Stubborn Survivors: Dissenting Essays on Peasants and Third World Development 086746299X

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STUBBORN SURVIVORS: DISSENTING ESSAYS ON PEASANTS AND THIRD WORLD DEVELOPMENT

Rex Mortimer Edited by Herbert Feith and Rodney Tiffed

Monash Paper on Southeast Asia

_ No. 10

CENTRE OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES MONASH UNIVERSITY

© Copyright: no part of the book may be reproduced in any form without permission Typeset by the Office of the Faculty of Arts,

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Monash University. Printed by Aristoc Press Pty. Ltd. Glen Waverley. Melbourne, Victoria.

ISBN

0

ISSN

86746

0727

299 X 6680

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The editors and the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies would like to express gratitude for a generous contribution from the Department of Government of the University of Sydney

towards the costs of this publication.

CONTENTS Page

Chapter

Preface by the Editors, Herbert Feith and Rodney Tiffen

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Introduction by Benedict Anderson

REVOLT AGAINST THE WEST 1. 2.

Futurology and the Third World: Beyond the Limits of Liberalism

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Asian Marxism and the Dis-Europeanization of the World

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PEASANTS

3.4.

Gravediggers Unanimous: Social Science and the Peasant

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Traditional Modes and Communist Movements: Change and Protest in Indonesia

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STRATEGIES OF DEVELOPMENT Indonesia

- Growth or Development?

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5.6. Strategies of Rural Development in Indonesia Peasant Mobilization versus Technological Stimulation

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DISSENTING PERSPECTIVES 7. 8.

From Ball to Arndt: The Liberal Impasse in Australian Scholarship on Southeast Asia

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Wallenstein, Dependency, Passion and Vision: The Search for Class in the Capitalist Periphery

145

9. The Benefits of a Liberal Education: A Fragment of Autobiography Bibliography of Rex Mortimer's Works

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175

PREFACE When Rex Mortimer died in Sydney on 31st December 1979 of a he was close cancer of which he had become aware five months earlier to completing a project on which he had been working for almost ten years, on peasants and long-term political dynamics in the Third World . This volume is a record of his work on that project.

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The thinking on which this collection of essays is based was the climax of a long and exceedingly unusual intellectual journey, one which sets the author apart from most if not all of those who have written on the Third World, development and related subjects. Born into a Melbourne working class family in 1926, Rex Mortimer grew up in the Depression, his mother widowed when he was three. As a 17-year old first-year Law student in World War II he joined the Communist Party and in his subsequent period at the University of Melbourne he shone as a polemicist and editor. Melbourne University was the principal centre of Australia's intellectual Left in those years and Rex Mortimer was one of its prominent younger figures. Admitted to practice as a Barrister and Solicitor in 1949, Mortimer began what was to be an 18-year period as a party functionary, as lawyer, journalist and organizer. There were some excitements in his life in that period appearances before the High Court of Australia in the early 1950's in deface of the embattled party, seven months of cadre training in China in 1957, work with non-party intellectuals to establish the new Marxist theoretical journal Arena in 1963, and a 6-week visit to lndonesia in 1964. But that did not outweigh the reality of endless sterile hackwork. In later years Mortimer was to ponder repeatedly whee had stuck if out in the Communist Party for so long, especially as almost all of his erstwhile university friends had left the party by tlié late §0's. He concluded that one pivotal reason was the experience of China. His seven months in that country had rekindled a flagging faith in the potential of the party, while sharpening his disillusion with its current leaders. They had also propelled him and a number of his fellow ex-China trainees into

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a series of zestful battles against dogmatists and authoritarians in the

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Australian party. And in the 1960's this group gained ground. As a member of the Central Committee, Rex Mortimer was a principal leader of a faction which succeeded in democratizing many of the party's operations and persuading it to take openly anti-Moscow positions on such issues as Soviet anti-Semitism and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. More timer's last years in the Communist Party of Australia were in fact a

period of substantial movement towards policy lines akin to those of the Italian party, lines which later became known as Euro~Communist. If his 1957 visit to China had served to reinforce Mortimer's Communist commitments, his visit to Indonesia in late 1964 was part of a chain of events which eventually resulted in his leaving the Party. The six weeks in Indonesia aroused him to an interest in what the academic area specialists had to say about Indonesia and its Communist Party. He was intrigued by the way in which the questions the academics were asking paralleled and complemented his own: Could the Indonesian Communist Party use its alliance with Sukarno to get to power? Could it con-

ceivably achieve a revolutionary transformation of Indonesian society? Or had Sukarno effectively domesticated the Party? A year later, as it became clear that Indonesian communism was being drowned in blood, Mortimer decided to throw himself into graduate study of Indonesian affairs, with a view to studying the movement's debacle. At the same time he gave up his post as editor of the Party's Melbourne weekly. The Guardian. Beginning in March 1966, Mortimer spent four years as a graduate student at Monash University. A year of course work covering a range of Politics subjects, some of which excited him greatly, was followed by a year of study of Indonesian history and the Indonesian language, that by

a year's research on Indonesian communism in Western and Eastern Europe, and that by a year of writing. By early 1970 he had completed

the doctoral dissertation which was later published as Indonesian Communism under Sukarno: Ideology and Politics, 1959-1965; in the same year he was appointed to a lectureship in government at the University of Sydney. This sketch of fast progress along a conventional academic path conceals a period of painful wrestling with contending commitments, intellectual and moral. Mortimer was trying to make sense of the tragedy of Indonesian communism in those years - trying to explain why the imaginative movement, led by the world's third largest communist party, had fallen victim to the terrible massacreas of 1965-66, why, after

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building such massive popular support and political momentum, it could be destroyed so quickly and comprehensively. He was also trying to establish new directions for his own life, to work out where he stood in relation to Marxism and various streams of academic social science, and in relation to the university, the working class and the planet's majority class of peasants. Getting into his stride as a lecturer at Sydney University, Mortimer entered the most creative phase of his life. He introduced a range of new courses, fought effectively for reforms in the department's curriculum, and mediated contests stimulated by radical students. And he published original work in areas much wider than that of his thesis. If his Indonesian Communism under Sukarno was disciplined scholarship of the highest order, his contributions to Showcase State: The Illusion of Indonesia's 'Accelerated Mode/'nizatio were something more. In them Mortimer staked out a pioneering critique of prevailing models of development in the Third World and of the dominant strains in Australian understanding of Southeast Asia. At the same time he made exploratory forays into futurology, with several papers about the crisis features of industrial society in both the USSR and the West. At the beginning of 1974 the Mortimers left Sydney for Port Moresby, where Rex took up the Chair of Political Studies at the University of Papua New Guinea. Arriving on the eve of Papua New Guinea's independence, he soon found himself painting on a wide canvas. In his three years in Papua New Guinea he did a great deal of advising to the University's first indigenous Vice-Chancellor. He wrote seminal reports and papers on student strikes and the general problem of university

autonomy in conditions of effervescent nationalism. He introduced an Introduction to Politics course of a new type, with a textbook composed largely of the contributions of his students. He lectured to military officers on Indonesian history and politics. He engaged in public debate on Papua New Guinea's responses to Indonesian actions in the Western half of the island. He organized a program of village research. And he fashioned a critique of the general trends of Papua New Guinea's political economy and social structure in the early post-independence

period, contained in his contributions to Aseem Amarshi, Kenneth Good and Rex Mortimer, Dependence and Development: The Political Economy o f Papua New Guinea (1979) Following the three years in Papua New Guinea, Mortimer spent a year's study leave travelling in various parts of the Third World and in

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Europe and the U.S. He returned to teaching at the University of Sydney in the beginning of 1977. In his last three years he became more systematic in exploring his own political past and through it the place of communism in Australian intellectual history. Now that his days as a communist were sufficiently distant for him to form a critical perspective, he embarked on a largescale research project on the lives and thought worlds of over two hundred Australians who had been Communists at Melbourne University in the middle 1940's. He also spent much of those last three years pondering the central questions of development theory which are the basis of this volume. Mao Tse-tung, now increasingly discredited in China and many other countries, was a point of particular fascination for him at this time, and criticism of Western Marxism took a more central place in his intellectual position. Elaborating his ideas on the 'dis-Europeanization of the world' as a long-term process, he emphasized the continuing relevance of many of Mao's ideas to understanding the contemporary world crisis. He frequently linked them with the formulations of Western crisis theorists like Ivan Illicit, Geoffrey Barraclough and Richard Falk.

The essays we have placed first and second in this volume present the central propositions of Mortimer's world view: his critiques of liberalism

and industrialism, his stress on the importance of the

ecological timebomb and of war, and his insistence on the centrality of conflict in relations between the industrial centres of the world and their preindustrial peripheries. Had he lived to write a book on the subject matter of this volume - and occasionally in 1978-79 he said he was getting close to a point where he would be able to do that the source would probably have been an expansion of these two essays. To engage with the most original and most arresting of Mortimer's thought one can do no better than read them. The third essay, based on his inaugural lecture at the University of Papua New Guinea, complements the earlier ones. It is an attack on the way academic specialists of many stripes have relegated the world's peasants to the margins of contemporary world history and insisted, wrongly in Mortimer's view, that they are a disappearing class. In the

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fourth piece, Mortimer looks at a particular peasantry, examining traditional and modem elements in the way the peasants of Java responded to the Indonesian Communists and to Sukarno in the years before 1965. Written soon after he had finished his major work, Indonesian Communism under Sukarno, this essay is a set of mellow reflections on the central ideas of that book. The fifth and sixth essays focus on the principal themes of the 'development debate' as applied to Indonesia. 'Indonesia-Growth or Development? was the lead essay of Showcase State: The Illusion of Indonesiais 'Accelerated Modernizations a volume edited by Mortimer which pioneered the application of dependency theory to Suharto's lndonesia. 'Strategies of Rural Development in Indonesia: Peasant Modernization versus Technological Stimulation' extends the argument of the two essays before it. The last of Mortimer's major pieces on Indonesia, it sums up his interpretation of rural Java, in the Sukarno period on the one hand and the Suharto one on the other. More than any other piece in this volume, it represents the outcome of his many years of wrestling with the ideas of the American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, and especially with the argument of Geertz's Agricultural Involution. This sixth essay, although one of Mortimer's least known pieces, is highly relevant to the politics of Indonesian development today and in the postSuharto future. The three essays which close the volume deal with the thought worlds of Western students of the Third World. 'From Ball to Arndt: The Liberal impasse in Australian Scholarship on Southeast Asia', which Mortimer himself described as his best piece of writing, looks critically at post-World War II Southeast Asia scholarship in Australia, evaluating it in the light of the central themes of the book's first two chapters. Beginning as a carefully researched contribution to intellectual history, it goes on to sketch out in sombre, tough-minded fashion what breaking out of the 'liberal impasse' would entail. The next essay, 'Wallerstein, Dependency, Passion and Vision: The Search for Class in the Capitalist Periphery', discusses alternative approaches to the inapping of class formation outside the West. It points to the inadequacy of political economy analyses which leave us insensitive to the passions, visions and projects which bind people together sometimes in dramatically new ways, as in the Iranian revolution.

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The final piece in the volume, 'The Benefits of a Liberal Education' is a fragment of autobiography. In it Mortimer looks back at his life as a

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Communist Party activist, and at his time as a cadre trainee in China. Readers may want to compare it with a recently published piece by Angus Mclntyre, *'The Mentor Relationship and the Dream: The Case of Rex Mortimer", Biography, An Interdisciplinary Journal (University of Hawaii), Vol. VI, No 3 (Summer 1983), pp.238-255.

A large number of Rex Mortilner's friends and colleagues have helped us in our work on this volume, enabling us to assemble the body of material on which this selection is based, advising us on criteria by which we should make our choices, and filling in gaps on a host of small points. We are grateful to all of them, and particularly to Ben Anderson, John Ballard, Hal Colebatch, Donald Denoon, Paul Grocott, Ron Hatley, David Hegarty, Arnirah and Ken Inglis, Peter King, John Legge, Michael Leigh, Angus Mcintyre, Jamie Mackie, Mary Mortimer, the late David Penny, Julie Southwood, Bill Standish and Ken Turner.

Our selection of items may well leave some of Mortilner's friends and colleagues dissatisfied, particularly perhaps those who hoped that his writing on Papua New Guinea themes would be well represented here, and those who argued for a book in which the variety of his concerns and interests would find greater expression. But we have tried to be consistent in applying two criteria for which we opted early, that the volume should present a coherent, fully considered position on a set of related themes and that it should include only those items which Mortimer left in finished or near-finished form.

Finally, many thanks to Gale Dixon, Pam Sayers and Lois Osborn for editorial assistance and to Lois Osborn for her careful typesetting of the manuscript. Melbourne, Sydney, December 1983

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Herb Feith Rod Tiffen

INTRODUCTION On November 22, 1973, Rex Mortimer wrote to me the following characteristic paragraphs: Our general viewpoints are closer than you realise. I have for some

time abandoned, or rather rejected, the evolutionist standpoint. I no longer believe in any world wide movement towards human emancipation fuelled by the industrial revolution or anything else. In fact, my outlook is a pessimistic one . . . For me, the only meaningful idea of revolution is one that makes it possible to transcend the parameters of industrial civilization, hence my fascination with the experiments in China and Tanzania. I see this possibility arising, if at all, in the wake of pulverizing world conflicts which seem to me increasingly likely in the last decades of this century. In this respect, perhaps, I adopt a somewhat different perspective than you do. I cannot see the revolt son having meaning in itself, in its existential dimension if you like. That is part of it all, and one of the most powerful imprints made upon me by my time in China was the experience of hearing the experiences of others who had been renewed or reborn in the revolution . But, as Mao well understands, these experiences become captured and imprisoned in new shells of domination-subordination unless the experience

. . . is continually recreated. This is where

the dialectical rela-

tionship between voluntaristic and anarchistic activity, on the one hand, and leadership, on the other, becomes critical. Anarchistic impulses by themselves degenerate into either destructive mindlessness or authoritarian tyranny, while leadership always has the tendency to develop into bureaucratic manipulation . . It is probably too much to hope that the two can ever, except in the throes of revolutionary upsurge, marry successfully, yet it is in such periods that men become ten feet tall. The memory of this is at least a politically relevant thing, and conceivably a factor which may (if the Chinese experience means what I think it does) mark the beginnings of a transcendence into an a-modern social fabric. So what can revolution mean for Java? Not modernity, that's for sure. An interplay of traditions, an oscillation of political modes

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within a frame of continuity yes. But more than this, if we are to do more than play with words. Revolution must also mean change, if for no other reason than that a mere elaboration upon tradition can no longer avert colossal social and human crisis. Revolution is hope, and hope is necessarily bound up with change. Change within continuity, so far as one can see things at present, in the light of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Tanzanian experience, has to mean filling the village vessel with a new content which makes the old capable of supplying basic wants and resisting the thrust of modernization. Beyond that, I am not sure, because I don't believe the monstrous thrust of the developers can be defeated unless and until their whole apparatus is

cast down

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Casually penned, they nonetheless foreshadow, in their characteristic mixture of common sense and utopianism, pessimism and revolutionary commitments, the main themes of this volume, a collection of texts written between 1972 and his tragic, untimely death on the last day of 1979. They also offer intimations of the mind and heart of a man who, after devoting much of his active political life to the workers of Australia, focussed most of his best writing on the peasants of Asia. It is not my aim, in these brief prefatory pages, to 'introduce' Rex's texts in any direct sense. They have no need for anyone to paraphrase, explicate, or summarize their meaning. All are marked by their author's elegant lucidity, untrendy radicalism, moral subtlety - and sense of humour. (Only a man of Rex's serious wit would have entitled an account of long years spent within the Australian communist party and a sustained encounter with Mao's China 'A Liberal Education', fully in-

tending the ironies to flow evenly in all directions.) Nor, I think, is it either possible or necessary to give any satisfactory, short account of his political and intellectual life. What may be worth while is to say something about the character of Rex's thinking about the world, partly because of its intrinsic importance, but also because the way he came by it offers the best kind of example to other scholars and intellectuals: the kind one can imitate only by not imitating. Something of this 'character' can be sensed in the word 'disEuropeanisation', which Rex did not invent, but which he made very much his own. I shall suggest below that 'dis-Europeanization' has many different faces, but common to them all is refusal and resistance. It was typical that he wrote about the essay 'From Ball to Arndt', included in this volume, that 'I don't know why I said it was the best thing I have

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written, except that it has helped to define me against the mainstream is use ' (Letter of July 7, 1972). Waiter Benjamin's memorable description of the true historian as one who 'regards it as his task to rub history against the grain' stamiNa have strongly appealed to Rex's sense of his own enterprise. But Rex's idiosyncratic radicalism was by no means a personal quirk, or a mark of what he self-deprecatingly called his 'untameable frivilousnessi It was forged, I think, out of powerful, cumulative ex-

periences of marginality

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as a communist, an academic, and an

Australian. The texts in this volume, and other important works from the same period of his life, are, at bottom, monuments to his ability to turn these marginalities to triumphant account, It is easy to forget just how marginal a communist can be in a prosperous, English-speaking, industrial society. But in the Australia of the early 1950s, when Rex was young and at his most orthodoxly militant (he joined the party in 1943), the Australian communist party was not only fairly small, but came very close to being declared illegal as a party of treason. Few of those who read this book will have had, or perhaps will even easily imagine, the experience of being pushed to the margin of the most emotionally compelling community of the modern world: the naLion. And the consequences of this near-outlawry continued to haunt him years later, when the flood-tide of anti-communism had ebbed, and he was seeking entry into the profession of university teaching. But, in addi* i * within the party itself, he was among the small minority with a university education who stayed loyal and on the whole orthodox, among his fellow party members there were thus only a few with whom he could speak seriously as a Marxist intellectual. Yet the astonishing thing is how little this double inarginality crippled his mind or scarred his heart. The serious pieces that he wrote in his last years as a party member (he finally resigned in 1969), are still well worth reading. And unlike so many former long-time communists, he did not leave the party to become an 'ex-communist', an 'anti-comlnunist', or a sectarian of another stripe. He could joke about his 'remaining Marxist hangups' , or write seriously about 'the residual hold that Marxism still has on me' a decade after he and the party had parted ways. He also remained deeply interested in, sympathetic to, and eager to learn from the huge communist parties of eastern Asia - Chinese, Indonesian, and Vietnamese long after he had lost faith in the Australian. Indeed, it was through his experience of these Asian communist parties that he came to the in-

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tellectual and moral focus of this volume: the peasants of Asia, and, ultimately, of the world. For he found ways to turn his communist marginality to account. However stunted and stereotyped the Marxism that came to the Australian communist party in the 1940s and 1950s, party members were nevertheless, if they chose to profit by it, put in steady touch with a continental European tradition of critical social theory at fundamental variance with the conservative and insular empiricism of mainstream

Anglo-Saxon intellectual enquiry. (Just how conservative and insular can be judged by the fact that the discipline of sociology was a novelty at the Cambridge University I attended in the mid-1950s, and Max Weber's work only began to be published in the U.S. after World War II.) It therefore came naturally to him to speak later of 'dis-Europeanization' of the world, where most of his contemporaries in the Anglo-Saxon zone, if they had insurgent thoughts, would have defined themselves rather vis-a-vis English historiography or American social science. Nurtured on Marx and Lenin, and inheriting through them the wide-ranging iconoclasm of the Encyclopaedists, he retained the conceptions of class, revolution, capitalism, the dialectic, and so forth, as fundamental intellectual tools long after he ceased to be a communist even though, as this volume shows, he came to interpret them in his own characteristic way. At the same time, his often painful experience of the discrepancies between Marxist theory and communist practice, no less than his long immersion in a marxisant sub-culture, enabled him to view the academic vogue, of the later 1960s and 1970s, for 'dependency' and 'world system'

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theory with a penetrating and unillusioned eye. His last papers show very

well his distinctively Marxist will-to-change and his profound scepticism towards (even marxisant) academic theoretical pretensions. If Rex owed part of his incorruptible radicalism to his political and

cultural marginality as a long-time communist intellectual in a political system hostile to the one and a culture often contemptuous of the other, another source was, I think, his marginality to formal academic life. In 1966, at the age of 40, when those of his agemates who had stayed in universities had become established academics, he decided to return to university life as an M.A. (Preliminary) candidate, alongside youngsters who could have been his children. It was an act of characteristic humbleness, resolution and strength of character, and was followed by years of disciplined effort to acquire the skills of traditional scholarship.

