Comment by Max Lane – Socialists and progressive people face an important challenge in the coming few years to match the "solidarity" the Australian ruling class is extending to the new government of Indonesia and to any new conservative elite who may emerge as rulers in East Timor. Australia's foreign minister, Alexander Downer, was quick to visit Jakarta and invite President Abdurrahman Wahid to Australia and the tentacles of the Australian business and political elite are throughout East Timor.
We face a new challenge in building solidarity with the grassroots radical movement in Indonesia and its struggle for social justice, full economic independence and an end to the danger of military repression. The challenge is to deal with the widespread feeling here, including among students, that the replacement of Suharto by Wahid, the end of the Suharto dictatorship, meant that Indonesian solidarity is not so important anymore.
The problem of dictatorship versus democracy has ended, some think. Perhaps there is a problem of development, they say, but that is best dealt with by the Western NGOs.
For the mass of the Indonesian people, however, the question of democracy remains a desperate question. The change in Indonesia has been a change from the dictatorship of the Suharto clique to a collective dictatorship of the business and political elite.
Status quo government
The Wahid cabinet represents almost all sections of the ruling class, including the political creations of the Suharto-period: GOLKAR, the United Development Party and the Indonesian armed forces. It was these organisations that put Wahid into power. His cabinet also includes the ultra-right Star and Crescent Party, Megawati Sukarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) and the traditionalist Muslim Nahdatul Ulama.
The Wahid government came to power through a movement of mass defiance against the Suharto dictatorship which started around 1989 with student and worker protests (suppressed in 1996) and which was escalated by poor, urban, semi-proletarian and petty traders' protests in support of Megawati during 1996-97 (which diminished after the May 1997 elections). There was another leap forward in 1998 with the explosion of student unrest which led to Suharto's downfall.
The political framework for the transfer of power to a new government was the product of a struggle between the various political forces at the head of this mass movement and the political forces of the Indonesian bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, especially those political parties and figures representing the factions of the bourgeoisie who had been excluded from power and the wealth accumulated by Suharto.
This bourgeois opposition, represented by figures such as Megawati, Amien Rais and Wahid, stood at the head of large legal national organisations which had considerable wealth and religious and cultural authority. They also had support from the United States, Japan and western Europe.
The mass movement had not had time to produce a leadership with political authority on a national level. The leadership was divided among local student activist collectives. There was only one well-organised national force, the People's Democratic Party (PRD), which had been struggling under extremely repressive conditions and with most of its well-known leaders in jail.
The struggle between these two forces climaxed in November 1998 when tens of thousands of students and hundreds of thousands of poor semi-proletarians and petty traders mobilised outside a special session of the People's Consultative Assembly to demand that President B.J. Habibie resign and a coalition of the bourgeois opposition and "clean elements" in GOLKAR take power.
In a meeting of Wahid, Rais, Sukarnoputri and the "clean" GOLKAR figure, Sultan Hamengkubuwono, the so-called Ciganjur Four refused the students' call for Habibie to resign and stated that they would contest power through elections.
They also rejected the students' demands for an immediate end to the military's role in politics, arguing that it should be reduced gradually. It was at this point that any significant coalescing of political interests between the student groups or the PRD on the one hand and the bourgeois opposition forces on the other ended.
Even so, nine to 10 years of mass anti-dictatorship struggle, which climaxed in the demand for reformasi total in 1998, had set an agenda for democratic reform that the bourgeois opposition, now in a coalition government with the Suharto-period forces, has been unable to ignore completely.
In fact, the Wahid government has continued the process of implementing changes that mass pressure had already forced upon the Habibie government.
Habibie had passed legislation for multi-party elections, reduced the Indonesian armed forces' representation in parliament, removed serving military officers from civilian posts, withdrawn the most repressive of the labour laws and instituted a UN- supervised referendum in East Timor.
Wahid has now disbanded some extra-constitutional bodies which had already ceased to function under Habibie and finished the process of releasing all the political prisoners. He has had to deal with international condemnation of the Indonesian military's activities in East Timor. General Wiranto has had to resign from the cabinet and the armed forces have new leaders.
Sham democracy
In all capitalist societies, parliamentary democracy contains a massive element of sham: real power resides in boardrooms and only those organisations with money and links to the ruling class get the chance to present their ideas through television, radio and the establishment press. In Indonesia, the sham is even greater.
The Indonesian bourgeoisie and its backers in Washington, Tokyo and London are willing to risk repealing repressive laws and allowing a multi-party system because of two key factors. First, the new Wahid all-party government is taking some of the credit for the reforms forced upon it and its predecessor by the masses. As US assistant secretary of state for East Asia Stanley Roth said recently, "There is a honeymoon period at the beginning. The government will never have greater legitimacy than it has today in the eyes of the Indonesian people to make tough choices."
The more fundamental reason, however, is that establishment of "liberal democracy" in Indonesia is taking place largely in a vacuum of popular organisation.
In 1965, Suharto launched a national campaign of terror and mass murder to disorganise the entire working class and peasantry. At least 1 million people were slaughtered, tens of thousands in public. Hundreds of thousands more were detained for one or two years and more than 20,000 were detained for 10 years without trial.
This mass terror campaign completely smashed all popular organisations that had any tradition of independent mass action.
As a consequence, 35 years later Indonesia still has no large independent worker and peasant organisations. Neither are there any political parties which have mass memberships recruited on the basis of real commitment to a political program or that are capable of sustained mobilisation.
People's leaderships
In the advanced capitalist countries, the problem for the left stems from the trade union and NGO elite's bureaucratic control of working-class organisations. But trade unions exist, are organised and wealthy, and have legal rights. In Indonesia, more legal rights exist now, but the organisations do not.
According to the Indonesian National Front for Labour Struggle (FNPBI), the most militant of the new trade union confederations, there are now 29 independent trade unions. The development of these unions is a major step towards the re-organisation of the working class. But it is just a first step.
Of Indonesia's tens of millions of urban and plantation workers, it is unlikely that even 200,000 are seriously organised into trade unions. The peasantry is without any form of national organisation.
Only two political parties recruit members on the basis of a program and work to integrate their memberships: the PRD and the conservative social-democratic Muslim Justice Party. Both are at an early stage of development. All other parties rely on the charisma of local and national figures, financial patronage, clique networks and religious or cultural ties.
In these circumstances, conceding more formal democratic rights does not represent an immediate political threat to the Indonesian ruling class. But the potential for such a threat to develop very quickly – for mass, popular organisations to re- emerge – does exist.