It has been more than a year since the radical student movement, together with the urban poor, overthrew the Indonesian despot Suharto. The protesters chanted ``democrasi atau mati!'' (democracy or death!) and some, like the students of Trisakti University, did pay with their lives. The revolutionary People's Democratic Party (PRD) played a significant role, despite its small size.
Some on the Australian left, particularly the International Socialist Organisation (ISO), have criticised the PRD as ``radical reformists''. The ISO argues that the PRD should be trying to achieve a socialist revolution immediately.
The ISO claim that its approach is in line with that put forward by the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. However, it is the PRD's strategy and tactics, which the ISO rejects, that are actually consistent with Lenin's policy of carrying through a socialist revolution in an underdeveloped capitalist country.
The starting point of Lenin's policy in industrially underdeveloped Russia early this century was recognising that a socialist revolution could only be achieved with the conscious support and active involvement of the majority of people.
In Tsarist Russia, the majority of people were not workers engaged in large-scale capitalist-owned socialised production, but peasants engaged in pre-industrialised private farming and handicraft production. Moreover, both the working class and the peasantry were deprived of the possibility to freely organise by the lack of political liberty under the despotic government.
Lenin recognised that to convince the Russian workers and peasants of the need for a socialist revolution, they had to first win political liberty through a democratic revolution, which would replace the Tsarist government with a democratic republic.
In addition, the poor, landless peasants -- the majority of peasants -- were under the political influence of the rich peasants and were united with them in opposition to the semi-feudal hereditary landowning nobility that formed the social base of the Tsar's government.
Lenin understood that the poor peasants, who worked part of their time for the big landowners, would not be won to support a socialist revolution until an anti-feudal agrarian revolution had been accomplished that transferred the big landed estates of the aristocracy into the hands of revolutionary peasant committees.
Lenin therefore developed the policy of carrying out the workers' revolution in Russia through two stages.
The first stage would involve the workers, in alliance with the entire peasantry (including the peasant bourgeoisie), completing the tasks historically associated with the classical bourgeois-democratic revolutions -- replacement of the autocratic monarchy with a democratic republic and the confiscation by the peasant farmers of the aristocracy's landed estates.
Lenin argued that the democratic republic established by the worker-peasant revolution in Russia would not be a capitalist-dominated parliamentary republic, such as those created by the bourgeois-democratic revolutions in England in the 17th century and France in the 18th. Instead, he argued, for the democratic revolution to be victorious in Russia, the workers and peasants would need to create a revolutionary-democratic republic based on elected councils (soviets) of workers' and peasants' delegates.
The second stage of the revolution would involve the workers using the political power they had conquered in the democratic revolution to take over and collectively manage the capitalist-owned industries and to help organise the poor peasants to break the control the rich peasants had over the commercial production and distribution of farm products.
While the first stage of the revolution would not immediately go beyond the framework of capitalist economic relations (and in this sense would still be a bourgeois-democratic revolution), it would open the way for an uninterrupted transition to the second, socialist, stage.
The two stages, while having distinctly different tasks and involving different allies in the countryside, would form an uninterrupted revolutionary process because the workers and the majority of the peasants would hold political power from the very beginning of the revolution.
Lenin explained this policy of uninterrupted revolution in his November 1918 pamphlet, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. He wrote: ``The Bolsheviks formulated the alignment of class forces in the bourgeois revolution as follows: the proletariat, winning over the peasants, will neutralise the liberal bourgeoisie and utterly destroy the monarchy, medievalism and the landlord system''.
Lenin pointed out: ``It is the alliance between the proletariat and the peasants in general that reveals the bourgeois character of the revolution, for the peasants in general are small producers who exist on the basis of commodity production''.
After the bourgeois-democratic revolution had been completed, Lenin explained, the ``proletariat will win over the entire semi-proletariat (all the working and exploited people), will neutralise the middle peasants and overthrow the bourgeoisie; this will be a socialist revolution''. He went on to state: ``Things have turned out just as we said they would. The course taken by the revolution has confirmed the correctness of our reasoning ...
``Having completed the bourgeois-democratic revolution in alliance with the peasants as a whole, the Russian proletariat finally passed on to the socialist revolution when it succeeded in splitting the rural population, in winning over the rural proletarians and semi-proletarians, and in uniting them against the kulaks [rich peasants] and the bourgeoisie, including the rural bourgeoisie.''