Out of this effort came his book Indonesian Communism under Sukarno,

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one of the half-dozen unquestionably magisterial works on modern Indonesia. Nonetheless, I believe it is true to say that he came to the academy far too late in life for its conventions, mores, and rhythms to become ingrained second nature to him. When he wrote to me in 1972 that 'I still cling to the idea that the overriding consideration now, more than ever, is to bust the liberal consensus' - the words 'still cling' show very clearly how unlike radicalized younger academics Rex was. For most of them, moving steadily from childhood through youthful maturity, within an almost unbroken ambience of formal educational institutions, the liberal consensus looms as an academic consensus above all, the problem is thus how to break out of its embrace. Rex's far less sheltered life accustomed him to thinking of the consensus in broader, social terms, and so he conceived of 'busting' it as a large political, rather than narrow academic, challenge. Similarly, Rex's special 'distance' from the academy paradoxically helps explain his creative role within it, His relative detachment prevented him from taking academic feuds and cliques too seriously, and from confusing authors with their publications. He could maintain cordial relations with scholars whose work he respected even if he disliked their politics, and he found no difficulty in dismissing as 'shockers' colleagues whose personal and scholarly qualities he despised, even if he shared some of their political views. Perhaps to his own surprise, he turned out to be a highly successful and innovative university politician, partly because he made frien& in unexpected places, also because distance helped him think in terms of long-term goals and act as a wise conciliator in 'campus' crises. ile believed in truth more than journals, and in ideas more than the academy. Not surprisingly, he was often regarded as more a polemicist than a scholar. In one sense, this perception was quite correct. Almost all the texts in this volume are polemical powerful and explicit attacks on a wide variety of conservative, liberal, and Marxist idees* recues and their more prominent public evangelists. Yet his polemics were never defences of scholarly territory; rather they were organized forays against the hierarchical structures and often authoritarian informal ideology of academic professionalism - and forays from an undeceived margin, not from an insurgent center. He paid attention to the words people wrote, and to their public influence, not to the formal credentials and titles of the authors. And so, in a quite matter-of-fact way, he addressed such different figures as Ball and Wallerstein, Illicit and Arndt, above all as

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'public Men' , just as he conceived himself to be. He had little time for the self-serving dichotomy between 'serious' scholars and 'shallow' journalists, popular in the academy, perhaps because he had been both at different times, but more, I think, because he believed in public discourse and in what he would sometimes call the 'free-floating intellectuals' -epitomized by such figures as Marx, Engels, Tocqueville, Proudhon, Russell, Benjamin, Sartre and Chomsky. It is therefore not surprising that many of the pieces in this book, though informed by wide learning and long reflection, are less conventional scholarly articles than serious intellectual essays. Beneath the solid, burnished, almost old-fashioned surface of Indonesian Communism under Sukarno mainstream in all but its lucid sympathy for its subject - lies the story of Rex's complex relationship, in the first place to Indonesia, but ultimately to China, Asia, and the peasants of the Third World. Once again, it is his capacity to turn marginality to advantage that remains so stimulating and instructive. His first real encounter with Asia is subtly depicted in 'A Liberal Education', which includes an account of the six months he spent in 1957 being educated, along with other select Australian communist cadres, in the theory of Mao-style Marxism and the practice of the Chinese revolution. There can be little doubt that he was 'lucky' in the timing of his visit to China, which occurred during the brief 'Hundred Flowers' period, revolutionary clan was still high, while intellectual life was freer and more diverse than at any time before or since under CCP rule. 'A Liberal Education' makes quite clear that the thing that most impressed Rex about Communist China was what he felt to be its moral vitality -which he compared favourably with that of Russian communism and of communist parties closely following the Russian model. It appeared to him that the Chinese cadres were on the whole egalitarian, austere, committed to an authentic socialism, and, perhaps because so many of them were peasants, in an overwhelmingly peasant society, unobsessed with what he already felt was a mindless 'heavy-industry' , urbanized vision of the future. Watching Han Chinese cadres at the party school he attended

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uncornplainingly cleaning latrines for minority comrades, he could not but be impressed by the contrast with the cynicism, self~indulgence and

vindictive manipulativeness of the leaders of the CPA group. When he would reminisce about those months, I was invariably struck by the opposition between the humour, embarrassment, and even malice with

which Rex described some of his fellow Australians, and the respectful

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seriousness with which he spoke of most of his Chinese teachers, inter~ prefers and guides. Part of this reaction resembled the typical embarrassed response of any sensitive tourist in the enforced company of less sensitive fellow-countrymen. But I believe there was more to it than that. First of all, he was, ultimately, not a tourist. He was in China as the guest of the Chinese Communist Party, and he had come to learn. The kind of learning involved could not be more remote from the 'learning experience' that comes from 'field-work' on the site and in the culture of study-objects. For it is the rare scholar who does not proceed magpiestyle, gathering scraps of material to build and feather a nest wholly alien to the material's origin: the figure for this pattern is the anthropological

book about a tribal group which the tribe will never read. Even rarer is the scholar who in any fundamental way learns from, rather than about, those he studies in other words, changes the way he lives his life or sees the world, to accommodate a new reality. Rex went to learn fro m the Chinese, who had carried through an autonomous, unique revolution, such as his own party had signally failed to do despite/because of Australia's industrial progress, and who seemed to have found a way of morally renewing Marxism. Vis-a-vis his Chinese teachers, he felt himself genuinely a pupil, beyond all the usual Marxist and liberal 'internationalist' pieties. In a curious way, this experience gave Rex a vivid intuition of what Third World intellectuals must often experience when visiting the First or Second World: that the things to be learned can be learned nowhere else, and that they may be of overwhelming importance, less for the student's future career, than for the destiny of his society. (Contrast the magpie approach: 'If the data aren't there to study A, I'll do B. And why not in country C or D, rather than E" The cross-national comparison would be interesting from a theoretical point of view . . . .') But the violent contrast between some of Rex's Australians and his Chinese also stemmed from a circumstance at which he only hints in 'A Liberal Education? his familiarity with Australia and Australians, and the strangeness of China, a strangeness magnified because China came to him through English. For 'Asian specialists', who take an often justified

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pride in their mastery of particular Asian tongues, the idea of learning

anything of real importance about a society without a knowledge of the local language is commonly felt to be a fancy fit only for journalists and economists. (And there is no doubt that Rex would have loved to have understood and spoken Chinese.) In the event, however, and in a way that Brecht would have thoroughly appreciated, Rex's marginalization in

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a tiny English-speaking enclave in the immensity of Chinese-speaking China offered him the possibility that loss of hearing offers to the deaf: he observed better, as it were. Incapable of communicating with most of the China into which he was plunged, he saw it large, unaffected by illusions of intimacy and penetrative 'understanding His very alienness made him unusually and uncomfortably aware that the privileged treatment accorded the Australian group contained a faint contempt within its polite benevolence. Above all, the experience of living in a small foreign ghetto in the marginal midst of a vast Asian civilization, busy, sure of itself, and largely indifferent to outsiders, brought home to him emotionally, and then intellectually, the need for a fundamental shift in his conception of the world, to 'make space' for what was not-Europe. This need for a basic shift in perspective was certainly reinforced by his one tour in Indonesia, which he made in 1964 as a guest of the Indonesian Journalists' Association, then dominated by the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). In many ways, the six weeks he spent in Indonesia were like his six months in China. Whether talking with party leaders in Jakarta, or touring the towns and villages of Java with party guides and interpreters (he knew no Indonesian then), he was there to learn. He arrived at a time when the PKI was close to the apogee of its influence. With three million or so members (and millions more enrolled in affiliated organizations), with the strong support of President Sukarno, and with great international prestige as the largest communist party outside the socialist bloc, the PKI manifested itself to Rex as a huge, busy, self-absorbed Indonesian world, which took care of him with something of the same friendly indifference that the Chinese had proffered. To be sure, many party functionaries were worried by the backlash developing against the 'unilateral' efforts of the PKI's peasant organization to force implementation of the land-reform and share-cropping laws against Muslim landlord and bureaucratic resistance - and some of them spoke frankly with Rex about their concern. But he knew, and they knew, that he had nothing to teach them. He 'met' peasants as he had done in China, but he could not really talk to them; he could only watch them, in this village and that, through the glass wall of English. He was more alone on Java, not merely because he was not in a large group of Australians, but because a guest is always more marginal than a pupil. One might say then that a part of Rex's later uniqueness as an academic writing on Indonesia came from the fact that he made his 'field-trip' before he became either academic or Indonesianist. Though

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he eventually learned Indonesian, and wrote beautifully out of Indonesian-language sources, he never did get to talk to Indonesian peasants in their own language, beyond the mediation of interpreters. For, in the wake of the October 1, 1965, 'coup', the PKI was annihilated, and its huge rural following reduced for a generation to the cowed peasants who encouraged younger Indonesianists to dream clientelist dreams. Except for a brief symbolic stroll with me across an unguarded section of the West Iran-Papua New Guinea border in 1975, he never entered New Order Indonesia. As a result of all this, unlike most of his specialist colleagues, he never had the illusion of full immersion in In-

donesian culture or intimate, daily existence. He made, I think, no close Indonesian friends and, consequently perhaps, never had the slightest sense of mattering to Indonesia or participating vicariously in its history. But once again, he found a way of turning this marginality into strength. His distance helped him to think about Chinese and Javanese peasants above all as peasants, rather than as bearers of Chinese or Javanese culture, as 'my villagers', as backward farmers, and so forth. The fact that he had to read about Asian peasants, rather than listen to them in other words, their silence in his face - forced him to think about them in the large, and encouraged him to keep them as a kind of political-moral lodestone by which his thinking about imperialism, revolution, 'development', and the future of the world could be kept on steady course. Although he was exceptionally sensitive to the autonomy of different cultural traditions - and vigorously defended them against 'European' ethnocentric arrogance (not least among West Marxists) he was never inclined to lapse into the sentimentality which Asian specialists can exhibit for the cultures on which their careers are built. experience al-lowed* him to steer clear of both narrow countryspecialization and superficial global-comparativism. He liked to com1l11111! but always for serious reasons, and in terms of what he saw as comparable social and political problems and their possible solutions. It was typical of him that he tried very hard to work in Tanzania, and worked very hard in Papua New Guinea (both beyond the normal pur-

-

-

view of the Southeast Asianist), because he was deeply interested in the

results of Nyerere's peasant-based socialist experiment, and in the outcome of decolonization in Port Moresby. When, in 1975, he wrote 'Gravediggers Unanimous: Social Science and the Peasant', a biting attack on the myopia and ethnocentric cornplacency of those 'deveIoplnent' economists and 'modernization'

xv

|.

political scientists who so quickly assign the peasants of the world to the dustbin of history, his argument was based on observable facts and was couched largely in the language of social science. But behind the argument lay the concreteness of his years of involvement in Papua New Guinea and the darker illumination of his experience of xnarginality in transit through two vast Asian peasant civilizations, also an intense awareness that the great revolutionary upheavals of our time, in China, Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere, have been the work of peasants. The ad* miration he never ceased to feel for Mao Tse-tung was certainly elicited in part by the great man's successful leadership of the first peasant revolution in history, but it also derived from his early, and personal, recognition that in the most concrete way Mao had begun the disEuropeanization of Marxism. When he wrote 'Gravediggers Unanimous', he was well aware that the coiner of the phrase 'rural idiocy' was a founding-father of social science. Beyond Rex's marginality as a communist, and later as an academic, there was also his margin ality as an Australian. Although he would often growl about what he called the 'cultural cringe' of Australians vis-a-vis London and Oxbridge, and to a lesser extent Boston, New York and Washington, and he could be sharp about the boorish, truculent na-

tionalism of some of his fellow-countrymen, he was Australian to his bones. He was quite at home within the Australian working and lowermiddle classes, swearing, boozing, and debunking wit h the rest. And this sense of rootedness did not disappear even during the 1970s, when he increasingly felt that these classes were being absorbed into a complacent consumer society and were turning their backs on earlier socialist tradi-

tions. After all, for many years he had been deeply involved in Australian politics at the local, state and national levels. And when he became an academic he continued to take his national responsibilities very seriously. He had no illusions about the extra-Australian importance of either Ball or Arndt. Yet he launched the broadside 'From Ball to Arndt: The Liberal Impasse in Australian Scholarship on Southeast Asia' because he felt an obligation to younger Australian scholars and because he took Australian scholarship seriously, in its own right, and as

part of the national culture that he was committed to changing. Precisely because he felt so Australian, I think, he was keenly aware of Australia's doubly peripheral position, geographically to Asia, and culturally, economically, and politically to the Anglo-Saxon cores. He had no use for Australia-is-part-0f-Asia cant, but he was very conscious

xvi

of his country's proximity to Southeast Asia, and her exercise of political and economic power there and in the Southwest Pacific. He despised the national mythology of Australian innocence and defenselessness before

the hordes of Asia because he fully recognized Australia's record of mini-imperialism and manipulative meddling in the affairs of its neighbours, not only of Papua New Guinea, Fiji and other small Pacific states but also Malaysia and Indonesia - not to speak of her odious complicity in Suharto's bloody aggression against East Timor. At the same time, he had a lucid view of Australia's relationship with Atlantic Anglo-Saxondom. He found naive and snobbish Anglophilism laughable and currying political favour with Washington dangerous and un-

dignified; but he also criticized ag 5

II

L

v.

as too

often a mask for laziness and insecurity. He understood very well that in many respects Australia is marginal. But his life's experience had shown him what an advantage marginality could be, provided one accepted it as such. This awareness shows usl -111:i-l --cu'l _" Europeanization: the sense that observing the world from the Australian margin, without bombast, was, and is, worthwhile and important, and that being neither Asian nor European could be a source of critical strength. In conclusion, I believe that aside from the intrinsic value of the essays collected in this book, their deeper significance lies in the example their author set for younger scholars, and perhaps especially for younger Australian scholars. This example will remain when texTs specific critiques become dated with changing historical circumstances and with intellectual transformations to which those critiques will have themselves contributed. It is not an example that can, or should, be imitated in its specifics - Rex's life and experience were too unusual for that. But in its general contours it can, and should, be followed: this means having the calm inner courage to work from the margin, knowing how to turn disadvantage into benefit, being a citizen as much as an intellectual, and always remembering scholarship's paradoxical importance and insignificance.

Ithaca, New York, Guy Fawkes' Day, 1980

Ben Anderson

xvii

REVOLT AGAINST THE WEST

CHAPTER ONE FUTUROLOGY AND THE THIRD WORLD: BEYOND THE LIMITS OF LIBERALISM* Peering into the future, that abiding obsession of aspiring mankind, has passed out of the province of the anchorite and prophet, and been usurped by the academic specialist, a new brand of high priest who conjures up his visions from the dissection, not of bats' entrails, but data bank excreta. Lest it be presumed, however, that scientistic magic has brought a new element of certainty into the age~old practice of futurology, a cursory glance at the current literature will soon disclose that the consumer is confronted with as conflicting an array of choices as the clientele of witch-doctor or astrologist. It is all there in this free market in predictive wares: potions labeled confidence, optimism, gloom and skepticism. The methods of the game may have changed, but the results, as ever, are determined less by the nature of the evidence than by the preconceptions of the practitioner. Broadly, we may range contemporary academic futurologists into two camps. On one side stand the technological optimists, including some of the most prestigious names in social science - the political mandarins Herman Kahn and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the sociologists Daniel

Bell and Raymond Aron, the economist Kenneth Galbraith. Steadfast in their devotion to scientific wizardry and human adaptability, they paint a picture of the coming decades which, while it would be repulsive to their classical liberal antecedents, proceeds from the same faith in illimitable progress along a road paved with human invention. For them, America represents the wave of the future, which, despite all its present tensions and conflicts, prefigures the future of us all. In the words of Brzezinski, America is becoming a 'technetronil society: a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially and economically by the impact of technology and electronics, particularly computers and communications. The industrial process no longer is the principal *This paper was originally prepared for a seminar at the University of New

England, Armidale, in 1971. This version of it appears to have been finalized in 1972.

1

determinant of social change, altering the mores, the social structure, and the values of society . . . Human conduct will become less span» taneous and less mysterious - more predetermined and subject to deliberate 'programming . . . '

Delphic oracles of this outlook dominate the establishment vehicles of social science, projecting a vision which the masters of industry and government need to keep themselves and us firmly and eagerly tied to the treadmill of work-reward-achievement. The blandness of their prognostications, with their inherent assumption that the future is a logical continuation of the present, their complacent belief that Western world domination is assured in perpetuity, and their sublime dismissal of the environmental and social threats to the order of things as it is, reveal the intellectual poverty of contemporary liberalism.' Futurology of this stamp has been scathingly branded by one critic as 'political cosmetology', the function of which is to cover up the ugliness of contemporary American society.' Over against the crass optimism of these tonic salesmen we must set the gloomy predictions of the ecologists, whose most articulate spokesman is the glibly earnest Paul Ehrlich. Their computation of the rapid trend towards resource pollution and exhaustion, backed as it is by a formidable body of evidence, strikes me as being much the more convincing scenario of the two in sheer technological terms. The standard riposte of the advocates of growth unlimited - . that science will 'find a way' - constitutes both a striking confirmation of the ecologists' case and an asinine assertion that the patient will be cured by a further dose of his disease. Yet the environmentalists show themselves to be utterly incapable of

coping realistically with the social and political implications of their message, being as tightly encapsulated in liberal ideology as their advert series (if we may call them so, since the two sides habitually talk past, rather than to, each other). The ecologists inform us, in effect, that either we must drastically reverse the priorities of our socio-economic system or resign ourselves to slow strangulation in the toils of our own wonders. Only the most sublime optimist of the liberal breed could

believe that the entire dynamics of the industrial system could be consciously and voluntarily discarded within the time span they allow us, by the same token, only the most naive observer of human behaviour under stress could presume that the reaction of men to the imminent withdrawal of their life sustenance would be to lie down tar rely and give

up the ghost. 2

contemporary liberalism of either tendency appears extraordinarily vapid in an era when its original premise that scientific ingenuity and human rationality assure a prospect of continuous progress H is coming more and more into question. Nor do the other established social philosophies offer much in the way of convincing alternatives. Conservatism, in its most persuasive and perceptive form, argues against the very possibility of predictability, after the style of Robert Nisbet:

-

The present does not contain the future, the far is not contained in the near, nor was the present ever contained in the past. Not if what we are concerned with is change . . (In human society) the Random Event, the Maniac, the Prophet and the Genius have to be reckoned with. We have absolutely no way of escaping them . . . What the future-predicters, the change-analysts

.

and trend-tenders say in effect is that with the aid of institute resources, computers, linear programming etc. they will deal with the kinds of changes that are not the consequence of the Random Event, the Genius, the Maniac and the Prophet. To which I can only say 1 there really aren't any; not any worth looking at anyway!

