic bourgeois set about taking over the government'.

'Unconcealed mistrust'
'They must in every way check as far as possible the intoxication of victory and the enthusiasm for the new state of things, which make their appearance after every victorious street battle, by a calm and dispassionate estimate of the situation and by unconcealed mistrust in the new government. Alongside the new official governments they must establish simultaneously their own revolutionary workers' governments, whether in the form of municipal committees and municipal councils or through workers' clubs or workers' committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lose the support of the workers but from the outset find themselves supervised and threatened by authorities which are backed by the whole mass of the workers.

'In a word, from the first moment of victory, the workers' mistrust must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party, but against their previous allies, against the party that wishes to exploit the common victory for itself alone'.

'To destroy the influence of the bourgeois democrats upon the workers, establish immediately an independent and armed organisation of the workers and create conditions which will be the most difficult and compromising for the inevitable momentary rule of the bourgeois democracy -- these are the main points which the proletariat and hence the League must keep in view during and after the impending insurrection.

'As soon as the new governments have consolidated their positions to some extent, their struggle against the workers will begin. Here, in order that the workers should be able to offer energetic opposition to the democratic petty bourgeois, it is above all necessary that they shall be independently organised and centralised in clubs.

'Everywhere workers' candidates, who should as far as possible consist of members of the League, [should be] put up alongside the bourgeois-democratic candidates, and that their election ... promoted by all possible means. Even where there is no prospect whatsoever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to gauge their forces and to bring before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint. In this connection they must not allow themselves to be misled by such fine speeches of the democrats as, for example, that by so doing the workers are splitting the democratic party and making it possible for the reactionaries to win. The ultimate intention of all such claptrap is to dupe the proletariat. The advance which the proletarian party is bound to make by independent action of this kind is infinitely more important than the disadvantage that might be incurred by the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.

'[The workers] must do the utmost for their final victory by clarifying their minds as to what their class interests are, by taking up their position as an independent party as soon as possible and by not allowing themselves to be misled for a single moment by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeois into refraining from the independent organisation of the party of the proletariat. Their battle cry must be: The Revolution in Permanence!'

The principles here are much better general guidelines for revolutionary politics in Indonesia than is the slogan of a 'democratic coalition government'. Only in Indonesia, for now, the element of joint 'struggle against a common adversary' by workers and the democratic bourgeoisie is much smaller than it was in Germany 150 years ago. The democratic bourgeoisie is doing deals with the 'common adversary' (the institutions of the military regime), and applying discreet pressure here and there, rather than engaging in open revolutionary struggle against it. This may change. But to relate to Megawati and her party now as if they are analogues of the 'democratic petty bourgeois' who were 'everywhere oppressed' 150 years ago, and seen by Marx as likely to launch themselves into 'violent conflict' soon against the German monarchies, is to give them a coat of red paint which they do not deserve, and thus to sow illusions.

My criticism of the PRD is not that it gives too much prominence to democratic questions - but, if anything, that it gives too little. Both the PRD's program and its recent agitation omit the call for a Constituent Assembly - a democratic elected assembly with power to override all previous unelected authorities, and to define a new and democratic political system. The PRD does campaign boldly and courageously to end the institutionalised political power of the military, but as regards positive alternatives it confines itself to vague formulas of 'the struggle for a form of democracy where popular control is continually strengthenedÉ struggle to strengthen the parliament, so that the executive will not be able arbitrarily to implement policy. The PRD proposes the institution of the parliamentary [as distinct from the presidential] form of government'. (Green Left Weekly no.358).

There may be good reasons why the general formula of calling for a Constituent Assembly should not apply in Indonesia. Neither the DSP nor the PRD have explained them, or offered any sharp, radical, alternative democratic slogan.

The immediate alternatives for Indonesia are a reconsolidation of military rule, or a limited, conservative bourgeois-democratic transformation. The models for the latter are Kim Dae Jung's South Korea, Cory Aquino's Philippines, or Nelson Mandela's South Africa. If the Indonesian workers have developed their organisation and their spontaneous confidence to a large degree, then they may push the bourgeois-democratic change further - but at the expense of making another model relevant: that of Ebert's, Noske's and Scheidemann's Germany, where 'democratic coalition governments' broke the power of the Emperor and the Junkers but simultaneously crushed and slaughtered the most radical leaders of the militant but politically unclear workers.

The meaning of the DSP's and PRD's 'democratic coalition government' slogan is to point the Indonesian workers towards seeking to push a future bourgeois-democratic government a bit further to the left, rather than organising in sharp political opposition to it. At the very least it will hinder the Indonesian workers' progress to independent politics. At the worst it may encourage illusions which put those workers at the mercy of a future bourgeois-democratic government intent on securing itself against threats from the left. The hope of revolutionaries everywhere must be that our solidarity and aid will help the Indonesian workers, and the PRD, to gain sufficient political confidence to put independent working-class politics on the agenda.

* $6.95 from local Resistance bookshops, or (plus $2 postage) from P O Box 515, Broadway, NSW 2007.
** International Socialist Review, November 1981 and June 1982.
*** See Sean Matgamna (ed), The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism volume 1, Phoenix Press, London, 1998. The book is available from Workers' Liberty.
**** The text is in How Solidarity Can Change the World, Phoenix Press, London, 1998, pp.57-58
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