In a March 1919 report of the central committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), presented to the party's eight congress by Lenin, he described the timing and process of the two stages:
``In October 1917 we seized power together with the peasants as a whole. This was a bourgeois revolution, in as much as the class struggle in the rural districts had not yet developed. As I have said, the real proletarian revolution in the rural districts began only in the summer of 1918 ...
“The first stage was the seizure of power in the cities and the establishment of the Soviet form of government. The second stage was ... to single out the proletarian and semi-proletarian elements in the rural districts and ally them to the proletariat in order to wage the struggle against the bourgeoisie.”
Lenin's policy of uninterrupted revolution was in stark contrast to the position of the Mensheviks, a party of right-wing, pro-capitalist “socialists” like the modern-day ALP. They believed that the working class should make an alliance with the capitalist owners of industry and their liberal politicians to replace the Tsar's absolutist monarchy with a capitalist dominated parliamentary democracy. Only in the distant future, they said, once capitalist industrialisation had fully developed in Russia, would the struggle for socialism become possible.
How can Lenin's policy of uninterrupted revolution be applied in Indonesia today? Indonesia is a capitalist country oppressed by imperialism. Russia was a weak imperialist power, with survivals of feudal relations in the countryside.
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.
Before the 1997 economic crisis, there were some 86 million employed workers out of a population of 200 million in Indonesia. There are substantially fewer now, since millions of workers have lost their jobs.
According to the PRD, about 10.5 million workers are employed in manufacturing, 30 million in the service and mining industries, and 46 million in agriculture. In the cities, there are millions of urban poor, many of whom are semi-proletarians, having only occasional waged work and engaging in petty trading activities for survival.
If Indonesia is to have a socialist revolution, a revolutionary alliance between the working class and the tens of millions of urban and rural semi-proletarians will need to be forged. Grouped against such a popular revolutionary movement will be the Indonesian bourgeoisie, its army and police, and Australian and United States imperialism.
To forge such an alliance the revolutionary workers will need to champion the immediate needs of the peasant masses, which centre on winning democracy and land reform.
The majority of Indonesia's rural population are small landowning peasants. In the early 1980s, almost 16 million small landowners grew subsistence and cash crops on some 16 million hectares.
There is also a small number of large landowners (1800 agricultural estates controlled 2.2 million hectares of land producing crops like rubber, sugar, palm oil, tea and tobacco in the early 1980s), and 57% of peasants have no access to land at all.
The social relations in the Indonesian countryside are quite different from those in Nicaragua before the 1979 revolution there. In Nicaragua, some 80% of the land was owned by the dictator Somoza and his family.
The initial land reform in Indonesia would not be nearly as substantial as in Nicaragua, but it would be significant if the plantations and large landowners' lands were confiscated by landless and 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 students (who largely come from urban bourgeois and middle-class families) and the urban poor.
Such an alliance would need to fight to win the democratic rights to strike, protest and organise.
Under Indonesian laws it is a capital crime to produce and distribute Marxist literature. So winning political liberty is crucial to being able to conduct open socialist educational and organising work among the masses of people.
Central to the struggle for political liberty is the struggle to end the military's involvement in and control over the political activity of the oppressed masses and to establish a genuine multi-party democracy.
In addition, a radical redistribution of land ownership needs to be carried out to put farm land under the control the peasants.
These are the democratic tasks facing the people that PRD chairperson Budiman Sujatmiko outlined in a speech on March 21 from Cipinang prison.
The PRD argues that achieving these democratic tasks 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”.
The May and November 1998 protest actions that forced Suharto out of the presidency were carried out mainly by students and the urban poor. The political radicalisation of the industrial workers and the political awakening of the peasantry is only just beginning.
The ISO has repeatedly implied that the PRD has sold out to the liberal bourgeoisie. In an article in International Socialism, the theoretical journal published in London by the ISO's British co-thinkers, Clare Fermont characterises the PRD as a “radical reformist” organisation. The “PRD's main demand has been for a people's coalition government, rather than socialist revolution”, Fermont states.
The criticism that the PRD does not immediately fight for socialism is echoed in an article by John Rees titled “After Bloody Friday: what next for the Indonesian revolution?”. Rees states, “In 1917 Lenin once again discovered that even in backward Russia the working class would have to directly proceed to simultaneously solve the problems of the democratic revolution and the socialist revolution”. Rees criticises the PRD for calling for “people's councils” -- not “workers' councils”.
The ISO claims that the PRD is in alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, specifically Megawati Sukarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party-Struggle (PDI-P). “The PRD worked in alliance with Megawati's PDI and recently focused its efforts on the urban poor rather than organised workers”, Fermont wrote.