Nisbet, in virtually denying all sense to history, pushes a valid objection to prediction much too far; the accidental factor indeed offers a salutary corrective to schematic blueprints of the future, but it nevertheless operates within certain general constants pertaining to human organisation and behaviour that permit meaningful discussion of the future in probabilistic terms, providing the framework of approach is sufficiently broad and open. At the other end of the ideological scale, the social stage theory of Marxism proffers a vision of development culminating in a community utopia of freely associating human beings. But the Marxian system depends upon the same confidence in technology and man's ability tO harness it in his own longterm interest that characterises liberalism; both arose out of the same nineteenth century belief in progress, with Marxism appearing, so to speak, as liberalism's radical alter ego. In its conventional forms, at least, Marxism can promise no more answers to the problem of 'over~civilisation' than its respectable middle class rival. On the other hand, there is one central feature of Marxism which transcends the limitations of the alternative philosophies, and retains for it some relevance to the contemporary human crisis. Unlike liberalism, which tends to reduce the historical process to a cumulative, gradualist progression, omitting or minimising the tempests out of which the present has emerged, Marxism is supremely a conflict theory of change, and it is in the study of contemporary conflict and its roost likely outcomes, I

suggest, that some notion of the shape of the future may be discerned.

3

The triumph of liberalism in the West was itself the product of the convulsions which wracked Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A long period of crises, revolutions and wars preceded the supercession of earlier belief systems, a period characterised as well by profound cultural malaise and confusion and the proliferation of extravagant and irrational theories. The comparison with the present hardly needs underlining, and I would argue that the transcendence of our present world views by a new totalising synthesis of human experience awaits upon events liable to be more rather than less catastrophic than those which gave birth to the age of liberalism. There are many possible points of entry for elaborating the implications of a conflict approach to change, as contrasted with the cumulative theory posited by liberalism, with a view to making probabilistic assessments about the future. I propose to tackle the question, in bolder terms than I could reasonably justify, through a consideration of the dilemmas confronting that great majority of mankind we group under the title of the Third World. There is general agreement that the great and growing gap between the highly industrialised countries and those which are still in the process of adjustment from colonial or semi-colonial subjection represents both a profound human problem and an endemic source of international instability.' But here, as in other fields, the liberal vision preserves its unshatterable faith in the virtues of social engineering. It assumes that the third world must and can take the same general path of development as the 'advanced' countries have taken, and that this outcome will be facilitated by the assistance afforded their less fortunate neighbours by

the latter.' My contention, on the other hand, is that the division of the world into rich and poor nations constitutes a system of interactions which is enforced by the power of the wealthy club, and that the conflict of interest between the two parts is both irreco ncilable and unalterable within the present international order. There is no doubt that most third world countries aspire to emulate

the material lifestyle of the prosperous countries. Equally, however, they also exhibit a desire to preserve distinctive mores and cultural inheritances in comparison with which Western styles of behaviour are viewed as brutal, vulgar and above all 'alien'. In the event, they are failing in both areas, ultimately because the power of the great nations defeats their every effort. The urge to 'catch Up' with the West is promp-

ted partly by a recognition by third world leaders that technology

4

represents power, and partly by the stimulus for the acquisition of industrial goods which contact with the richer countries promotes among their peoples. But as they reach for these things, sao are they caught in the toils of a world system dominated by the 'have' countries and subjected to inordinate pressures from them which distort and- frustrate their economic development and at the same time break down the delicate integrating fabric which binds their societies together. Whether in its capitalist or communist form, the industrial system is inherently dynamic, growth-oriented, world~penetrating and worldtransforming. The unique feature of our era lies, not in the existence of strong and weak states, or the capacity of the former to dominate and exploit the latter, but in the fact that the technological power deployed by a relatively few highly industrialised states is so prodigious and SO insatiable in its drive for expansion and the diffusion of its artifacts and life styles that it tends to destroy, in an attempt to make over after its own will, all social and value systems that impede it. The United States is the most conspicuous example of this type of system but the differences between the U.S. and other major industrial powers in their dealings with the third world are largely ones of degree and are determined chiefly by the superior resources at America's command. In other words, we are now witnessing in all its profound consequences the projection which Marx and Engels made for bourgeois society: The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communications, draws all, even the most barbarian nations, into civilisation . . . It

compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production, it compels them to introduce what it calls

civilisation into their midst, that is, to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image? This vision has to be modified in many respects, of course. What Marx and Engles saw as the historically progressive mission of bourgeois society has now become the mission of all industrial societies, irrespective of their social and political systems, and they are not 'creating a world after their own image', but rather one that intensifies their own image by creating a caricature of it among the weak nations, We have arrived at something like an international system of apartheid, in which . . ..

. . .

'development' for the dominated people is an obscene and grotesque imitation of the way of life of the 'master races'." Although consciously predatory aims occupy an important place in these interactions between the industrialised and the non-industrialised

5

states, they do not penetrate to the heart of these interactions. Just as colonialism perpetrated many of its worst effects upon the colonial countries 'accidentally', as it were ---- that is to say, by the imposition of policies which, because conceived after the 'rational' calculations of the

metropolitan power, produced unforeseen consequences upon the colonial society so today the industrial powers wreak havoc with the ecological fabric of the new states even when they are seeking (whether out of self-interest or not) to place their governments and economies upon a sounder footing." Quite apart from the considerable measure of self-interest involved in the aid programs and strategies of the donor countries, quite apart from the conditions, restrictions, political strings and unequal terms of trade with which aid has been hedged or cancelled out,'" it has inevitably

-

been cast in the mould of developmental concepts which have been conditioned by the experience and deeply ingrained preconceptions of the industrial powers. This has been the case even in those limited cases where the aid has been utilised by the governments of the new states themselves: usually the elites entrusted with such administration have already adopted the values of the industrial countries (at least at a national level); but in any case, the sense of inferiority flowing from the colonial and post-colonial experience has meant that new states' elites for the most part have tended to follow their interpretations of Western experience rather than seeking out and proceeding from the clues to be found in their own hist social organisation and culture. In other words, the tragedy of the new states is that for the most part their strategies of modernisation have been 'other~directed' (to adapt Riesman's term), not endogenously conceived. It could hardly be otherwise, considering the conditioning they were subjected to, the pressures they confronted from without, and the sanctions applied to them when they tried to avoid playing the game the great powers' way. Contrary to the premises of liberal theorists, who avert their eyes from the devastating impact of the strong powers upon the weak ones, there is no guarantee whatsoever that most third world countries will be able to achieve even their minimum goals of economic development and cultural self-preservation. Those few liberals who do recognise the possibility, and on occasions hint at its cause, resign themselves to the existence of states locked in some indefinite stage of 'transition' from preindustrial to modern society." But this view too rests upon the common liberal fallacy that a state of highly unstable equilibrium will tend to self-

m

6

perpetuation. Nations and societies do not remain indefinitely in a post

son of statis when the world itself is in a volatile state. They progress,

they regress, or -- and this is the point where real change comes on to the agenda they seek to alter the terms by which these concepts are governed. At present, chronic political instability is characteristic of the noncommunist third world. A general trend towards military rule has typified the last decade, the army being in many cases the only institution capable of bringing sufficient coercion to bear to prevent breakdown or dissolution. But it is more than doubtful that army rule represents more than a temporary interval separating one crisis situation from the next, as the recent course of events in Pakistan reminds us. Appeals to nationalist euphoria as a binding agent recur frequently, but tend to run their course in an ultimately sterile ritualism or provoke conflicts between new states which strain their already slender resources. Revolutionary social movements are gaining ground again, after an intermission, in India, parts of Southeast Asia, and Latin America. They offer, where successful, at least a partial solution to the problems of stratified societies by removing incompetent and corrupt elites, tackling some of the structural obstacles, such as parasitic landlordism, to the kinds of change that are needed to cope with domestic poverty and dependency. But revolution is no panacea, even in the limited number of third world countries where stratified societies exist or the chances of success for revolutionary movements are in any way reasonable. Quite apart from the prodigious internal problems confronting a revolutionary government in a poor country, it is still beset with the enormous task of

-

. ..

. ...

repulsing the unrelenting pressure of the industrialised nations to enmesh it in their network of power, trade and exploitation. The logic of the situation in which they find themselves suggests that the third world countries can only gain relief from their problems in a world where the overweening power of the industrial giants has been broken. To put it another way, the excruciating fix by which they are forced to define themselves against something that is unattainable and withheld from them can only be resolved by the elimination of that OTHER pressing down upon them. This does not mean, of course, that the poor countries have the capacity, either individually or collectively, to challenge great power hegemony directly. What it does suggest is that any pronounced weaken-

ing of the major powers by internal conflict or war, or - more likely - a

7

combination of both, would spark a conflagration in which the wretched of the earth would take a part analogous to that played by the 'barbarian' invasion of the Roman Empire. At this point, the link between the agonies of the third world and the state of affairs in and among the industrialised states becomes critical. There are many possible scenarios for major conflict involving the stronger powers, and the internal and external tensions that point toward the probability of such a conflict have grown appreciably sharper in the

immediate past period. The Soviet writer Andrei Amalrik has drawn what is on the whole a convincing script for a war between the U.S.S.R. and China in his monograph, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? But where Arnalrik, in a manner typical of disillusioned Soviet reformers, has a totally misconceived view of the stability and social contentment prevailing in the West, from our point of view it is inconceivable that a large-scale protracted war between these two powers would fail to promote convulsions throughout Europe, especially if, as

Amalrik believes (soundly, in my humble opinion), the odds in such a war would favour a limited Chinese victory. But there are other, equally likely, starting points for a general war, and the intensification of the international trade war in 1971 both underlines the trend towards war and opens up the possibilities of a variety of alliances and combinations of powers by means of which the lines for war would be drawn. Japan may well form the pivot of these realignments, since her rapidly enlarging areas of conflict with the United States in the sphere of international trade promise to upset the general pattern of postwar politics and disrupt the ideological lines along which it has until recently been concentrated.

With regard to the general issue of prospective change, then, my central quarrel with the liberal theorists is that, by projecting the future as if it formed some continuous web with the present, they ignore the most glaring fact about change in our era. Its most Po werfu! catalyst by far has been that form of politics which is' war. This applies irrespective of the type of change with which we are concerned - technological, social or political. There has never been a time in living memory when wars of one kind or another have not been in progress in some part or parts of the globe, and there have been few occasions on which some major armed conflict has not been under way. The great powers have persistently been drawn into local conflicts, where they have not been responsible for their outbreak in the first place, and their intervention

has exacerbated rather than relieved the tensions which produce war. I

8

see no reason to believe that this will not continue to be the case, or that the rising graph of social conflict in the world will not before too long precipitate a conflagration of unparalleled proportions. Such an eventuality may put all our expectations or fears for the future at rest by foreclosing any future at all for our species. But I am more inclined to believe that it will stop short of armageddon. What it will almost certainly signify is the close of the long era of Euro-American world domination, and produce at least a major attenuation of the mode of industrial civilisation which we tend to accept as the normal evolution of the race. Few care to contemplate chaos on a gargantuan scale, still less the death of all that one has come to accept as the foundations of civilised life and progress. But it is at the same time vainglorious to say the least, to rank our obliteration higher in the scale than that of the countless millions of Asians and Africans whose bones have fertilised the gardens of our affluence, or to equate one stage in the history of mankind with its imminent consummation. Here Amalrik provides a fitting rejoinder to futurologists of either the technocratic or the ecological school: Apparently, if there had been a science of futurology in Imperial

Rome where, as we are told, people were already building six-storey buildings and there were children's merry-go-rounds driven by steam, fifth-century futurologists would have been foretelling for the following century the construction of 20-storey buildings and the industrial utilisation of steam engines. As we now know, however, in the sixth century goats were grazing in the Forum as they are doing now below my window in the village."

An age of madness, which the Javanese see as alternating with ages of harmony, may be upon us. With all its horrific import, it may still

represent the only road skirting the final solutions of nuclear holocaust or ecological suicide. Though this will offer small consolation to those who would prefer total destruction to living in a world which had become the black or the yellow man's burden, others may take comfort in the hope that out of the maelstrom a phoenix will arise from the ashes, offering a new opportunity to fashion a world closer to the spirit of human community than that which is enshrined in our tombs of concrete and glass. Footnotes

1.

'America in the Technetronic Age', Encounter, May 1969.

2.

To avoid misunderstanding, I am not treating liberalism as a poiificaf

9

outlook, but as the dominant philosophical or ideological standpoint of Western intellectuals, its characteristic features (as illustrated in the paper)

being: progressivism, universalism, and unilinearity. 3.

W.I. Thompson, 'Futurology: The Final Solution', Canadian Forum, March 1971.

4.

'The Year 2000 and All That', Community, June 1968. See also Nisbet's article, 'Has Futurology a Future', Encounter, November 19'71.

5.

On the dimensions of this gap, see for example Dudley Seers and Leonard Joy (eds), Development in a Divided World, Penguin, 19'}'1.

6.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto' Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), 112.

7.

This is the crux of the argument presented by orthodox developmental theory in both economics and political science. The dominant school in economics is that epitomised by Milton Friedman; the conventional wisdom of political scientists is most conveniently represented in G.A. Almond and G.B. Powell, Comparative Politics, A Developmental Approach, Little Brown, 1966.

8.

Observe how cities such as Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila and Seoul have become Meccas for budding tycoons. They are attracted not only by the opportunities for making a fast buck, but by the fact that there are no inhibitions on conspicuous consumption at bargain prices by Western standards and the inducement of any vice they care to pay for. A few miles outside these Westernised enclaves, of course, poverty and immigration is being steadily intensified by the depredations of Western technology.

9.

The present developmental strategy being pursued, under Western auspices, in Indonesia is a good case in point. While Western governments and economic experts wax eloquent on the success of the strategy in promoting

1

Selected

economic growth in Indonesia, the social effects of the process receive hardly any attention. Briefly, these can be summarised as follows: 1) denuding of Indonesia's precious raw materials (oil, minerals and timber) to meet the needs of the industrial powers, 2) aggravation of the gap between a modern economic sector centred in Jakarta and a backward sector embracing most of the country, 3) enlargement of the gulf between a rich and powerful elite and the improverished multitude, 4) intensification of Indonesia's mammoth unemployment problem by the destruction of labour-intensive by capitalintensive industries, 5) the crushing of the weak indigenous entrepreneurial class by foreign competition, 6) an absolute decline in popular living standards as the burden of growth is placed on their backs by more 'realistic' price policies. The impact of improved rice technology on the villages is particularly revealing. Studies in progress show that the rural poor (the vast majority),

being unable due to the small size of their plots and their lack of capital to adopt the new innovations, are being driven off their land by their more wealthy neighbours, additionally, they are steadily losing the opportunities for outside employment which they depended upon to supplement their in-

10 I

adequate farm incomes by the introduction of rice-hulling machines and similar labour-saving devices. Improved rice production within the present social structure of Indonesia, in other words, spells disaster for the mass of the peasantry. 10. On this subject, see for example Teresa Hayter, Aid as IMperialism, Penguin, 1971_ II.

See for example F.W. Riggs, Administration in Developing Countries.

12. Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?' Survey, Autumn 1969, page 79.

11

CHAPTER TWO ASIAN MARXISM AND THE DIS-EUROPEANIZATION OF THE WORLD* In the early Cornintern debates on revolutionary strategy, M.N. Roy, the leading Indian communist of his time, argued that the world revolution would be centred in the colonies, which would form the vanguard rather than the reserve force of the revolution, and that the Com intern ought

therefore to concentrate its attention on the development of the Asian revolution. A few years later, Sultan Galieill, a disgraced Tatar communist, describing the European proletariat as a 'burnt-out revolutionary hearth', was calling for an International of the proletarian nations of the East against the colonial powers of the West.' These and other early expressions of Asian Marxist deviance from the Europe-centric bias of classical Marxism and the communist movement may be viewed as no more than manifestations of nationalist euphoria. But I believe it is appropriate to see them as intimations in con~ viciousness of a process which d'Encausse and Schram have dubbed 'the

dis-Europeanization of the world'.' This process was M ' E 3 H B y the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1904-1905, and carried forward by the Bolshevik revolution, the Japanese assault on European hegemony in East Asia from 1941 to 1945, the anti-colonial revolutions, the Marxist-

led revolutions in China, Vietnam and Cuba, Japan's emergence as a major industrial power, and the defeat of the United States in Vietnam. Among its most dramatic expressions in the 1970's must be included the formation of the OPEC cartel, the revolutionary upheaval in Iran, and the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. Many, Marxists and non-Marxists alike, would dispute the notion that these disparate events should be seen as part of a single process. *This is a slightly revised form of a paper presented to the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, Melbourne on 18 February, 1979. The main change is the inclusion of several pages of text from a paper on 'Contributions of Asian Marxism' presented on 30 November, 1978 as the opening address to the Conference on Marxism and Asia held under the auspices of the Australian National University's Centre for Continuing Education.

13

They would find the juxtaposition of such different and in some respects mutually incompatible occurrences as the Japanese invasions of 1941-42, the Chinese revolution, the formation of OPEC and the Iranian upheaval anachronistic and even abhorrent. Here I wish only to point

out that the coherence of the process lies in its undermining of Western world hegemony, that the process is not linear but irregular and haphazard as to its ultimate tendencies (the workings of history, like those of God, being infinitely mysterious), and that no moral approbation or disapproval is attached to any single element in the process. The general process involves a growing ascendancy of the weaker over the stronger, of the technologically inferior over the technologically superior and of mobilized masses of people over machines and centrally organized systems of power. The process of which we are speaking is a glacial one, combining slow-moving shifts, longish pauses and sudden precipitations. It is not

of course completed. The Europeanized world is far from being displaced from the centre of the modern world system; it has shown itself to be resilient and adaptive, incorporating new elements though not without increasing strain - and even terning forces, such as the revolutionary power of China, which appeared for a time to be challenging it or at least resisting its embrace. Likewise, there has been no sharp, consistent or complete break by Third World Marxists with Europe-centred world views, but rather, in Asia particularly, confused and hesitant attempts to reconcile orthodox Marxist doctrine with heretical revolutionary practice. Nevertheless, the diversity characteristic of modern Marxism does, I believe, contain an Asian or Third World strain, which can be discerned running erratically

but surely from Roy and Galiev to Mao Tse-tung, with significant contributions from Latin America (Che Guevara) and Africa (Franz Fanon). At the same time, there is in the West itself a widespread sense that the world system is in a chronic state of crisis from which it is unlikely to recover in anything like its present form. Attention is being paid by a good many theorists both to the causes and nature of this crisis and to the exploration of alternative models for a future world. On the whole, European Marxists have contributed little to these debates. The vision of most of them remains overwhelmingly concentrated upon the problems of 'advanced' societies. They have perceived little in the Asian revolutions which contributes directly to the transformation of the world as a whole. Their outlook is a progressivist one

14

which allots primacy to the role in future social change of the technologically sophisticated civilization, the industrial proletariat, the European intellectual, and the 'high culture' of the West. It is entirely symptomatic that Leszek Kolakowski's The Breakdown should devote 28 out of a total of 530 pages to non-European Marxism since Lenin, and those a decidedly myopic and patronizing evaluation of Mao's 'peasant

Marxism'.' Mao and European Marxism When we turn to Mao's work, however, we cannot fail to note that this greatest of Asian Marxists became increasingly preoccupied in his last 20 years with the nature of the world system and alternative paths of human

development. In those years he divested himself to a considerable extent of the European patterns of thought which had largely dominated his writings during his active revolutionary years, and developed themes which are in many respects strikingly similar to those advanced by radical internal critics of Europeanized society and some theorists of world crisis. To illustrate the extent of Mao Tse-tung's departure from European Marxism and prepare the ground for a comparison of his views with the Western critics and crisis theorists I have in mind, I propose to set out a series of 10 contrasts between European Marxism and the ideas of Mao. The presentation is crude and extreme. On the one hand, it ignores the extent to which Mao's views were inconsistent and incomplete. On the other hand, it greatly oversimplifies the thought world of Western Marxism, itself made up of many streams. The point of the exercise is to draw attention to the large gulf that has developed between the European and

Asian Marxist traditions. My interpretation of European Marxist attitudes is based upon a composite of writings stretching from Marx himself to his contemporary followers in Europe, it is not fully representative of any single view save perhaps that of official Soviet Marxism. One can document every point from the work of Marx, provided one overlooks the contrary indications or qualifications to be found elsewhere in his voluminous writings, and much the same could be said with regard to Lenin or Trotsky or other more recent Marxist theorists. As a whole, however, I put forward the schema as the dominant tradition of European Marxism as carried by the movements (communist, socialist, trotskyist) which it has nurtured, and nowhere clearly contradicted by the work of any of the leading figures in

15

communist politics or the philosophers of Marxism. lt is very much the pattern of thinking inculcated in me during 25 years as a member of the communist party and an indefatigable reader of its journals and texts. With Mao Tse-tung, we stand on somewhat firmer ground, because it is the work and influence of one man only with which we are concerned, and that of the last twenty years of his life. Even here, however, we have to try to sift the hay of his increasingly independent and selfconfident world view from the c h a f f of his residual Europeanisms, his tractical manoeuvres and his opportunist self-seeking. In the end though , we have, I believe, nothing less than an ideological cleavage precipitated by dis-Europeanization and the deepening crisis of the modern world. Here then are ten pairs of contrasting propositions:

European Marxism 1- The forces of production (technology) are the decisive forces in societal change. 2. Euro-America, as the repository of the highest forms of technology and social organization, constitutes the most dynamic centre of development and change. 3. Whatever the twists and turns of

revolutionary processes, the lead in world development in the long run must be taken by the advanced industrial centres of the world. 4. European culture, and in particular

its mastery of rational, scientific knowledge, guarantees its primacy.

