APSN Banner

Indonesia's first socialist magazine

Source
Green Left Weekly - November 29, 2000

Max Lane – Since August, a new left-wing theoretical magazine, Jurnal Kiri (Left Journal), has been published in Indonesia.

Three editions of the 160-page magazine have appeared. Its general editor is Marlin, who is also member of the editorial board of Links, an Australian-based Marxist journal.

Kiri is sold by left-wing activists and distributed through bookshops. Nearly 2000 copies of each edition have been printed, with most being sold within 10 days of publication.

The first issue carried the text of Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels' Communist Manifesto, as well as an Indonesian translation of the introduction, written by Democratic Socialist Party national executive member Doug Lorimer, to the Resistance Books' edition of the Manifesto. It also carried an Indonesian translation of the chapter of Lorimer's book Fundamentals of Historical Materialism: The Marxist View of History and Politics (also published by Resistance Books, Sydney) dealing with "Social Classes and Class Struggle".

An Indonesian translation of Lorimer's talk to the Marxism 2000 conference held in Sydney in January – "Imperialist Capitalism and Neo-Liberal Globalisation" – was also a feature of the first issue of Kiri.

The second Kiri included a number of Indonesian translations of writings by Frederick Engels (excerpts from Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, the introduction to Anti-Duhring and the introduction to The Dialectics of Nature), Lenin's article "Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism" and Doug Lorimer's introduction to Fundamentals of Historical Materialism (in which the dialectical materialist approach to understanding the world is contrasted to the reductionist approach of bourgeois social "science"). Other articles included: "Is the Structural Adjustment Approach Really and Truly Dead?" and "The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund" by Walden Bello (from the books Dark Victory: The US, Structural Adjustment and Global Poverty by Walden Bello and Shea Cunningham).

The third issue carried articles including Fidel Castro's speeches to the this year's G77 summit in Havana, which have also been published in Australia by Resistance Books under the title Neoliberal Globalisation and the Third World. The Kiri editor has included a note observing that Indonesian President Wahid, who attended the G77 summit, described the Castro's speeches as "boring, with too much detail". The issue carried more excerpts from Lorimer's Fundamentals of Historical Materialism. Other articles include an excerpt from Leon Trotsky's 1940 essay from In Defense of Marxism on "The ABC of Materialist Dialectics", "The Causes of the International Economic Crisis" by Links editor Allen Myers (translated from Links No. 12, May-August 1999) and translated excerpts from Soviet philosopher Yu. A. Kharin's 1981 book Fundamentals of Dialectics.

In the first issue, Marlin explained the spirit behind Kiri: "How much more human suffering will there be in the attempt to stop justice breaching the dams to flow freely? There must be no more! We must no longer waste the heritage of humankind's enlightenment, however much it should have gained.

"One part of this heritage is democratic, scientific socialism. We will test out this heritage because we no longer believe in the rulers' capacity to judge our heritage; because you wish to imprison our capacity to judge. Without democracy, our capacity for judgement can not be said to have the ability to flow through to be assessed as part of scientific testing. And democracy for scientific socialism is justice and the freedom to seek justice, the great product of scientific truth. It is this spirit that Kiri is published...

"The history of capitalism is a history of all kinds of economic exploitation, a history of all kinds of violent, militaristic political oppression, every kind of subordination and anaesthetisation of culture, and also every kind of bribery – in essence, every kind of robbery of the surplus value of workers for the accumulation of capital. But what excites us, what makes us proud, what moves us, is that this history is also a history of every kind of resistance to the past as well as the present. This proud and great heritage only strengthens the spirit of capitalism's opponent: us. We still stand up against capitalism, including in the form that it now takes in its final stages: neo-liberalism."

Country