These allegations reveal a lack of understanding of the Marxist revolutionary strategy developed by Lenin and the actual dynamics of the Russian Revolution. The PRD's approach is entirely consistent with Lenin's policy.
Sujatmiko describes the PRD's ideology as “popular social democracy”, which is a “form of democratic socialism”. He calls for reformasi total (total reform) and for the PRD to struggle against the exploitation of human beings, patriarchal repression and environmental destruction.
The PRD is testing the use of the term “socialism” in the context of the limited political liberty won by the democracy movement in Indonesia to date.
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 masses still have immense illusions in the liberal-bourgeois politicians, as shown by the vote gained by Megawati's PDI-P and the other liberal-bourgeois opposition parties in the June general election.
Moreover, the ability of revolutionaries to organise and educate the Indonesian working people to carry out a socialist revolution is severely restricted by the lack of real democratic political and civil liberties in Indonesia.
In July 1905, Lenin castigated anarchists for claiming the Bolsheviks were sell-outs because they were not calling for an immediate socialist revolution, but were fighting for the fullest possible democracy. He said, “We are not putting it off, but are taking the first steps towards it in the only possible way, along the only correct path, namely, the path of the democratic republic”.
Lenin pointed out that it was necessary to organise thousands of workers and get millions to sympathise with a socialist program rather than engage in “high-sounding but hollow anarchist phrases”. To conduct such organising and socialist propaganda work required first winning the political liberty to freely carry them out.
In his April 1917 article “Letters on Tactics”, Lenin warned against the error of subjectivism, thinking socialist revolution is immediately possible when the actual relation of class forces does not allow it: “But are we not in danger of falling into subjectivism, of wanting to arrive at the socialist revolution by `skipping' the bourgeois-democratic revolution -- which is not yet completed and has not yet exhausted the peasant movement?
“I might be incurring this danger if I said, `No Tsar, but a workers' government'. But I did not say that, I said something else. I said there can be no government (barring a bourgeois government) in Russia other than that of the Soviets ... And in these Soviets, as it happens, it is the peasants, the soldiers, i.e., petty bourgeoisie, who preponderate.”
Thus, even in early 1917, after political liberty had been won by the Russian workers, Lenin did not call for an immediate transformation of the democratic revolution into a socialist revolution. Instead, he called for the revolutionary transfer of political power from the unelected, capitalist Provisional Government to a government of the soviets.
In these soviets it was the peasant soldiers, and not the workers, who were the majority. The soviets were not “workers' councils” but councils representing the majority of the people: the workers and the peasants.
Lenin argued that only a revolutionary government based on a worker-peasant alliance (i.e., a “people's coalition government”), organised on the basis of “people's councils” (i.e., councils of workers' and peasants' delegates), could complete the democratic stage of the revolution.
Rees' claim that Lenin said the democratic revolution and the socialist revolution must occur simultaneously is not backed up with any evidence from Lenin's writings. In fact, after the socialist revolution had been carried out in Russia, Lenin argued (in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky): “It was the Bolsheviks who strictly differentiated between the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the socialist revolution: by carrying the former through, they opened the door for the transition to the latter. This was the only policy that was revolutionary and Marxist.”
The PRD has been the most uncompromising fighter against the Suharto dictatorship, campaigning to get the military out of civilian politics, calling for the nationalisation of Suharto's property and testing out the possibilities for legally conducting socialist propaganda.
Contrary to the assertions of the ISO, the PRD has never been in an alliance with Megawati. Rather, it has defended the democratic right of Megawati to be president of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) against the attack of the Suharto regime in 1996. The PRD organised mass actions in support of PDI members' right to choose their party leader in order to get a hearing for the PRD's ideas amongst the urban poor supporters of the PDI.
It also called for a united front between all the opposition groups to mobilise their supporters in the streets to overthrow the Suharto dictatorship. This call and the refusal of the liberal-bourgeois opposition politicians, including Megawati, to unite to promote mass actions against the Suharto dictatorship helped to convince many of Megawati's supporters, particularly among the students, that she is, as the PRD has repeatedly argued, “more afraid of the masses than opposed to militarism”.
The PRD has organised mass actions against Suharto and his protégé B.J. Habibie, linked workers' and students' struggles, tried to get student demonstrations to move off campus to join the working people's struggles and helped established national trade union, peasant and student bodies.
The PRD militants are applying the lessons Lenin drew from the Russian Revolution in the context of Indonesia today. The ISO's carping criticisms of the PRD demonstrate that it is they, and not the revolutionaries in the PRD, who have failed to understand those lessons.