Mao Tse-Tung People are more decisive than

machines or weapons. The force represented by mobilized masses imbued with the will to change is the most powerful force in the world. The East Wind prevails over the West. Wind. Europe is old, stale, rotting. Asia is vital, seething, pregnant with change. Asia, Latin America and Africa are the storm centres of revolution. Politics prevails over economics, and revolutionary will prevails over

technical processes.

Rational, scientific knowledge of itself reproduces exploitation and oppression. The development of popular knowledge in a context o f uninterrupted revolution constitutes the most creative force in modern

history.

5. It is above all in and from the city

The city is the graveyard of revolu-

that the impetus to civilization

tion, it reproduces inequality and oppression, and smothers creativity in affluence and vice.

advance emanates. 6. The proletariat, the exploited but heroic city class produced by modern technology and European culture, is the revolutionary subject and heir to the future.

The European proletariat is a burnt-

out revolutionary hearth- The peasantry have the firmest revolution-

ary resolve and the moral qualities

necessary to create a truly socialist society.

16

7- The basic contradictions in the world are between socialism and capitalism, and between the working class and capital.

The basic global contradiction is between the world's villages and the

world's cities. European 'socialism' has degenerated into socialimperialism. interdependence between the 'advanced' and 'backward' is a form

8. World social development is interdependent, with the backward learning from and being pushed forward by the advanced. 9. The shape of the future is an extension and transformation of the technological accomplishments of the

of enslavement. Self-reliance is the foundation of socialist development. Industrialism in intrinsically exploita-

tive, imperialistic and corrupting. The dynarnizing of the countryside through appropriate technology,

present.

cultural revolution and political forms close to the masses will create a new concept of the future. The transformation of nature is a social process the mode of which may be either liberating or repressive for man!

10. Man's destiny is to conquer, transform and dominate nature for the satisfaction of his needs and the

realization of his fullest potentialities-

n is not the point of this essay to argue for the truth of any of these propositions, let alone for either of these contrary schema in goto. It is doubtful if any of them could be accorded absolute status as a social verity, one could for instance write a lengthy book upon the varying roles played at different times by cities and countrysides respectively in the stimulation and inhibition of social change. Rather the suggestion is that Maoism, while in many respects raw, tendentious and utopian, points towards a more plausible prospect of the nature and impulses of social change in the contemporary world than does the older European variant of Marxism.

That idiosyncratic British Marxist, Raymond Williams, in a recent issue of the New Left Review, sums up what I see as central about Euro~ pean Marxism. According to Williams "It is undeniable historically that Marxism includes a triurnphalist version of man's conquest of nature. Nor is this merely a variant of the tradition in one form or another. It lies near the source. But it is then important to recognise that in both its moderate and its extreme forms the notion of the conquest of nature belongs not simply to Marxism but to a whole period of bourgeois thought. It can now be clearly seen that this triumphalist version is in an exceptionally close correspondence to this specific ideology of imperialism and capitalism, whose basic concepts, limitless and conquering expansion and reduction of the labour process to the appropriation and

transformation of raw materials, it exactly repeats'.' 17

A crucial feature of European Marxism is that, for all that it denounces capitalism and represents the socialist future as a negation of capitalism, it nevertheless has strong elements of continuity with the capitalist past and present. Marx repeatedly emphasised that socialism would be built upon t.he material advances that capitalism has created, that socialism would take over all the technological achievements of capitalism. It would transform the social relationships, but the forces of production brought into existence by capitalism would be further developed in fundamentally the same industrial fashion. Marx saw the future in terms of a wholly industrialised world. He spoke of the whole process of change in the modern world as the urbanisation of the countryside. The urban centres were going to swallow up the countryside, both internally within each specific country and on a world scale as the bourgeoisie tramped triumphantly across the globe. Capitalism is seen by Marx and by European Marxists as an historically progressive force, which, by its enormous expansion of the productive forces through the application of science and technology to production,

has made possible a leap into an age of plenty and social rationality. With all the qualifications that have to be made, there is a crucial sense in which the European Marxists share the progressivist, continuous and 'technetronic' view of the future held by a Herman Kahn or a Zbigniew Brzezinski- The technological context of their social visions is very similar. Both are passionate devotees of science, of rational organisation, of world integration. Neither has any patience with tradition, cultural specificity, the accommodation of nature or diversity. Industrialism and all that necessarily accompanies industrialism - not

everything we find associated with industrialism today but all that necessarily accompanies industrialism - are not only the high road to progress, but the inevitable path of human advance. And both assume the continued domination of Euro-American man. The impulse of Asian Marxism leads in quite another direction, admittedly uncertainly, confusedly and ambivalently. Change in its vision is sharply discontinuous with the present and the industrial path. Change will not be built upon capitalist foundations. On the contrary, it will be the expression of the anger and outrage of the world's peasants, the world's villagers, the underdeveloped, and so it will inevitably be clemental, cataclysmic. It is a world-scale movement of changeThe same impulse rejects industrialisrri - not capitalism or im-

perialism alone, but industrialist. It rejects industrialism as inherently

18

exploitative, expansive, hierarchical - which is a neat revenge on modernisation theory - and a system o f domination. When we look at Chinese analyses of Soviet society of the late l960's we find that they have gone beyond treating the deformations of Soviet socialism as merely the work of a Khruschev to a structural analysis o f social imperialism based fun-

damentally upon its industrial characteristics, because of course, it's not this clear but the thrust is there, the trajectory is there - they are industrialised societies. The Soviet bloc countries are overtaken by af- . -

fluence, by the rottenness o f bourgeoisification. The two are inseparable in the Maoist vision. Industrial society is privileged society. For Mao the destructive and creative force in change is aroused peoples, not the forces of production. Politics triumphs over economics. The major determinant o f change is not the forces of production, the major determinant is the aroused peoples, the exploited, the oppressed, the cheated of the non-industrialised countries. The future is seen not in terms o f in dustrialistn but of a revitalised and transformed countryside which absorbs, takes into itself, what is

positive in technological invention, but strictly controls its scope and character in order that it shall serve the egalitarian, participatory and

liberatory goals that are specified in the vision. These are the regulatory mechanisms within which the appropriateness of technology has to be evaluated.

Now there is no doubt at all that this is a utopian vision. What is fascinating about it is not only its great divergence from the European Marxist tradition, but the way it intersects with some currents of thought in the West at the present time. The notion of the kind of society that is needed to promote human and egalitarian goals is very similar to that of Ivan Illicit in particular. But Mao's whole world view is also in many respects close t o that o f some o f the more persuasive theories of global

crisis current in the West, the theories of people like Richard Falk, Robert Heilbronner and Geoffrey Barraclogh. Overall, what Mao has done at the level of meta-theory has been t o break the nexus which bound Marxism t o liberalism, and hence to the universalistic, progressivistic, rationalistic and scientific spirit o f the

nineteenth century. What he advances in its place may amount to no more than a populist vision, but it is attuned t o an age when confidence in the unending forward march of technology and science towards greater prosperity and happiness for all mankind, either through

cumulative accretion (the liberal view) or through the revolutionary transcendence of capitalism (the Marxist view) is at its lowest ebb for 150

19

years, and sinking faster with each passing day of energy-populatiom food~inequality-unemployment crisis. The liberal ideology of uninterrupted and irreversible expansion based upon ever~irnproved technology

and demands on nature, and its Marxist version, are precisely the forces

propelling us into ever deeper crisis - as writers as various as Richard Falk, Geoffrey Barraclough, Johan Galtung, Ivan Illicit and Raymond Williams all agree. I am not of course suggesting that the ideology is an autonomous force unrelated to material forces or for that matter that the former is a simply determined product of the latter. It is enough for my present purposes to point to the parallels between the crises of belief and the crises of growth in the contemporary world. It is true that Mao does not show any appreciation of the ecological parameters which are central to these other writers' concern. For Mao, the case against high technology is that it creates a social hierarchy increasingly divorced from and oppressive of the mass of the people, and that it stimulates in the latter an unquenchable lust for acquisition which reinforces inequality and rampant individualism. But from their different starting points Mao and these others converge towards a similar view of what the viable or preferred society of the future must be like: popularly creative and participative, largely self-sufficient, communitarian, strongly egalitarian, convivial, and employing technologies which limit specialization and hierarchy and in their aggregate strike a balance between finite resource use and renewal. Unlike the Western Marxists who continue to view the present world as a struggle between two opposed forces centrally located within Europeanized societies (proletariat/coinmunist/socialist/humanist versus

-

capitalist/imperialist), Mao conceives of the world as locked in a lifeand-death struggle between a single system (capitalist/social imperialist/industrial) and the mass of the oppressed peoples of the Third World. It is an elemental struggle, of the weak against the strong, of resolve and desperate ingenuity against modern weapons and centralized power structures. Most of the crisis writers give considerable weight to North-South conflict as a major factor in the general breakdown in modern society, and many 'underdevelopment' theorists such as Frank and Wallenstein hold similar views to those of Mao on the unity of the modern world system. The 'underdeyelopnlent' writers, however, tend to adhere to the classical Marxist concept of development, for them, the struggle against

imperialist domination is a struggle to appropriate advanced technology by and for (socialist) dependent nations. Mao, along with Illicit and 20

Galtung, on the other hand, perceives an inherent logic between types of technology and types of social organization and control. Contemporary revolutionary struggles like that in Iran reflect a profound ambivalence about the uses and abuses of technology (quite apart from the obscurantist and 'traditional' features of these upheavals which tend to deflect attention from the potential trajectory of their human projects). But one can discern in them, and in the attitudes of Third World publics, and particularly of Third World counter-elites, a growing disenchantment with technocratic society and a disposition to seek an alternative way out of the bind between 'backwardness' and dependence. Obviously, there is not going to be any short-term, clearcut solution to this dilemma. The fate of Mao's own project for China is evidence Of this. In the longer term responses to the dilemma will be dictated less by voluntarist impulses towards simplicity than by the imperatives of ecological and related crises. For Mao, the road to his envisioned future lies not only through revolutionary upheavals but also through major wars. In the last six or seven years of his life, he abandoned the simplistic notion of complete polarization between the haves and have-nots, and perceived the potential for conflict among the capitalist powers, including the Soviet Union, as a factor objectively aiding the liberation struggles of the oppressed. That there were tactical considerations involved in his changed perspective cannot be denied, and they may well have been decisive in effect. The same cannot be said, however, for his longstanding view that even nuclear war in unlikely to spell the end of the world. Though not a prospect to be welcomed, it will be weathered best, he argued, by those who have least to lose, and it will signal the demise of capitalist-imperialism.

To him, war was a creative as well as a destructive enterprise. Under no circumstances, he thought, should the oppressed allow their struggles for emancipation to be diverted or fatally compromised by the threat of nuclear retaliation. In this respect, Mao differs markedly from both the European

Marxists and the 'crisis' writers in the West. The latter understandably emphasize the horrors of nuclear war, while the Marxists in particular have seriously neglected the role that war has played in the revolutionary transformations of the twentieth century. It is easy and tempting to denounce Mao as irresponsible, inhuman and naive in his views upon war, but matters are not that simple. In the first place, it would be difficult to deny that the tensions productive of war have grown markedly in the last

21

five years, partly as a result of more intensive Soviet-American rivalry, partly owing to a rapid multiplication of the number of nations and regions experiencing or prospectively facing conflict and upheaval, and partly because of the competition for assured energy resources precipitated by OPEC initiatives. Secondly, strategic doctrine in both the United States and the Soviet Union has in the past decade swung increasingly to the view that it will be possible to limit the extent of nuclear destruction in the event of a great power war. We may remain profoundly skeptical of these assessments, but we are obliged to take note of them Thirdly, all nuclear strategists are agreed that in the event of nuclear war, cities and industrial centres will be the major civilian targets and victims, by comparison with which the countrysides, especially in countries with little in the way of high technology bases, are likely to escape lightly. All this suggests that the question has to be posed: can we envision any realistic means by which the billions-strong 'wretched of the earth' are to break the chains of dependency, poverty and oppression without the intervention of some catastrophic event or series of events which destroys or drastically weakens the dominant power of the technological giants? We must assuredly promote the alternatives - a new international or world order, disarmament, voluntary restraints upon growth, human rights, revolutions of the oppressed. But there are few indeed of those who are involved in such projects who do not feel their goals receding from them with each passing day of the world crisis. So Mao, the populist utopian, may yet appear as the supreme realist of our time.

.

Notes 1.

The ideas of Roy and Galiev are discussed in Héléne Carrera d'Encausse and

Stuart R. Schram, Marxism and Asia: An Introduction With Readings, London: Allen Lane, 1969. 2. 3.

op.cit., p.5. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents

of Marxism.'

Its Origins, Growth and

Dissolution, Clarendon, Oxford, 1978, Vol. III, The Breakdown. 4.

It would be tedious to seek to document each of these propositions in detail. Each reader will have to match them against his own understanding of the two traditions. For anyone not too well versed in Marxism, the following works will offer considerable assistance: Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents o f Marxism (3 vols.) is by far the most comprehensive study of European Marxism in all its emanations. Marx's views on the peasantry are analysed in David Mitrany, Marx Against the Peasant (New York: Collier Books, 1961). For his general concept of the respective roles of Europe and the colonial

22

world in future development, see S. Avineri, Karl Marx on Co fon iaiism and Modernization, Doubleday, New York, 1969. I-Iélene Carree d'Encausse and Stuart Schramm, op.cit., provides a most useful introduction and

documentation of the entire process we are discussing. The best source on Mao's later writings are to be found in two books by Stuart Schramm, The Political Thought of Mao The-rung (London, Penguin enlarged and revised edition, 1969) and Mao Tse-rung Unrehearsed (London: Penguin, 1974). 5.

Raymond Williams, 'Problems of Materialism', New Left Review, No.109 (May-June 1978), p.8.

6.

Ivan Illicit, Tools for Con viviaffty, (New York: Harper and Row, 1973)-

23

PEASANTS

I

CHAPTER THREE GRAVEDIGGERS UNANIMOUS' SOCIAL SCIENCE AND THE PEASANT*

My theme is that social science has condemned the peasant to death without a fair trial, in the name of those holy imperatives --- progress, development and modernization. t it another, less tendentious the peasant is treated in all the ajar theoretical systems and i n :al models of contemporary social science which deal in one way or another with development and social change, as an anachronism in the present -al, a hangover from the past destined within a relatively short space of time to be discarded in the inexorable processes of universal modernity. So wedded are the social sciences to this projection of the peasant's fate that they frequently take the anticipated results of their own systembuilding for established fact, and regard the peasant, explicitly or implicity, as if he were already a vanishing speck on the social map. Many social scientists achieve this feat by ignoring the peasant altogether in their theoretical systems; others by dismissing his presence with an offhand gesture, and others again by asserting positively that he is actually . shrinking before our very eyes. Two propositions recur constantly: peasants are disappearing, they are bound to disappear. Whatever the approach, the e f f e c t is the same, to dismiss the significance of the peasantry as a social force relevant tO

the concerns of the future. To be sure, the picture is not as clearcut as this. Social scientists who in the flush of enthusiasm engendered by their speculative models dismiss the peasant with the wave of a diagram or computer sheet recognize in their more sober empirical moments that there is such a phenomenon, *This text is based on Rex Mortimer's inaugural lecture as Professor of Political Studies at the University of Papua New Guinea on 26 August 1975, which the University published in the same year as Social Science and the Peasant: A Case of Academic Genocide. The present version seems to date from 1976, Like 'Futurology and the Third World' it was circulated among the author's friends but not published.

25

and that it shows lingering signs of life. Even the models themselves frequently smuggle in a cautionary aside to cover their flanks, be it only a reference to 'traditional obstructions' to the all-conquering forces of modernization. Some of the earlier hubris has evaporated. Things, it turned out, were not as simple as they appeared. The developmental gap went on enlarging instead of disappearing, many cherished 'take-off' countries crashed ignominiously; modernizing forces in the third world persisted in behaving in rather old-fashioned ways, the huge stain of poverty continued to spread, political stability proved as elusive a goal as ever. Even the peasant has refused to lie down and die, indeed, in the rice plains of Indochina and the rain forests of Mozambique and Angola, he displayed a disconcerting vitality and recalcitrance. Among the social scientists there were signs of remorse. Samuel Huntington made the 'change to change'.' On the radical fringes of the academy. modernization theory is rejected in favour of 'dependency' and 'the development of underdeveloplnent'. There has been a spurt of interest in peasant studies. For all this, the obliteration of the peasant is foreshadowed in all influential currents of thought in the social sciences today. Even those engaged in peasant studies think of themselves as students of a class in its death agonies. Developmentalism, bloated and palsied, still squats in the official chair, sullen and defensive, but stubborn. And the paradigm remains unshaken° whatever the road, the destination is universal industrialization and modernity. The corpse by the wayside is that of the peasant. Few are left to weep at the peasant's grave: a clutch of whole earth

romantics, some illegitimate offspring of Mao Tse-tung, and a few

-a

very few - social scientists who have not only refused to join in the frenetic game of model-building, but have denied the possibility of predicting the future in the closed terms characteristic of the models that dominate social theory. The assumption of the peasants' demise, nevertheless, is as shaky as the social theory it epitomizes. While the peasant may not be all that well, neither are his impetuous gravediggers. While his future may be uncertain, so is that of us all. While he may appear to be overwhelmed by the wonders of modern technology and organization, he has demonstrated over millenia a stubborn disposition to survive and adapt and revive which may yet prove to be stronger than the powers he

confronts. 26

Social Sciences and the Peasantry

Whenever social scientist theorize about development, they invariably employ one of two evolutionary formats. Economists and those influenced by economists conceive the process of development as one involving a shift from agriculture to industry as the dominant mode of production. For sociologists, political scientists, psychologists and anthropologists, the broader and vaguer terms employed are tradition and modernity. Involved in both formats however is an unrnistakeable if not always explicit understanding that development connotes the disappearance of the peasantry or at least its consignment to the margins of social existence. Neither of the two models of societal change most influential in our universities, however, conveys any sense of historical openness or predictive humility. Both are unidirectional models, permitting only one range of outcomes from the processes of change associated with the rise of industrial society in the West. The first of these models is that of developmental economics. It is wondrous how many works on development economics one can read in which the peasant either fails to make an entrance on the stage at all or is relegated to the wings a bit player submerged in that background scenery labeled 'the declining rural sector'. I am reminded of the development economist whose ignorance of rural conditions in an overwhelmingly peasant country was proverbial, but who, when challenged with the claim that he had never met a peasant, exclaimed indignantly, 'On the contrary, I once had dinner with one in the Bali Beach Hotell' An unfair story, perhaps, but a true one. The dominant ideology of the development economist is presented in its crudest and most unambiguous form in Walt Whitman Rostov's The Stages o f Economic Growth. In the early 1960's, developmentalism took on an almost apocalyptic flavour. To its devotees the walls of tradition seemed to be crumbling beneath their trumpet blasts, and Rostow was in many respects the Joshua of the period. Rostow lays down a universal stage theory of economic development culminating in the highly industrialized society of his native America, His perspective gives short shrift to the peasant. 'A society predominantly agricultural', he asserts, 'with, in fact, usually 75 percent or more of its working force in agriculture shift m i predominance for industry, communications, trade and services.'

