Workers' Liberty Australia-Indonesia: workers' solidarity for workers' struggle
1997
According to the American CIA, no less, "the anti-PKI [Communist Party] massacres in Indonesia [in 1965] rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s [and] the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War..." The biggest non-ruling Communist Party in the world, with some two million members and 300,000 activists, was wiped out. Over half a million people were slaughtered. Half a million more were jailed in the following years, without charge or trial, and 1.4 million more were kept under surveillance by the military, on suspicion of PKI sympathies.
This huge campaign of terror laid the basis for Suharto's military dictatorship, with its seizure of East Timor, and its ability to hold the working class in hideous conditions and sub-poverty wages. Yet the official organisations of the Australian working class, the ACTU and the ALP, remain allied with Suharto's machine. The ACTU continues to support the government-run "trade unions" in Indonesia, and to shun the new independent trade unions.
Now the Indonesian workers' movement is reviving. Industry has grown tremendously in Indonesia over the last thirty years, and with it the working class. Independent trade unions are organising. Strikes are increasing. An openly radical party has been launched, the People's Democratic Party, linked to the PPBI trade union centre. The Indonesian working class is the biggest, most concentrated, social force of radical opposition to the dictatorship. Its chances will be much improved if Australian trade unions break their ties with Suharto's fake unions, and link up with the genuine trade unions in Indonesia, giving them material aid and solidarity against repression.
As the crisis unfolds in Indonesia, the workers' struggles will not remain neatly confined to a "democratic stage". They should not be cut down to fit into the role of back-up force for bourgeois-democratic leaders like Megawati Sukarnoputri. The US government wants democratic reform, of a sort, in Indonesia. It wants a less corrupt, personalised, and erratic capitalist administration, implementing IMF free-market policies. Megawati Sukarnoputri, and probably some sections of the military and the business elite, want that too. Even limited democratic reforms would be an improvement for the workers.
But they must and will aim higher. They have the social weight to achieve more. And if their mobilisation is artificially restricted by dogmas about completing the "democratic stage" first before going to the "socialist stage", then that may cripple even limited democratic reform, by crippling the main social force that will fight for democracy.
That is what happened in the run-up to 1965: the Communist Party, the PKI, limited itself to critical support for Megawati's father Sukarno, leader of the independence struggle and president from 1945 to 1966, and left its supporters unprepared and defenceless when the army turned on them. A re-run of 1965, or at best a re-run of the Philippines under Aquino or South Africa under Mandela, with its privatisations, cuts, and IMF policies - those are the prospects for Indonesian workers unless they mobilise round the idea that they create the country's wealth, and they, not any capitalist or bureaucrat, should control it.
Unfortunately the People's Democratic Party limits itself to the call for parliamentary democracy, and supports Megawati Sukarnoputri for president. The biggest political force in the solidarity movement in Australia, the Democratic Socialist Party, confines itself to appeals for "people's power" and democracy in general, and holds a "two-stage" perspective for Indonesia.
Suharto's tirades against "communism", however, reflect his uneasy awareness that not even a massacre like that of 1965 can wipe out the ideas of workers' control and common ownership, or a political tradition as deep-rooted as that of the PKI. Suharto will not be able to stop socialists organising underground in Indonesia, and their ideas getting a response from workers. What he can stop is open discussion of socialist strategy in Indonesia, and of the lessons of the 1965 tragedy. That makes it more important for supporters of the Indonesian workers' movement in Australia and other countries to provide space for that discussion.
Workers' Liberty is a socialist group active in the trade unions and ALP. We distribute the monthly magazine Workers' Liberty and other pamphlets. For a sample copy of the magazine, to subscribe ($35 for 10 issues), or for more information, contact Workers' Liberty, P O Box 313, Leichhardt, NSW 2040.
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