-

leaves us in no doubt that this process is TnevTltaTaTe and highiy desirable.

Rostow's book no longer enjoys the vogue that it did in the early six27

ties. Most of his colleagues are embarrassed by his mechanistic methodology, but, while deprecating his crudity, they do not depart in any crucial respects from his scenario. Gerald Meier, for instance, currently a more prestigious figure, is at pains to point out that the tricks of growth are not as simple as Rostow would have us believe, but he is equally convinced that the tricks will in the end work much as Rostow predicts. 3 Mavericks like Gunnar Myrdal snipe from the sidelines, and the humble agricultural economist persistently remind us of the peasant's existence and problems. But neither has much impact on the developmental juggernaut. The accepted wisdom of developmental economics, then, may be expressed as a restrained and qualified Rostowianism. Parsonian Sociology

The influence of Parsonian sociology on development theory runs only a close second to that of the economists. Talcott Parsons with his famous pattern variables has largely dictated the manner in which noneconomists conceive of social change. For Parsons, tradition and modernity represent the great divide in history, and he has undertaken the task of defining their respective characteristics and celebrating in our era the ascendancy of modernistic virtues rationality, universalistic norms, role specificity and so on. While one must grub hard to find mention of a single peasant in Parsons's abstract tomes, his theoretical system posits a one-to~one rela-

-

tionship between

modernity and industrial society, and the process

towards modernity is seen as cumulative and universal.5 There is clearly no place for the peasant in Parsons's brave new world, and, if he has not said so specifically, his more empirically-oriented disciples leave us in no doubt. Marion Levy Jr., in one of the most widely used texts on social changes, asserts that as 'time goes on, they (the underdeveloped countries) and we will come to be more like what we are now',6 Which is of course an American, highly industrialized society, where agriculture is merely a branch of the prevailing technology. Absence of Countervailing Theory

Like Rostowian economics, Parsonian sociology has had its critics, but, despite protestations to the contrary, there does not exist within

28

academic sociology a really definitive countervailing theory in this area. However Parsons's concepts may be circumscribed and qualified, his central thesis that the process of modernity is a cumulative and universal one, in which traditional societies consisting largely of peasants will be transformed over time into societies based on industrial and bureaucratic values, remains fundamentally intact, save for a few notable figures who refuse to engage in the model-building game at all. No sociologist of the peasantry is further from the Parsonian tradition than Teodor Shanin, whose sensitive and scrupulous analysis of peasant life and aspirations has made such an impact in the recent revival of peasant studies. Yet Shanin shares the dominant belief in the ultimate doom of the peasantry, concluding regretfully that 'the definition of the peasantry which views it as an aspect of the past surviving in the contemporary world seems, on the whole, to be valid'. In political science, the concepts of modernization and political development are overwhelmingly parasitical upon Rostowian economics and Parsonian sociology, sharing all their basic theorems and conclusions. Political scientists have contributed little of consequence to the theory of development, but have made no bones about consigning the peasant to the lowest basement of the modernized future. The enemy is, then, tradition, and where does tradition crouch growling: in the rural areas generally, and among the peasantry in particular. In their schema, developmental forces in the third world may consist of parties, armies, intellectuals, bureaucracies, entrepreneurs, achievers, men of empathy but never peasants. The latter are mostly ignored, or consigned to the developrnentalists' purgatory for passive or perverse resistance to -»-

onrushing development. In a widely used and typical text, we are assured by one political scientist that the new states must 'move speedily into the modern world . _ . economic systems are to be transformed and the remnants of backwardness (a common euphemism for peasant society RM) wiped from the slate', and by another that all 'countries are becoming somewhat less like Ethiopia and somewhat more like the United

-

States'." Even Barrington Moore Jr., in many ways an unorthodox and radical figure in American political science, is no exception in this regard, in his massive study of modern social change, he refers to peasant radicalism as 'the dying wail of a class over whom the waves of progress is about to roIl'.9

29

Neo-evolutionism in Anthropology

Anthropologists, of all social scientists, are least given to generalizing predictive theory, and may be said to have a vested interest in the preses vation of the rustic. This does not prevent them from sorrowing dolefully over the prospective disappearance of their clients under the walls of the megalopolis, nor, alas, does it deter those of them who do venture into the realms of general theory from adding their grist to the mills of modernization forecasting. Robert Nisbet has tellingly demonstrated that mainstream anthropological theory has jumped from one neoevolutionary format to another, with some form of stage theory always in evidence. The trick has been to arrange diverse societies from different times and places along a continuum of development culminating in the industrial suburb or the post-industrial world of Telstar. This staging, as is propounded, represents the internal dynamics of human society as such, on a universal scale. In fact, it does nothing of the sort. The order is solely in the heads of the analysts, not in the actual history of any given society." One has only to peep into a basic text such as Dalton's Economic Anthropology to find the editor conceiving of his role essentially as that of recording the death agonies of the peasant, and one of his most distinguished contributors explicitly expounding a stage theory of society such as that referred to by Nisbet." It can no more be shown that these many diverse societies represent a logical and necessary continuum than it can be shown that the plastic disposal bag is the logical and necessary development from the compost heap. The psychologists, professional and amateur, who enter this field (like McClelland, or Hagen, or Lerner) are in no way distinguishable from their colleagues in other disciplines, save for their peculiar angle of vision, which focusses on the individual personality traits of the innovators and entrepreneurs who constitute the agents of modernization, and represent the antithesis of peasant values. Notionally, the psychological categories of achievement or empathy are open to the peasant, but the most distinguished theorists virtually rule out the possibility ty. Thus Daniel Lerner states as a 'major hypothesis' of The Passing of Traditional Society that 'high empathetic capacity (the modernizing trait) is the predominant style only in modern society, which is distinctively industrial, urban, literate and participant', and conceives the process of acquiring empathy as one involving 'the move from the familiar

and deeply personal life of a family farm in an isolated village to the 30

.

strange impersonality of a 'job' in a busy city . . " 2 David McClelland implies much the same in The Achieving Society, when he dismisses as romantic the notion that 'developing societies can both retain their traditional values and develop econornicallyi 1 3 Historian as Prophets What, however, of the historians, who are loathe to proclaim themselves unambiguously to be social scientists, but who in this context may be regarded in many respects as the original sinners? It is quite remarkable that these sober and meticulous scribes, when once the wand of prophecy is placed in their hands, get carried away on a gale of euphoria which would bring a blush to the cheek of all but the boldest social scientist. Consider the case of William McNeill, whose influential The Rise o f the West is in the grand tradition of developmental history. His book concludes with this ringing declaration: What such a vision of the future anticipates, in other words, is the eventual establishment of a world-wide cosmopolitanism, which, compared with the confusions and haste of our time, would enjoy a vastly greater stability. A suitable political frame for such a society might arise through sudden victory and defeat in war, or piecemeal through a more gradual encapsulation of a particular balance of world power within a growingly effective international bureaucracy. But no matter how it comes, the cosmopolitanism of the future will surely bear a Western imprint. At least in its initial stages, any world state will be an empire of the West. This would be the case even if non-Westerners should happen to hold the supreme controls of world-wide political-military authority, for they could only do so by utilizing such originally western traits as industrialism, science, and the public palliation of power through advocacy of one or other of the democratic political faiths. Hence "The Rise of the West" may serve as a shorthand description of the human community to date, 1 4 Marxism and the Peasantry

Least of all have the Marxists disturbed this consensual pattern of the social sciences. Their legacy is hardly propitious. No nineteenth century prophets were more wholeheartedly modernist, or more relentless in their rejection of the peasant. They certainly proclaim a different path to the goal of modernization, but the end product of their prophecies and prescriptions would seem to make little difference so.far as the peasant is concerned. As is well known, Marx was relentlessly anti-peasant in outlook-" No functionalist ever denounced peasant backwardness and the peasant mentality as impediments to social progress more trenchantly. No social theorists have ever equated the future more unequivocally

31

with industrial society than did Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.° The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by immensely facilitated means of production, draws all, even the most barbarian nations, into civilization . . . - It nnrnnple -_,...,,-.- all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production, it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, that is, to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image."

It may be worth reminding our present-day worshippers of the modernization process that those words were penned 130 years ago, yet the prospect it holds out of universal industrialistn is, I suggest, no closer to realization than it was then. But more of that shortly. Soviet and Western Marxism has hewed closely to an industrial model of social development ever since, with no more than tactical concessions to peasant interests and support. A pair of contemporary Marxists can state without equivocation that development in peasant societies demands concentration upon heavy industry, an allout war on traditionalisrn (sic), and 'creating new centres of political and economic power'." However, a new generation of Marxists and neo-Marxists is more restrained and more conscious of the contradictions inherent in the socalled development process. The work of Andre Gunder Frank and others of the underdevelopment or dependence school have certainly called into question many of the postulates of conventional theory. But it should not be forgotten that the main thrust of their argument is that imperialism holds back the development of the third world, and by development they seem to mean much the same technological end product as their bourgeois opponents, however much they may differ as to its social organization. If the work of their founding father, Paul Baran, is any guide, these theorists also see development in terms of rapid large-scale industrialization and the supercession of the peasantry." The Heresies of Mao Tse-tung

In fact, only one major Marxist social thinker has addressed himself to the shape of the future without taking it for granted that it is a nonfuture for the peasants. This is none other than our ubiquitous friend Mao Tse-tung. Mao's views are not consistent, and have changed over time. During the Great Leap Forward in 1958, for example, he set China the aim of overtaking Britain in industrial production within a relatively

32

short space of time, and clearly expected far-reaching changes in the composition of Chinese society in the direction of urban and industrial occupations. Especially during the Cultural Revolution, however, 51 considerably revised his thinking on this question. In the first place, he came to regard the poor of the world as the major agents of social change, and believed that the struggle of the world's countryside against its cities would be an elemental one in which industrial civilization as we know it would be destroyed. Secondly, he came to have considerable doubts about the desirability of affluence as a social goal, viewing it rather as the precursor of social decline and individual debasement. In his old age, he took a rather Olympian and decidedly un-Marxist attitude towards the future. Whimsically, he speculated on the eventual superces~ sign of the human race by some higher species, perhaps evolved from horses, cows, sheep or insects." The Impact of Industrialization

Turning now from the systematizers to the untidy world, let us look first at the actual impact of industrialization upon the peasantry. As noted, social science proceeds as if the peasantry were already a dying class, and occasionally makes such an unconscious attitude explicit. Thus the anthropologist Jack Potter, in a reader on peasant society, states baldly, 'As anthropologists began to move away from the study of primitive societies to the serious study of peasants, peasants, like the primitives, were rapidly disappearing . . . . In the modern world peasant societies are anachronisms, and it is inevitable that they disappear'.2° Dr Potter got his sums wrong. There are no realiable figures for the

entire period of industrialism. For the period between 1950 and 1965, fairly exact statistics have been compiled by the FAO. As this was the most dynamic period of industrial expansion in world history, they suffice to indicate the general picture: WORLD AGRICULTURAL POPULATION, 1950-1965 1950

1965 Percentage

Total Population 2496m

A grice natural

Population

l 442nd

Total Population

3363m

33

Agricultural Population

1745m

of

Agricultural Population

1950

1965

57'

52

As will be readily observed, the period illustrated, despite its industrial expansion,

witnessed both a considerable growth in world population as a whole and a substantial growth in the number of persons employed (that is, engaged) in agriculture. Far from disappearing, as Potter informs us and the social sciences generally take for granted, the peasant is being reproduced considerably under the umbrella of industrial civilization. Agriculturalists still represent the majority of the world's people. To see what is happening in clearer perspective, let us take comparable figures from the same source for those parts of the world where the vast majority of the world's population is concentrated and where peasant life is the norm: AGRICULTURAL POPULATION OF ASIA, AFRICA AND LATIN AMERICA, 1950-1965 /950 Tore!

Continent

Population

/965 A griculturaf Population

Total Popufarion

Agricultural Population

Percentage vf A griculturaf

Popuiatfon /950 /965

1365m

§171n

I-897111

l 1Tlm

67

62

Latin America

162

94

246

118

58

48

Africa

219

166

314

231

76

74

Asia

Even the limited support given by these figures to the modernizers is in fact over-stated. In most Third World countries, the shift out of

agriculture does not necessarily signify entry into other defined occupational categories, but often merely consignment to the demi-monde of the urban squatter settlement. For this reason alone, it cannot be regarded as a definitive social trend toward industrialization. From this it is apparent that, whatever may be happening in the minority of industrialized countries, the third world has been experienc-

ing a rapid growth in its agricultural population. Lest I be accused of sleight of hand, allow me to acknowledge without compulsion that these figures refer to agricultural populations, and not to peasants as such. There are no figures which will tell us precisely what we want to know, unfortunately, partly because the definition of a peasantry is itself a rnatter of dispute. So we must make do with what we have. But the distinc-

tion in point of fact does not alter the general picture. No one would 34

argue, I believe, that significant growth has taken place in the number of capitalist farmers or plantation labourers in this period, if anything, our knowledge, sparse as it is, would suggest some overall decline in their

numbers. Similarly, any increase in the absolute number of landlords, as formerly pre-peasant societies in Africa, for example, are peasantized, would have to be set against the very substantial losses to the ranks of the landlords in China, Indochina, Cuba, and parts of Eastern Europe. This leaves us with two main social groups -- peasants and landless labourers - who must account for the overwhelming majority of the increase. Although many social scientists would exclude the landless labourer from their definitions of the peasantry, I believe it does violence to the character of rural social relationships in most poor countries to draw this arbitrary distinction, the livelihood and way of life of the landless labourer and the peasant have so much in common as to be indistinguishable in many cases - indeed, they frequently exchange roles, and are found quite frequently to be one and the same person in different phases of the agricultural cycle. Landsberger's argument supporting this view is highly persuasive." Accordingly, when we speak of the growth of the agricultural population, we are speaking of the growth of the peasantry, all low status cultivators. The general picture revealed by these figures is assuredly familiar to the social scientists whose field is the third world, or some part of it, along with the reasons for the trend. The basic reason, of course, is that the nature of economic change in the poor countries has prevented industry from soaking up more than a fraction of the population increases which have occurred during and largely as a result of the world operations of the industrial powers, and that capitalist 'free' farming has been

inhibited. It is all the more remarkable, then, that the inescapable fact that the peasantry is increasing in size finds so little place in the theoretical schema of the developmentalists of all disciplines, is in truth substantially denied by them . The Significance of Proportional Decline

The alert social scientist will note that I have been concentrating upon the absolute growth in the number of the peasants, and ignoring what the figures also reveal - namely, that the proportion of peasants to total population has declined by five per cent in the period under review. Here is the basis for most predictions that the peasantry is indeed a dying social class, whose relative decline is symptomatic of the industrial era,

35

and whose eventual demise is certain, at least as a significant element in social calculations. It is of course a trend that has been more or less con» start since the age of industrialism began. But is it therefore immutable? The question is crucial, and I propose to approach it by breaking it into three parts. First, how significant is the proportional decline in peasant numbers in comparison with the absolute numerical growth of the peasantry? Second, what do past historical experiences suggest with regard to these trends? Thirdly, on what premises can we argue that the relative decline of the peasantry is a definitive trend for the future?

The Limits of Growth Of one thing we can be certain: the figures give little comfort for Carlo Cipolla, the economic historian, in his 1960 prediction that by the year 2020 or thereabouts the peasant will be as marginal as the hunter and gatherer." Nearly a third of the period Cipolla allowed has elapsed, and the peasant, so far from disappearing, is clearly multiplying. What factors can possibly foreshadow a sudden and drastic decline in peasant numbers over the next 45 years? None, I believe, that would not deplete other social classes more drastically. In other words, the only conceivable winnower would be a catastrophic world conflict or series of conflicts, and, while there is every likelihood that this will occur, I know of no expert who does not appreciate that the prime victims of such a cataclysm would be the inhabitants of cities, particularly in the industrialized countries. This is obviously not what Cipolla had in mind. Like his social

science brethren, he was thinking of the victorious march of industrialization and modernization. But, barring some technological and social miracle, there is no possibility whatever that peasant numbers are going to decline in absolute terms, or be substantially reduced in proportional terms by industrialization in anything like this time span. On the contrary, the computations that have been made, even on the most optimistic projections, show that the peasant is going to be around in great numbers for a very long time indeed. Johnston, for example, has made these calculation: When a country starts with 80 per cent of the labour force in agriculture, "if the total labour force is increasing at 2 percent per annum and the non-labour force at 3 per cent, at the end of half a century the farm labour force would still be increasing at 1.5 per cent

annually and would account

for 68 per cent of the total labour

36

force". It would take 100 years to get 50 per cent of the labour force into non-farm employment and 125 years before the farm l a b o r force began to decline in sheer numbers. 2 3

Cold comfort for the modernizers, I would have thought. Consider first the perspective: a lengthy period in which peasant numbers will go on increasing, an apogee when they will stabilize and then start to decline. Now ponder the conditions that will have to be met if even this prolonged reduction of the peasantry is to take place: steady economic growth, a higher rate of industrial employment growth than the third world as a whole has yet been able to achieve, lower population growth rates than are predicted for the third world, an absence of major internal tonal conflicts, political stability, and, of course, the overcoming of ecological and resource constraints upon longrange industrial development. Small wonder that Johnston himself found the prospect an implausible one. It must surely appear even less convincing at the end of the stagnant, crisis-ridden seventies than it did after the buoyant sixties. If we cannot accept this projection as a realistic one, and I hardly think we can, then the day of reckoning for the peasant is postponed to a future so distant as to demand a far more flexible and open forecast of the future than is presented by the prevailing models of social science. The Past in the Present Let us turn now to the second aspect, the experiences of past phases of history which witnessed a relative decline in the numbers of the peasantry not dissimilar to that which has occurred in our era. A little thought will bring to mind the ancient imperial civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Rome, all of which were founded initially upon the productivity, hardi-

hood and diligence of their peasantries, and all of which proceeded in the course of their development to reduce that peasantry in order to feed the lust of the ruling classes for wealth, conspicuous consumption and display, and expansionary wars of conquest (and, on the more creditable side, intellectual and artistic pursuits). Naturally, we have no precise figures for these periods, but there is substantial evidence that over the course of their centuries of development (far longer periods, note, than our present industrial age) the peasant proportion of the population declined in favour of slaves, soldiers, and urban classes. Keith Hopkins, for example, outlines the changes in the social structure of the later Roman Republic between 200 B.C. and 31 B.C. in these terrors: In 300 B.C. Rome was a city-state with an adult male citizen population of

37

about 250,000. It controlled central Italy through a series of alliances with neighbouring towns, which had varying degrees of autonomy and reciprocal rights in their dealings with Romans. Through a combination of aristocratic competition for honour and military glory, a general desire for booty, and inter-city political manoeuvrings, Roman armies plundered, conquered, pacified, governed, and eventually settled the rest of Italy, Sicily, Spain, North Africa, Greece, Eastern Asia Minor, Syria, Gaul and Egypt . The usual estimate of the total population of the empire at the end of the Republic (31 B.C.) is in the region of 50 million. Of these, about four million would have been citizens, including their wives and children. The effects of these conquests were pervasive and uneven. The citizen army, for example, up to 107 B.C. consisted in principle of peasant landholders, who originally served only in the summer fighting season. Increase ingly, extended wars against foreign powers necessitated longer service, peasant-soldiers therefore neglected their holdings. But wars and the government of provinces brought wealth to Rome which could safely and prestigiously be invested only in land, at the same time prisoners of war were enslaved and so provided an alternative source of labour to the peasant-soldiers. Moreover, there were alternative occupations for Roman citizens, both in the provinces and in the new concentrations of population which grew up at Rome and in Southern Italy, where much of the provincial booty and taxes were consumed. As a result of these processes, peasant land was bought up with war profits, the free peasants were dispossessed, and their land was concentrated into plantations. These plantations were cultivated by slaves and produced new capitalist crops (eg. wine and olives) for the growing towns, which themselves consumed and reworked other plunder of empire. Thus while the duration and distance of wars from Rome increased, the number of peasants from which the army could be recruited diminished."

As we know from other sources, this process was accelerated under the Empire. Anyone operating with contemporary social science techniques in those ages could easily, plausibly and trendily have argued that the in-

evitable process of imperial development would signify the disappearance of the peasantry as a class, or its permanent relegation to the margins 0-t" society lWith the benefit of hindsight in these cases, we know that this in fact did not occur. It was not the peasant who foundered in chaos, captains and the kings, their entourages, grades armies, panoplies and glories. In the wake of their demise, the humble peasant proceeded to reclaim his ruined fields, his orchards and his vineyards, to thrive and once more provide the mass base for future exploiters and empire-builders.

mu

Goats in the Forum I do not wish to be misunderstood. I am not arguing that history will

repeat itself, still less that these historical episodes are the proper com38

parative perspective for us to adopt. Nor am I arguing that the peasantry throughout the ages has remained unchanged in character, role or technological level. 1 merely wish to place before you some historical evidence for the view that a relative decline of the peasantry in the course of empire-building and the expansion of industry, commerce and the construction of sumptuous edifices does not necessarily signify a definitive historical trend that we may take for granted and base all our theorizing upon. Andrei Arnalrik, the Soviet dissenter and exile, in

predicting the imminent destruction of the Soviet empire, has made the same point more succinctly and colourfully: Apparently, if there had been a science of futurology in Imperial Rome where, as we are told, people were already building six-storey buildings and there were children's merry-go-rounds driven by steam, fifth-century futurologists would have been foretelling for the following century the construction of 20-storey buildings and the industrial utilisation of steam engines. As we now know, however, in the sixth century goats were grazing in the Forum as they are doing now below my window in the village."

The encompassing facts about the peasant, I believe, are that he has many times gone under in the face of superior technological and organizational power, he has, by the same token, demonstrated an extraordinary persistence and resilience in the face of such power, and recent events in Indo~China should serve to remind us that these characteristics of the peasantry are not confined to the distant past. It may be -- I do not assert it, I merely raise it - that the survival capacity of the peasant, exhibited over rnillennizi, is related to the fact that the mode of his interaction with his environ r'- his ecological rationality, if you like - is so well adjusted that he will continue to be around in

one form or another while more dynamic but unstable systems rise and fall without end. He may always be the social victim par excellence, the sport of greater powers, but at any rate the perennial survivor. If this should come to pass, it will be a revelation to the contemporary social sciences. It will be due to the fact that their basic assertions about the future are false, because their blind faith - and that is all it is, in the final analysis - that the future is an indefinite extension of those elements of the past and present which they have arbitrarily chosen to select and transform into laws of development, is misplaced. The foundation of all their predictions is an assertion of historical unilinearity, of universalistic trends, of cumulative change -...- above all, of an idea of in~ evitable progress, all of which finds no support in actual history, but

only in the patterns into which they have arranged bits and pieces of

39

history. Put more simply, the social scientist believes we are all going steadily and surely in the same direction, by the same means, towards the same goals; but the truth may be that we are galloping madly off in all directions. With evidence now accumulating that the indefinite prolongation and expansion of industrial society may be ecologically insupportable, the elegant edifices erected by the social sciences come to resemble less fortresses of knowledge than sandcastles on the edge of an incoming

tide. The social scientists, in short, are engaged not in scientific predict

son but in prophecy, and pretty unlikely prophecy at that. At least the Delphic Oracle left her clients with a tantalizing alternative, whereas the social prophets of our day would shunt us down a one-way track to a

plastic Disneyland. In Place of Models What then can we put in place of the implausible models of the social sciences? Not another model, to be sure, for that would merely be to close the circle once again, when the crying need so far as social inquiry is concerned is to proclaim that the future is open, its problematics elusive. There is still a place for social theory, but one which is humbler in its ambitions and more conscious of the limitations of the speculative arts, for SO we would do better to think of them. I can do no more than point to three features of our times which to me appear to deserve greater attention in this art of speculation than they are usually accorded: One, that the reconciliation of the two worlds of power and riches, on the one hand, and powerlessness and poverty on the other, may not be possible within any international framework that we can realistically conceive of, that the present framework, being inherently unstable, is liable to explosive disintegration within a measurable time span. Two, that war has been the most dynamic agent of technological and social change in our era, and that the neglect which has been accorded this feature of our epoch by liberal and radical social theorists alike reflects their shallow optimism about the shape of the future. Three, that in view of the staying power exhibited by the humble, parochial peasant over countless ages and through countless systems, it would be more fruitful for social science theory to devote more attention to the kinds of relationship between town and country that have promoted the more lasting and beneficial exchanges between each, rather than concentrating upon the scintillating but conceivably quite temporary achievements and ills of our technological wonderland. 40

Allow me to conclude with a passage from Bertrand Russell, which appears to me to offer more insight into the relative weights of industry and agriculture in the long-term affairs of modern man than we are accustomed to derive from the works of contemporary social science: Industry, except in so far as it ministers directly to the needs of agriculture, is a luxury, in bad times its products will be unsaleable, and only force directed against food-producers can keep industrial workers alive, and that only if many food-producers are left to die. If bad times become more common, it must be inferred that industry will dwindle and that the industrialization characteristic of the last 150 years will be rudely checked."

Notes l . Samuel Huntington, 'The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics', Comparative Politics, Vol. 8, No. 3, April 1971. 2.

Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (London: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1960), 19.

3.

Gerald M. Meier, Leading Issues in Development Economics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 43

4.

See also Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama (London: Penguin, 1968), III, 1203.

.

Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: The Free Press, 1951), 499. 5.6.

Marion J. Levy, Jr., 'Social Patterns (Structures) and Problems of Modernization', Wilbert E. Moore and Robert M. Cook eds., Readings on Social Change, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 207.

7. 8.

Teodor Shanin, Peasants and Peasant Societies (London: Penguin, 1971), 17.

Rupert Emerson, 'ideologies of Delayed Industrialization', and Karl W. Deutsch, 'Social Mobilization and Political Development', Jason L. Finkle and Richard W. Gable ed., Political Development and Soeia! Change, (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1966), 173, 208.

9.

Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 505.

of

Dicratorshzp and Democracy

10. Robert F. Nisbet, Soda! Change and History (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 236-9.

I I . George Dalton, 'Introduction', and Manning Nash, 'The Organization of Economic Life', in George Dalton, ed., Tribal and Peasant Economies, (New York: The Natural History Press, 1967), ix, 9_

12. Daniel Lerner, The Passing o f Traditional Society (New York: Free Press,

1965), 56, 76.

41

13. David McClelland, The Achieving Society (Princeton NJ., Van Nostrand, 1961), 394.

14. William McNeill, The Rise of the West (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), 806-7. 15. See David Mitrany, Marx Against the Peasant (New York: Collier Books, 1961). 16. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto' I Seleefed Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), 112.

17. Peter P. Bell and Stephen A. Res rick, 'The Contradictions of Postwar Development in Southeast Asia', Journal ofContemporaryAsia, Vol. I, No. I (Autumn 1970). 18. Paul A. Boron, The Polirieal Economy

of Growth

(London: Penguin, 1973),

447-8.

19. Stuart R. Schram, Mao The-rung Unrehearsed (London: Penguin, 1974), 26-7. 20. Jack M. Potter, 'Introduction Peasants in the Modem World' in Jack M. Potter, May N. Diaz and George M. Foster eds., Peasant Society: A Reader, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 378. 21. Henry A. Landsberger, Rural Protest: Peasant Movements and Social Change (London° Macmillan, 1974), 6-18. 22. Carlo Cipolla, The Economic Hzlvtory Penguin, 1962), 109.

of

World Population (London:

23. Cited in Guy Hunter, Modernizing Peasant Societies (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 99-100.

24. Keith Hopkins, 'Structural Differentiation in Rome, 200-31 B.C.', in I-M. Lewis, ed., History and Social Anthropology, (London: Tavistock, 1968), 63-4. 25. Andrei Amalrik, Wil! the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? (New York' Harper and Row, 1970), 67.

26. Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society (London: Allen and Un~ win, 1952), 92.

42

CHAPTER FOUR TRADITIONAL MODES AND COMMUNIST MOVEMENTS' CHANGE AND PROTEST IN INDONESIA*

A leading Southeast Asian historian, Harry J. Benda, has made two comments on Asian Communism that are highly pertinent to the evaluation of the role of Indonesian Communism in the 1950's and 1960's. 'Ideology apart,' he notes, 'it is not inconceivable that in Asia (as elsewher11.--l=~!llll. as such provide a substitute for decayed or vanishing social institutions. For it is exactly these institutions the family, the clan, the tribe, or the village community - that have suffered most h e a v y under the eroding onslaught of the economic and political system carried to Asia by the West in the course of the past century or so'.' But ideology too must be taken into account, and Benda has something relevant to say on this aspect of the interaction between Asian Communists and their followers: 'For whatever urban-oriented "modern" leadership might have decreed, at the local level Communists quite soon learned to speak - or slipped into speaking - the language of peasant expectations of apocalyptic change leading to immediate justice on earth. [Peasant audiences] may themselves have taken an active, dynamic part in distilling from the new gospel laid before them what they needed and could assimilate, weaving old and new together into a

_

kind of 'folk Marxism'

- just as they had for millennia done with the

gospels of other sophisticated creeds." Although there is insufficient evidence to test these hypotheses in depth, I will attempt in this paper to demonstrate the validity of both propositions as applied to the Indonesian case. Communist organization , it will be argued, did indeed prove to be a substitute for decayed or vanishing institutions; and not only did the peasant follower of Cornmunism adapt Communist doctrine to his needs, but the doctrine itself, u.

*This paper was prepared for the Con ference on Asian Peasant Revolutions held at Saint Croix in the Virgin Islands, January 24-28 1973. It was published in its present form in John Wilson Lewis, ed., Peasant Rebellion and Communist Revolution in Asia, Stanford University Press, 1974.

43

in the circumstances confronting the Communists, had to be diluted to be consistent with perceptions to which the peasant was attuned. In some instances, the combination of Communist organizing skills and an ideology assirnilable to peasant needs has proved to have a devastating revolutionary dynamic. So it seemed to many observers that this would be true also of the Indonesian Communist movement in the early 1960's. But in the event, this expectation was unfulfilled. Although the movement came to represent a huge tide of protest and impatient aspiration, the very terms of the PKI's accommodation to its environment rendered it incapable of directing that tide toward the destruction of the obstacles in its path. To explore the reasons for the failure of Indonesian Communism to convert grass-roots support into revolutionary force, it is necessary to range widely among the traditional and contemporary phenomena of Indonesian society. The Javanese Peasantry

In most respects, conditions conducive to agrarian unrest are to be found in Java.* The area is marked by acute land hunger, a high incidence of landlessness, and an increasing trend toward 'pauperization' of the peasantry. But one important factor that is applicable to much of the region Zagoria surveys is missing: in Java, there is nothing approaching the incidence of 'parasitic landlordism' found in India, the Philippines, South Vietnam, and other countries of Monsoon Asia! Indeed, Java differs notably from these countries in the smallness of the landowner class as a social grouping, the smallness of landowner holdings, and the low order of economic differentiation among the peasantry. Inequalities

abound, to be sure, but they are inequalities set within an overall pattern of subsistence or below-subsistence farming 4 In addition, Java exhibits strongly one of the characteristics Zagoria has elsewhere identified as inhibiting revolutionary potential. 'A landless class that is divided by caste, language, tribe, or religion will inevitably have great difficulties in achieving unity,' he notes. In the Javanese case, the peasantry is sharply divided into two hostile religio-cultural groups: the abangan, the majority of ethnic Javanese, who wish to preserve the basically aniinist but part Hindu-Buddhist, part Islamic Iifeways derived *I have confined my discussion to Java since information on Communist organization elsewhere in Indonesia is too scanty to warrant analytical study- The fact that both general political developments and Communist operations centered on Java during the period I cover somewhat compensates for this deficiency.

44

from the customs followed by their ancestors from time immemorial; and the safari, or activist Moslems, whose most important cultural referent is their religion.* These two 'exceptional' features of Javanese society together posed a formidable obstacle to the revolutionizing efforts of the PKI and played a significant part in forcing it to accommodate to its social and political environment. The more closely we examine traditional society and its cultural content, the more forcefully are we impressed by the need to view Communist tactics and dilemmas in mobilizing protest in this historical context. Traditional Javanese society was notoriously loose in its organizational structure. As Sartono Kartodirdjo points out: The strongest institutional link in traditional Javanese society was suwita, a system of client relations extending through society from top to bottom. The essence of this institution was an asymmetrical exchange of services, with the client providing products of labour in return for physical protection, chances for advancement, and enhanced status . . . _ Thus the hierarchy of the state, and the bureaucracy in particular, was integrated not by formal institutional or organisational means, but by the myriad dyadic linkages of the client system. Since the traditional state had no functionally specialised political and economic organisations separate from these particularised pyramids of patrons and retainers, political relations were always preponderantly particularist, ascriptive, and diffuse in character.' The relatively formless nature of the authority structure was

replicated at the village level. The traditional Javanese village appears to have been only loosely integrated by work exchanges, the political authority of the village head, and various cultural mechanisms for promoting harmony and. a sense of community. By comparison with the

Chinese or Vietnamese village, say, it lacked marked gradations of wealth and landholding, and it was deficient in articulated solidary bonds over and beyond the base unit of the nuclear family. Traditional protest and rebellion likewise demonstrated an absence of enduring, tightly knit, and more or less continuous vehicles for the expression of discontent comparable to the clans, guilds, or secret societies of China and Vietnam. Rebellion in Indonesia has customarily taken the * A hangar: and safari represent the two major cultural-cum-ideological streams (aliran) in Javanese society. A third stream, that of the PfUoJf, or Javanese nobility, constituting the great tradition of old Java in its modern antecedents, also has to be incorporated into the cultural patterning. For an extended dicussion of the alimn and their modern political expressions, see Clifford Gcertz, The Religion

45

of Java (Glencoe, I t

l.: Free Press, 1960).

form of sudden, passionate outpourings of violence and agitation or equally idiosyncratic acts of withdrawal, rather than carefully laid and constructed designs of subversion. Although specific social conditions and structures certainly influenced the locale and timing of dissident movements, the coherence of such movements seems to have been created through the medium of common cultural experience. Magical-mystical movement of a messianic kind, in a word, have formed the leitmotif of traditional rebellion. In precolonial society, the spirit of political estrangement was epitomized in the sage-like figure of the adjar, together with his pupils, 'whose typical role is to diagnose decay within the kingdom and warn of the impending down-fall of the dynasty." Although 'the classical adar vanished from the scene with the penetration of Islam and the later superimposition of bureaucratic colonial authority . . . his social and political role [was taken over by] the rural Islamic kjai [religious teacher] of the late pre-colonial and colonial periods." The colonial order acted to spur revolt by underminingthe traditional economic, political, and cultural system and creating 'a chronic state of crisis in society." By inducting the traditional ruling groups into their apparatus, but repelling and persecuting the kai, the Dutch ensured that, in times of stress and breakdown, the masses would turn to these counter-elites for the inspiration and organization of resistance. Meanwhile, the Moslem zealots, impelled by the activist cast of their religion to be more assertive in their opposition than the adar, responded by emerging at times of disorder and distress at the head of their faithful santri (pupils) 'to play brief but at times decisive roles in the collapse of an old order and the emergence of a new, before retiring again to their former isolation." As Benedict Anderson emphasizes, the

very distance of the k a i from constituted authority enhanced their popular standing: perceived as being free of self-interest, they radiated a pure flame of dissident power that attracted adherents." Both the colonial and postcolonial orders abound with examples of revolt sparked and led by Islamic teachers and holy men." Some Consequences of the Colonial Era

The overall effect of Dutch rule was to sap whatever vitality there was in Javanese village society and undermine its fragile organizational structure, Traditional elites, from the nobility down to the village heading, were drawn into the colonial administrative apparatus and rendered less capable than before of acting as mediators for peasant interests. At the

46

same time, Dutch economic penetration had the effect of stifling the emergence of differentiated strata in the countryside, so that no equivalent of a gentry class developed to provide local leaders for revolt, resistance or renovation. The prevailing system of commercial agriculture practised in _lava intensified tendencies toward involution and 'shared poverty." while simultaneously weakening the social mechanisms that might have enabled the village to cope in some measure with the increasing poverty and distress. Viewing the resultant social fragmentation from the vantage point of the early post-independence years, Clifford Geertz characterized the evolution of Javanese small town and village society as 'an unbroken advance towards vagueness.9!2 The village in particular, with virtually no informal but clearly bounded social groups such as cliques and gangs," was notable for 'the general formlessness of the life [and] the looseness of ties between individuals.' "' A number of anthropologists and sociologists have noted that the nuclear family represents the only stable village corporate group in Java.' 5 Town life has not been very different in this respect, at least at the provincial level. Relations among upper-class urban dwellers are govern~ ed primarily by elaborate and intimate rituals of status, ceremonial and influence that seldom coagulate into more than informal cliques of a generally limited kind," and relations among the poorer kampong dwellers have tended to replicate the village pattern." As for the estate labourers and other marginal economic groups created by Dutch intervention, various factors appear to have inhibited their conspiratorial organization. In addition to the lack of a cultural tradition conducive to such a development, to say nothing of close Dutch

supervision, most agricultural labourers were merely seasonal workers whose strongest ties continued to be with their nuclear families and home villages.

We find further confirmation of social and cultural impediments to lasting organization in the fact that even among industrial and semiindustrial workers in the modern era, trade unions and similar associations have been susceptible to pronounced membership 'drift' and multiple allegiance, solidarity consciousness apparently finding little focus within such organizations qua organizations." Even the PKI, with its undoubted organizational skills and drive, was never able to overcome this problem completely in its heyday. In the colonial era, as we have seen, in the absence of any social

organizations capable of promoting protest and rebellion, the vacuum

47

was filled by the kai, a figure standing outside the formal structures of Indonesian society and drawing elements from within these structures toward him only at times and under conditions of local unrest. Even after the formation of nationalist movements and trade unions, the religio-cultural broker of dissidence retained a good deal of power and influence on events. Anderson argues persuasively that to; sir l E.; independence itself was ignited on a mass scale by forces working within the tradition of the adar and the kai. In this case, however, a new twist was given to the traditional formula under the influence of the Japanese style of rule on Java. As George Kahin observes, 'The central thrust of revolutionary power in the critical generative stage of the struggle for independence . . . lay primarily, and to a decisive degree, with Indonesian youth,' and these youth were products of an experience akin to that of the traditional religious training schools." According to Anderson: The institutions created for youth by the Japanese authorities bore certain common features that, by an irony of history, replicated some of the essential characteristics of the traditional pesantren. Accordingly, the experience of being part of these institutions reinforced the cultural power of that tradition no less than it instilled new conceptions and cemented new relationships . . . . The impact of the Japanese style was powerfully enhanced by the familiar traditional resonances it evoked . . . . Victory in the war and independence for Indonesia depended on the sefnangaf [spiritual power] and discipline of the Indonesian people themselves. The similarity between these ideas and Javanese conceptions of power as cosmic energy, to be concentrated and accumulated by ascetic purity and spiritual discipline, was quite apparent."

Alongside the activities of the pemuda (youth), and sometimes converging with them, especially in the rural areas, there appeared once again on the historical stage the more truly traditional figure of the kai,

hiding his time in isolated oblivion until the portents of dynastic collapse became evident." Together, but only in a very limited sense coordinated, these forces supplied the diffuse militant energy of the national revolution and its impulse toward social radicalism, but, lacking effective leadership and a uniting ideology, the radical wave gradually spent itself and left control of the national revolution in the hands of moderate and upper-class leaders of the older nationalist moveinents." In the latter stages of the revolution, and especially in the early years following independence, political parties and their networks of voluntary associations came to fill the empty shell of the village with organizational activity. It is testimony to the dearth of solidary bonds in small town and village society that the parties made such decisive inroads in these com-

48

munities, providing the major focus of group loyalties and activities. The principal mode of entry of the parties was via patron-client relationships streamed along the lines of long-standing cultural cleavages. This was a pattern to which, as we shall see, the PKI adhered in at least some essentials. A number of factors account for the rapid and extensive upsurge of the Communist movement in Indonesia after independence. The expectations aroused by the Indonesian national revolution, in part fueled by a long millenarian tradition, were not matched by any program or vision of social change that gave promise of satisfying those expectations. The independence settlement itself heavily compromised the achievement of independence by making extensive concessions to Dutch economic and political influence. Moreover, the parties mainly responsible for effect~

ing that settlement established a distance and remoteness from the populace that left the latter in a representational void. Over a longer span of time, there was little in the way of development in Indonesia that held out any hope of alleviating the acute problems of land hunger, underemployment and material distress, which were most pronounced

on Java. The thrust of the Communist movement, from the time of its revitalization in 1951 after a disastrous and bloody setback in 1948, was toward the creation of political conditions that would make far-reaching social change possible. Its message was initially directed toward those very groups that felt most acutely disadvantaged and disenchanted by the post-independence settlement - urban workers and lowly state functionaries, estate labourers, squatters on estate lands, and the young people in the more detraditionalized villages. But even if the PKI had fully

mobilized and organized these groups, they would not have constituted a sufficient base of support for a challenge to the established order. The PKI felt obliged to seek a wider clientele among the peasants, and for that purpose to appease a section of the elite that could afford it political protection while it pursued its grass-roots mobilization. Both prongs of this extended strategy obliged the Communists to bend toward an accommodation with traditional forces and ideas, both embroiled them too in the religio-cultural divisions that bite deep in Indonesia and cross~cut their efforts to agitate along class lines. By the imperative of survival, the

PKI thus gave sustenance to the very forces it needed to overcome in order to reach its objective, The tension between the pressures toward adaptation and the desire for transformation hence lies at the centre of

49

the ideological dynamics of the Communist movement between 1951 and 1965.

The character of the PKI has to be gauged from two overlapping viewpoints: that of the leadership as expressed in its goals and strategies, and that of the cultural perceptions of the huge peasant mass it rallied behind it in the l950's and 1960's. Although from the first angle one can detect a continual, if circuitous, striving to use the Party to promote change, from the second, the movement seemed to be concerned rather with defending the material and sociocultural interests of the abangan Javanese against the inroads of both activist Islam and urban-sponsored 'modernizations The pressures of change, slow as their pace was in Indonesia, affected the PKI leaders and the peasants alike. The former were impelled to dilute their doctrine to make it palatable to the peasant, the peasant, for his part, was induced by his need for a social and cultural champion to accept new ways of organization and thinking promoted by the Communists, so long as they could be harmonized with his basic urge to conserve a past that represented his frail peg of security . Certain features of the leadership and cadre force of the PKI placed the Party in a uniquely favourable position to appeal to the dispositions of the abangan. But, by the same token, the special character of abangan society and culture sharply limited the PKI's ability to transform this large social grouping into a disciplined political resource. The Social Choices in the Early Years of the PKI

In the first phase of its existence, the PKI worked some direct accommodation with the Islamic tradition of revolt, which played a significant part in the Communist uprisings against the Dutch in 1926-27,23 The failure of the revolts, and the consequent punitive measures visited upon the PKI by the Dutch, effectively put the Communists out of action for almost two decades. Although a weak underground Party nucleus was reestablished in 1935 and gathered adherents during the Japanese occupation, it was not able to organize a successful anti-Japanese movement. In this, the Communists, like other political factions, were deterred in part by the effectiveness of Japanese counterintelligence work and in part by the cultural inexperience in conspiratorial techniques already referred to. But the main thing that worked against the development of a popular resistance movement was the Japanese policy of catering to nationalist sentiment in Indonesia. By sponsoring a myriad of organize sons that were designed to rally the population to their side but at the 50

same time held out the ultimate promise of independence, the Japanese managed to co-opt most of the actual or potential nationalist leadership." In the early stages of the independence struggle, the PKI, reestablished openly in October 1945, pulsed in tune with the pemuda rhythm, and tried to reach the youth with a militant social program formulating goals for their struggles. This bid f o r pemuda support was launched by a maverick Communist, a lawyer with pronounced mystical leanings named Mohammed Jusuf, who had no close connections with the prewar PKI apparatus and whose political style was quite out of character with that of conventional Communist leaderships." It is more than doubtful that Jusuf's attempt to unite the radicals could have succeeded, but in any case in March 1946 he was thrust aside by older generation PKI leaders returned from long years of exile and detention in Dutch prisons and camps." These men were disinclined to follow Justlf's footsteps. Long out of touch with the situation in their country, bound by long-standing ties to the elite nationalist leaders, and inured (by many years of Comintern experience or influence) to the politics of maneuver and compromise, they elected to follow the then current international Communist line of accommodation to the purely nationalist objectives of the Republican leaders, and endorsed their policy of compromising with the Dutch and other Western governments. But a large number of younger PKI or future PKI members, including those who were to become the top leaders and key cadres of the movement in the 1950's and 1960's, were caught up in thepemuda wave, some of them as prominent activists and leaders. These young men retained and later revived the sense of radical mission and nationalist purpose that animated them in the hectic years of 1945 and 1946. By this time it had become more difficult for Communism to effect the kind of conjunction with Islamic militancy that had occurred in the 1920's. Communist attacks on orthodox Moslem leaders of Sarekat Islam in that period, the hardened division between Islamic and secularist nationalists that developed during the l930's and early 1940's, and the formal expression of this division in the Japanese-sponsored organizations during the occupation had all combined to rouse the ire of Moslem religious leaders against the "atheistic" Communists. After the outbreak of the national revolution, Islamic groups were sufficiently well-organized and militant to cater adequately to their own communities, and they erected formidable barriers of sentiment against

51

Communist infiltration. The Communists found it easiest to gain adherents among the abangan Javanese of central and east Java. The road to the abangan was relatively open, since many of their accustomed leaders, the prrjajf, had lost all standing because of their collaboration with the Japanese in depredations against the peasants. The abangan, alarmed by the zeal and organizational advantages of the Moslems, were susceptible to the appeals of any radical non-Islamic group that showed a concern for their material and cultural needs. How muchthe santrf-abangan schism intensified during the revolution was demonstrated in 1948, by which time the pemuda drive was long spent and the political stage dominated by relatively regularized Party and military structures. The PKI, affected by the increased intransigence of Moscow in the opening rounds of the Cold War, took a more militant stance in opposition to the Republican leadership, culminating in a confrontation between Republican and pro-Communist armed groups at Madison in September." The PKI was then set upon by the loyalists, and in the ensuing fighting and disorders Communist supporters and Moslems slaughtered each other with wild abandon in the hinterlands of east and central Java, with the latter having by far the better of the contest." The PKI was decimated for the second time; of more lasting significance, it was from this time forward identified for better or for worse with the abangan outlook, and was to find devotion to Islam a major limiting factor on the growth of its mass membership and influence. The Party After Independence After languishing for some years, the PKI was taken in hand in January 1951 by a new leadership that was to remain intact for 14 years, that was

to bestow on the movement its greatest political gains and inflict on it its most devastating setback, and that was to devise a most subtle and intricate relationship between modern and traditional influences. The young leaders and cadres who came to the fore in 1951 and the years immediately following belonged to the pemuda generation and, in many cases, had been pemuda stalwarts.* They were imbued with the radical nationalist spirit-CharacterisTI1c o'f' their age group, and animated by the pernuda ideal of creating .e fig, independent, and 'progressive' Indonesia. By virtue of their own and their followers' experience in the revolution and their relatively low-status origins, the new PKI leaders were

-

- had all been prominent activists. All were 30 years old or under in 1951 _

*The top leaders of the PKI in this period

Sudisman

52

D.N. Aidit, M.H. Lukman, Njoto,

quick to responci to the deep dissatisfaction with the fruits of independence already in evidence by 1951. They hit out strongly against the style and policies of the government, labeling the settlement with the Dutch a betrayal of the revolution l status nesia following independence that of a 'sernicolonial, sernifeudal' state. Their programmatic utterances called for the repudiation of the Round Table Conference Agreement ending the war with the Dutch, the nationalization of foreign enterprises, and the reconstruction of Indonesian society along prescribed Communist lines industrialization, the modernization of the country, the inauguration of a technological and social revolution in the countryside, and the elimination of superstition and backwardness." These policies struck strong chords among the disaffected lower strata, insofar as they emphasized Indonesia's dependent status, they also echoed the feelings of those elite groups that aspired to establish and lead a strong, independent, and assertive nation. These groups were most heavily represented within the 'radical' wing of the PNI (Partai Nasionalis Indonesia), which captured the leadership of that party, repudiated coalition with the more

m

a n

-

Westernized parties, and took over the government early in 1953. At this stage, the ideology and style of the PKI gave it the unambiguous stamp of a modernizing force. Its program, as we have noted, strongly reflected the modernizing thrust of international Communist doctrine. In addition, alone among the political parties, the PKI sought to appeal to the populace across ethnic, religious, regional, and cultural boundaries, and to rally them to the Communist banner along the lines of actual or incipient class solidarities. It strove to implant trade union

and socialist consciousness among the workers, and to educate the peasants to an awareness of their common needs and aspirations as a class." Organizationally, the Party sought to transcend patron-client and aliran modes by promoting participant consciousness, applying universal standards of recruitment, promoting able members on merit and irrespective of status, developing specialized roles in the organization, and establishing a disciplined system of authority based on normative rules of conduct. Part of the PKI's success as a mobilizing force, it seems reasonable to assume, sprang from its ability and willingness to provide scope for the talents of thousands of cadres who in more tradition-bound parties and organizations would have been denied upward mobility. It would be highly misleading to overlook or minimize in any way

these modernistic features of the PKI, which all commentators have

53

recognized. But since we are here concerned with the PKI's impact on and interaction with its huge peasant base, there is every reason to look carefully at those factors that pulled the Party in the direction of the traditional ideas and practices which prevailed among the peasants. The Communist leaders, overwhelmingly persons of lower-status urban background who had experienced their greatest inspiration and sense of mission in the early years of the revolution, felt no explicit allegiance toward a traditional order that had become seriously attenuated in the last half century or so of Dutch rule, and that moreover had shown itself utterly incapable of coping with the challenges and stresses of the occupation and national resistance. Nor were they, like so many of their higher-status, better-educated nationalist competitors, drawn in an arnbivalent fashion to worship the order, rank, and routine of the Dutch colonial system. At the same time, they were strongly anti-Western, and heavily influenced by the mystique of the revolution and national awakening associated with the pemuda efflorescence, which as we have seen contained strongly traditionalist undertones. Part of this ideological inheritance included a reverence toward the Indonesian or, more specifically, the Javanese precolonial past, which was seen to have represented a period of national greatness, 'primitive communist' customs, and cultural values superior to foreign ways. These precious traditions of the past were believed to live on among the common people , overlaid by oppressive and colonial layers, and to bear the seeds of national revival and adaptation to 'national democratic' change." In this respect, then, the PKI leaders and cadres were attuned to traditions consonant with the outlooks of both the Javanese elite and the Javanese

peasantry. They were open to induction into a neotraditionalist political and social framework under certain conditions, and these conditions were in many respects created by their relative weakness in relation to their adversaries. The Communists might have hoped to elevate class to a primary place in the political stakes, but prevailing social and political cir-

cumstances weighed heavily against them. The urban workers were relatively few in number, and predominantly employed in small and scattered semicraft enterprises where patron-client relationships between owners and workers remained strong." A great part of the urban work force was casual, itinerant, and underemployed. But one step away from the peasantry, or in many cases still partly dependent on farming for

their livelihood, these workers (a high proportion of them village women

54

augmenting their family incomes) were far from ideal material for the promotion of class-based politics." Additionally, they were acutely vulnerable to governmental and military repression, as the clampdown in August 1951 following a wave of PKI-led strikes had confirmed." lndustrialization failed to make headway between 1951 and 1965, and the PKI was unable to put muscle into its proletarian nucleus, it felt compelled to adopt moderate tactics in the unions under its control while seeking to implant stronger class and political consciousness among the workers through education and propaganda alone.*

Among the peasantry, there was considerable discontent in some areas, but the PKI was in a poor position to exploit it for revolutionary purposes. Like all the other parties, the PKI was urban-based and lacked cadres in the countryside, where these did exist, the Party was in no position to direct and discipline them until it had gained greater political experience. A local target for use in mobilizing the peasantry was also difficult to identify. In contrast to many other Asian societies, the 'shared poverty' system common in Java had kept social differentiation in the villages down to a minimum and prevented the growth of a substantial landed class, in comparison with patron-client ties organized along the santrabangan axis, class lines of identification were weak and submerge ed. Local village officials could serve, and did serve, as objects of competition and conflict, but these too tended to take on religio-cultural coloring and in any case to offer only minimal opportunities for radical mobilization in a system where preponderant power lay in the hands of urban officials outside the villagers' reach. Although the PKI sought to implant class consciousness among its worker and peasant followers, and succeeded to some extent in doing so, social and political circumstances

combined to delay and dilute the impact of this effort, while the PKI masses, at most partly detraditionalized, tended to interpret even those PKI policies that were directed toward tangible political goals from the standpoint of their traditional belief system. For its own reasons, the PKI leadership itself found it necessary over time to lend power to this traditionalist image of itself. *lt is notable that PKI, programmatic declarations and conference reports provided virtually no directions for l a b o r agitation after 1953, even though the Party led the largest trade union federation, SOBSI. Apart from a short period of industrial militancy in 1960, when the PKI was testing its ability to influence the government by radical pressures, the Communists' efforts on behalf of the industrial workers were almost completely reserved for political ends in broad conformity with government policy. Nevertheless, the PKI was considered the most active intervener on behalf of workers' interests. See Lance Castles,

Religion, Politics and Economic Behavior in Java (New Haven, Conn.: Southeast Asia

Studies, Yale University, 1967), pp.8l-84.

55

The directly political constraints on a radical, class-based strategy were no less compelling. The Indonesian Communists, unlike their counterparts in China, Vietnam, Burma, Malaya, and the Philippines, had failed during the World War to marshal nationalist sentiment and traditional sources of revolt under the umbrella of a resistance movement against the Japanese invaders, and, largely as a result of this failure, they were not equipped with nationalist credentials or resources built up in armed struggle when the nationalist revolution broke out in 1945. With these handicaps, they not only failed to gain hegemony of the national

revolution, but in the aftermath of the Madium affair emerged from that revolution to face the challenges of independence weak, divided, and with their nationalist claims sullied. Ranged against them was an ongoing political system dominated by a coalition of high-status nationalists and Islamic elites backed by a substantial army, which, if resistant to civilian control, was at the same time strongly anti-Communist. For the Aidit leadership, both armed agrarian revolution and militant political opposition based on radical elements in the towns and countryside were ruled out by the stark fact of Communist weakness in relation to the government forces.* This conclusion was fortified by the August 1951 episode, when the union militancy that led to heavy punitive measures against the PKI was not matched by an equal willingness on the part of the PKI's followers to rally to its aid at a time of travail. Ever present, too, in the minds of the PKI leaders was the memory that violence had cost them dearly in the past, whereas the Republic, whatever its deficiencies, was in part the product of their struggles and sacrifices, the PKI could not lightly put itself in the same position as the Moslem insurgents of the Darul Islam or of secessionist groups by openly seeking its overthrow, By 1952 the PKI leaders had come to the conclusion that they must pursue a gradualist, moderate, and flexible strategy, hinged upon an alliance with one of the major parties and the extraction from this alliance of maximum freedom to pursue the amassing of grass-roots support in the expectation of ultimately opening wider political options for themselves." The strategy was cast in the form of a united national front program, following Soviet-disseminated precedents, but it very soon came to have a distinctive Indonesian flavor imparted by sociocultural *Aidit specifically rejected the path o f armed guerrilla struggle in his report to the Fifth Congress of the PKI in 1954. See D,N. Aidit, Problems of the Indonesian Revolution

(Bandung: Demos, 1963), p.254. The PKI leadership seems never to have contemplated it seriously thereafter, A policy o f urban opposition was implicitly ruled out by the character

of the PKI's united national front strategy.

56

and political conditions. In 1952, the governmental alliance between the two largest parties, the PNI and the Masjumi, began to break down, and the opportunity the PKI had been waiting for appeared. The PNI began to adopt a more radical nationalist stance congenial to the PKI, which eagerly offered the PNI its parliamentary support in return for an understanding that its legality would be respected so long as it did not engage in anti-government agitation or the promotion of class conflict." The effect of this informal agreement was to bind the PKI as a junior partner to a party that was strongly Javanist, based on the prijaji class and its partly Westernized offshoots, and basically conservative in social policy and outlook. Thus the Communists were driven by social and political circumstances toward an adaptation to traditionalist forces.

As the PKI's support began to grow within the framework of the alliance strategy, the accommodationist pressures on it intensified. The Party's appeal spread out rapidly into the villages of central and east Java, whereupon the influence upon it of vertical alignments and other traditional ties became more salient and inhibiting- In locales with a record of radicalism not already preempted by Islamic groups, the PKI effected its penetration via detraditionalized elements, particularly village youth partially uprooted by the disorders of the occupation and revolutionary war." Through their agency, the Communists agitated against traditional barriers to change and reform, such as authoritarian Iurafz (headmen) and their subordinates. Once again, however, the pace

of these 'vanguard' villages had to be adapted to the requirements of overall strategy and the lower order of militancy displayed by the mass of

villagers i n f l y enced by the PKI, so that the promotion of agitational politics was increasingly replaced by an accent on welfare programs and the nationalist consensus that united the Communists and the PNI-led governments from 1953 onward. In other villages in which the PKI established its influence in the 1950's and early 1960's and in which there was no easy line of access via existing radical tendencies, the Party relied mainly on traditional patronclient and authority relationships to establish its organization. Some Communist patrons were recruited through kinship links with urban leaders attached to the Communist cause, others through their desire to advance their interest against competitors in the village domain with the support of a well-knit and active Party machines, and still others through

57

their opposition to Islamic groups in the village power structure.* Later, as the PKI's moderate and patriotic stance and the respectability it gained by association with the government and Sukarno became more pronounced, important village patrons were attracted by the Party's image and its promise of providing them with opportunities for personal advancement. The PKI was aided in its effort on the village front by the failure of the PNI to use its base among the prijaji and pamong prada (state bureaucracy) to bid for active peasant allegiance, as an urban elite used to taking rural acquiescence for granted, the PNI leadership failed to appreciate the extent to which disruptive change and alarm at Islamic resurgence had induced the abangan Javanese to look for a social and

cultural champion wit h greater dynamism and concern for their interests . The PKI, with its activist organization and underdog's drive, began to fill the village vacuum to an ever-increasing extent at the expense of the PNI, as the 1955 general elections and the 1957 regional elections amply illustrated." In the process, the PKI took on more and more the role of a broker for abangan cultural values. Whatever the Party's view of its aims and tactics, the humble pea~ sent could be excused for interpreting its actions on his behalf through traditional spectacles. The PKI vigorously promoted the radical nationalist issues that fed the restlessness and disorientation of large numbers of small-town dwellers and villagers, and by SO doing stirred in them that sense of oneness of the rakjat (common people), which was deeply rooted in Javanese culture." ,It reminglgd vidagers of the

_gag

glories of Indonesia's (non-Islamic) heritage, and insisted both on the

relevance of this heritage to the transformation of society and on the superiority of Indonesian ways to all foreign ways." It defended com-. munal customs and rights, interpreted in the broadest possible sense, against 'feudal' demands and capitalist inroads alike." It administered indefatigably to the elementary needs of the peasants, just as the *Generally speaking, Communist patrons seem to have come from among well-to-do

and frequently 'modern' (in terms of occupation and urban orientation) villagers. See Selosoemardjan, Social' Changes in Jogjakarla (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, l960), p.l76, Robert Jay, Javanese Villagers (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969), pp.422-28, and Jay, Religion and Politics in Rural Central Java (New Haven, Conn.: Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University, 1963), pp.98-99. With all hypotheses concerning Communist bases among the peasantry, however, it is well to bear in mind Sartono's caution that 'Studies of Indonesian political developments since Independence

contain scarcely any sustained analysis of the rural population' 'Agrarian Radicalism in Java.' in Claire Holt, ed., Culture and Politics in Indonesia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972), p.71.

58

righteous kings and officials of popular legend had done in the past. It propounded the promise of a better future for the common people, after the style of jealously preserved treasures of folklore and prophecy. With respect to the przjaji, the PKI adopted an attitude in accord with the ambivalence of the abangan toward their superiors, giving critical support to 'progressive' officials and organizing concerted opposition to 'reactionary' ones." This combination of appeals by the PKI, outstandingly successful as it was in the parliamentary period in building up the Party's numbers and mass influence and in maintaining the governnlent's general benevolence toward it, did not bring the Communists appreciably closer to their goal of national power; their relationship with the PNI was predicated on that party's right to determine the central political issues. PNI plans did not include extending to the PKI a share in government office or introducing any significant part of its social program. The government's main attention was given to international affairs, and to the promotion of the interests of the political-bureaucratic-entrepreneurial cliques with which it was closely connected. Yet the PKI could not press the claims of its clientele beyond moderate limits without endangering the alliance that had brought it its gains, especially since the anti-Communist parliamentary opposition was sufficiently strong to represent a continual threat to

its security. The Communist appeal perforce had to be cast increasingly in terms of the nationalist temper which it shared with the government, and which exercised a strong hold over the minds of the political public. By 1957 the Communists' electoral advances had raised a distinct possibility that they might capture an absolute parliamentary majority in the general elections scheduled for 1960. But they can hardly have

counted strongly on being given the opportunity of coming to power in this manner, especially in view of mounting dissatisfaction with the way in which the parliamentary system was functioning and the army's determination to take a hand in the country's political future. At the same time, given the political constraints on the PKI and the diffuseness of its bases of support, the Communists had little alternative but to play a waiting game. The longer the Party waited, however, the more strongly its ideology and policies came to reflect the weakening of its class stand and its accommodation to neotraditionalist modes. The PKi's material by this time was beginning to reflect the actuality, rather than the doc~ trinal symbolism, of its political position. It stressed what was common among the interests and outlooks of the parties forming the government

59

1

alliance, thus reinforcing the disposition of both the elite and the political public to see the contours of politics in aliran terms, and prompt ting its own followers to view its role as one associated with rather than sharply distinct from that of the other parties in the alliance* Similarly, by seeking to accumulate the largest possible membership and following from all strata of society as a means of pressing its claims to a share in office while at the same time deterring repression, the PKI was impelled to broaden the ambit of its appeal along nationalist lines and to downgrade specifically class demands."

The PKI and Sukarno

With the PKI denied political initiative, and discontent and rebellion mounting in the country, Sukarno and the army moved in to oust the parliamentary regime and inaugurate the system of Guided Democracy. Once again, fundamental social change was deferred by the device of institutional rearrangement and a still stronger resort to neotraditional and nationalist appeals. At the same time, Sukarno undercut the drawing power of the PKI's radical program by introducing measures to cushion strategic sectors of the society against economic distress. The PKI, caught between the Scylla of the Sukarno-army partnership and the Charybdis of the anti-Communist regional rebels, could see no option other than to follow and adapt its coalition strategy to the new dispensation, with Sukarno as the key figure in its moves to gain security for itself. Inescapably, this decision dictated a further and more extensive accommodation to traditional forces. Sukarno cast his magnetic appeal in images that evoked widespread

devotion from Indonesians of all kinds, but more especially from the Javanese abangan heartland. The themes he stressed completion of the national revolution, national unity, Indonesian identity, antiimperialism, democracy with guidance -..- were all traced in an imagery striking deep chords among this aliran. National pride was fostered by an idealized picture of the Javanese past drawn from historical legends and the wayang plays, in which the traditional emphasis on harmony, the mediation of conflict by consensus practices, mutual assistance, and a sense of order fused with his modernist ideas into a dynamic conception of a future harmony based on the values of the Javanese perso reality and

---

..

*This point should not be overstressed, however. Part of the PKI's appeal lay in the fact that it was simultaneously identified with D0})ln8,l' government policies and dissociated

from unpopular government actions and behavior.

60

culture. His populism was modern in its promise of some participant role to all citizens, but it was also cast in an authoritarian mould justifying the leadership of the common people by their traditionally sanctified leaders. His formula for national unity through Na5akom,* while notionally according equality to all suku (nationalities), in practice promoted unity on Javanese terms by repressing regional ambitions and strengthening the role of the political centre; it accorded first place in politics to expressive leaders and native sons with traditional merit or its pretense behind them, it strengthened the bureaucracy, a Javanese instrument, as against local and regional autonomy. Sukarno's analysis and prescription were pertinent enough to account for their appeal. Their implicit authoritarianism was if anything welcomed by a great part of the political public, for whom the novel practices of Western-style democracy had proved deeply disenchanting, and who were ready to follow a leader with charisma and a panacea. As such, Sukarno's most pronounced appeal was to the alienated public and the abangan, who read into his ideas (with his aid) a sign of the return of a strong and just ruler who would restore the stability and prosperity of the realm and make of the kraton, or palace, a center of power and attraction. His ideology embraced millions in the psychological rewards of integration into the national crusade and the struggle to achieve utopia." The almost contrived blend of past- and future-oriented elements in Sukarno's ideology was duplicated in the structures of his political system. Many of the formal institutions of the regime were outwardly modern and 'progressive' in character, although all were imbued with the mystique of national oneness and elite guidance that derived from powerful precolonial traditions. of greater significance, however, was the fact that other structures, and particularly the informal modes of decision-making that were more crucial than the institutional panoply, were more obviously traditionalist in inspiration and style. The powerful court circle, the modern pruaji at the head of bureaucratic units converted to appanages, the imposition of loyalty tests as the main criteria of worth these, along with the formal restoration of the pamong prada to something approaching its former glory and power, resounded with echoes from the Javanese imperial past." By underwriting Sukarno's ideology and political structure, glorifying his national role, and agreeing to conform with his guidelines for the

-

-

1

*An acronym signifying the unity of nationalist, religious, and Communist groups in

society.

61

country, the Communists were drawn toward a more explicit accommodation to tradition. There were sound pragmatic grounds for their alliance with the President, who represented their strongest protection against the army and their best hope of obtaining a strategic position in the power apparatus without a fight they could not expect to win. At the same time, there were more than pragmatic reasons that made their coming together possible and mutually agreeable. As we have noted, both Sukarno and the PKI struck their strongest chords among the same clientele -~ the lower urban strata caught between the influences of tradi-

tion and modernity and seeking a strong pegangan (mooring post) to attach themselves to and give them their bearings, and, more extensively, among the abangan of central and east Java, who longed for security and the promise of a better life. It is not stretching things too far, then, to suggest that both Sukarno and the PKI, in not very different ways, were seeking to define and articulate the needs and interests of these strata, providing the urban public with a utopian message to counter its psychocultural disorientation and the abangan with an assurance that their material interest would be met and their cultural values defended against the challenge of orthodox Islam. The subtle but significant shifts that took place in PKI ideology in this period indicate the degree to which the Communists were adapting to the new dispensation at the expense of doctrinal fidelity. In 1960 class was explicitly downgraded in favour of national alliance against external foes and their domestic allies.4*° The undifferentiated rakjat became the repository of all national virtues and aspirations, which ran in a continuous line from the precolonial past to the socialist future." The aliran, rather than class groupings, became the central pivot of the united national front prograln."" Instead of class forces, the spectrum of Indonesian society was conceived in the political, and sociologically neutral, categories of 'right, left, and middle forces'."' The struggle for the overthrow of imperialism in Southeast Asia and the entire world, rather than the fight for the internal reconstitution of Indonesian society, became the central preoccupation of PKI policy and action.* In the absence of direct evidence, we must draw on the general principles of cultural analysis to hypothesize how the peasantry of Java interpreted the joint Sukarno-PKI ideological melange. If traditional agrarian radicalism can be said to have contained four characteristic symbolic *This orientation was justified in doctrinal terms by the claim that Indonesia remained

a 'selmcolonlal' country even after the nationahzatlon of most foreign capital in 1958.

62

--

features 'rnillenarianism, messianism, nativism and belief in the Holy Warm -- then the ideational link is certainly highly suggestive. In catering to traditional millenarian urges, Sukarno promised a 'just and pro~ sperous future' whose contours resembled a modern version of the blessed kingdom of legend. The PKI, likewise, if it refrained from spelling out the ultimate nature of its constantly reiterated goal of a Communist future, nevertheless made two things about it clear: it would build on (non-Islamic) village traditions of mutual help, cooperativeness, and consideration; and it would bring the common people the abundance of food and clothing, freedom from crushing tax burdens, and equal distribution of cultivated land foretold in millenarian prophecy." The messianic element was provided by Sukarno's charisma alone, at least at the national level, though Aidit's picture was to be found in quantity in every Javanese village penetrated by the PKI, and the personalization of his role was promoted assiduously by the Party propaganda machine, he never achieved anything approaching a mystical aura even among those strongly influenced by the Communists. Nativisrn was fully supplied by the radical anti-imperialist, antiforeign themes that loomed so large in both Sukarno's ideological armory and that of the Communists. Finally, with campaigns to liberate West I r a n and confront Malaysia, the Javanese received their secularist, non-Islamic variants of the Holy War, and its potency as a source of support for the regime and the Com~ rnunists is attested to both by the enthusiasm engendered by the crusades and by the alarm shown by anti-Communists at the strides made by the PKI under their umbrella. Whatever the intentions of the PKI leadership (and this can only be conjectured as ambivalent or, more likely, acquies-

cent), it would appear that the Communists were providing the radical proclivities of the peasants with ample fuel in terms consonant with their

traditional aspirations and outlook. Yet despite the convergence of the ideologies and, to a large degree, the interests of Sukarno and the PKI, there was an implicit conflict between their respective aims. Whereas Sukarno, as the incumbent source of power and embodiment o f pruajf values, was seeking to integrate the

Javanese and Indonesian masses into a socially conservative order managed and directed by their superiors, the Communists, as power aspirants and articulators of lower-status abangan values, were trying to mobilize the masses for the supercession of that order. In practice, however, the conflict was vitiated to a considerable degree by certain

facets of Sukarno's temperament. Although he jealously safeguarded his

63

own prerogatives and probably considered that not much in Java ought to be different, his romantic Jacobin leanings led him to value the appearance, if not the reality, of change and 'revolution'. The PKI appealed to him intrinsically for its dynamism, as well as for its usefulness as a counterweight to army power, and he was content to let officeholders be harried and humiliated if a case could be made out for their halfhearted commitment to the causes he held dear. This gave the Communists opportunities for resisting the consolidation of the new 'bureaucratic capitalist' power structure by constant campaigns and agitations against 'reactionaries' and 'hypocrites' in high places.* With all their political guerrilla tactics, however, they were unable to arrest the tide of socioeconomic processes, and found power coalescing in a civil-military bureaucracy strongly antithetical to their ambitions. At length the PKI felt constrained to make a partial break with consensus politics and the neotraditional pattern in order to prevent the doors to power being firmly closed against them on Sukarno's death or incapacitation. Fortunately for them, in September 1963 Sukarno's antiimperialist crusade precipitated a head-on clash with the Malaysian Federation, backed by British armed forces, and Indonesia succumbed for a time to a heady radicalism, which the President embraced more fervently than any other. The PKI decided on a 'revolutionary offensive' to isolate and crush the anti-Communist forces and throw off the chains keeping them from a share in governmental office." The hub of the PKI effort was directed toward the peasantry, and the chosen issue was land reform. Seizing on the government's failure to implement vigorously its own 1959 and 1960 laws on the subject, the PKI in the early months of 1964 launched a campaign of 'unilateral actions', by the peasants, seeking to carry the laws into effect through organized strength and in some respects to go further toward applying the PKI's more radical demands in this respect. The Communists succeeded in promoting widespread actions of this kind, particularly in central and east Java, with the object of impressing their allies and deterring their enemies by demonstrating their control of the countryside. They aimed in the course of the campaign to radicalize and discipline their own followers so as to create a class-type force of poor peasants and landless labourers committed to their cause." - s l u -

*These . 're£ooling' . . campaigns reached a crescendo durin g the PKI ' fronts' in the first nine months of 1965. 5

64

s

I

e 1 t ° o II vo u Lon n a

The Destruction of the Communist Party in Indonesia

Ultimately, however, the campaign was a failure. Ranged against the Communists, despite Sukarno's benevolence, were the local military and civilian officials, the PN1 branches and their supporters, and, most violently, the Moslem religious leaders and their safari following. For all the radicalism that could be called on by the PKI in areas of the key pro-

vinces, it was no match for this array of opposition. In the end, the abangan peasants, reared on a moderate political diet, led in many cases by men of wealth and substance in the villages, fearful of Moslem intransigence, and confirmed too often by the PKI itself in their traditional cultural disposition toward harmony and deference to authority, recoiled from the furore their activities stirred up and obliged the PKI to beat a careful and screened retreat." Here was substantial evidence that the PKI had failed to bridge vertical lines of social division, to implant a tough class consciousness in the rural poor, or to transcend the basis on which its phenomenal mass support was based its ability to protect its clientele from official and Moslem wrath and bring them benefits without undue cost. From that time onward until its obliteration in the aftermath of the 1965 coup attempt, the PKI confined its efforts to shift the balance of power to maneuver within the metropolitan superculture of Jakarta, replacing its fire-eating village mass campaign of 1964 with ineffectual efforts to establish People's Science Institutes to combat superstition and fatalism." The coup attempt itself has been persuasively interpreted as primarily a nativist reaction on the part of mystically tinged abangan military officers from central and east Java against the unpatriotic, self-interested, and corrupt behavior of their high command offenses both to the interests of the line men and to traditional concepts of the purity and devotion of the kesatria, or warrior." Whatever the final verdict on this episode, if there ever is one, there is no doubt whatsoever that the ensuing massacre of Communists and Communist sympathizers turned into one more round in the repeated conflict between the safari and the

-

.--

abangan, with the santrf, backed again by the forces of government and army, having a still more signal victory than they had had in 1948.5 7 The response of the Communists to their sudden precipitation into

the void, if more fully explored, would likewise sound traditional resonances, judging by what little we do know about it. The seeming

65

belief of the PKI leaders that their proximity to the ruler, in this case Sukarno, would save them, is fully consonant with Javanese notions of power. What the Communists forgot, however, is that a decayed power centre is already a powerless one. The extraordinary passivity displayed by most PKI activists and organizations in the face of their persecution, amounting in some cases to voluntary surrender to the authorities, betrays a like dependence on a disintegrated centre, as well as a more deeply rooted peasant recognition that when the tides of the cosmic order run against you, it is useless to resist.

The decimation of the PKI left the neotraditional structures built up in Indonesia from the time of independence, and particularly after 1957 , fundamentally intact and now reassertive. Though the Party touched hundred of thousands of Indonesians with a new spirit of dynamism and political modernity, its imprint was light overall and poorly distinguished from the official state ideology as a result of the compromises it had been forced into. The abangan peasants of Java are still seeking a social and cultural champion. With the demise of the PKI, they have been unable to find a more satisfactory alternative than to vote Golkar* in 1971 as the only permitted protection against Moslem pretensions," and to seek sanctuary in Javanese mystical and Hindu revival movements." With the ever-increasing economic and political pressures bearing down on them, these resources are liable to prove all too ineffective to meet their needs, but the present regime has anticipated any attempt to reorganize them politically by designating them a 'floating tnass', to be denied any direct political representation or participation.T Unless and until Indonesian society crystallizes in more conven-

tionally modern forms of social structures and consciousness, the central paradox that afflicted the PKI must mark any potential successor to it. The crux of this paradox was that the closer the Communists remained within Javanese cultural lifeways, the greater the strength and influence they were able to amass, but the weaker their power to convert these resources into a revolutionary force. On the contrary, the further the PKI moved away from these cultural underpinnings by tapping radical 1

.

-fl.

*Golongan Katya, the army-sponsored equivalent of a state party, which routed the

Natio realist and Moslem parties in the 1971 general elections.

TThe 'floating mass' doctrine, enunciated by government spokesmen following the 1971 elections, prohibits all political party organization (including Golkar) below the kabupaten, or regency, level. Thus it effectively debars direct political participation by the residents of small towns and villages.

66

and proto-revolutionar elements in in e society, the more it demonstrated the radicalism latent in Javanese society but at the same time the greater became its vulnerability and isolation. Never being in a position to put all its stakes on the revolutionary road, the Party eventually fell victim to the cultural plurality and vertical allegiances that are the mainsprings of elite dominance. The conclusion seems inescapable 'alfran identification, while it provides a base of support relatively impervious to persecution by the authorities, creates an enormous problem for any political movement trying to mobilize for social revolutionary purposes, for it is extremely likely that efforts at open class struggle will dissolve into communal conflict'.'° NOTES

1.

Harry J. Benda, "Reflections on Asian Communism, 12.

2.

ibid., p.7.

3.

Donald Zagoria, "The Peasant as a Communist Revolutionary in Asia," paper delivered to the Conference on Asian Peasant Revolutions, Saint Croix, Virgin Islands, Jan. 24-28, 1973, p.20. A revised version of this was published as "Asian Tenancy Systems and Communist Mobilization" in John Wilson Lewis, ed., Peasant Rebehfion and Communist Revolution in Asia, Stanford University Press, 1974, pp. 29-60.

4.

See Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963).

5.

Sartono Kartodirdjo, "Agrarian Radicalism in Java: Its Setting and Development," in Claire Holt, ed., Culture and Politics in Indonesia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972), pp.83-84.

6.

Benedict R. O'G. Anderson, "The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture," in ibid., p.53

7.

ibid.

8.

Sartono, p.75.

9.

Anderson, p.54.

59

Yale Review, 56.1 (Oct. 1966) '

_

10. ibid., pp.54-55.

11. See, for example, Sartono, "Agrarian Radicalism", Sartono Kartodirdjo, The

Peasants' Revoir of Barren in 1888: Its Conditions, Course, and Sequel (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966), and Benedict R. O'G. Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution: Occupafion and Resistance, 1944-/946 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972). In addition to the instances recorded in these works, other post-independence revolts in which the influence of Islamic religious leaders was critical include the "social revolutions" in Atjeh and East Sumatra in 1945-46, the Darul Islam movement in West

Java, and the regional rebellions launched in 1958.

67

of an Indonesian

12.

Clifford Geertz, The Social' History 1965), p.5.

13.

Robert Jay, Javanese Villagers: Social Relations in Rural Modjokuto (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), pp.l88-89.

Town (Cambridge: MIT Press,

14. Clifford Geertz, "The Javanese Village," in G. William Skinner, eds., Local, Ethnic and National Loyalties in Village Indonesia (New Haven, Conn.: Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University, 1959), p.34.

15. See Geertz, "Javanese Village", Jay, and Koentjaraningrat, "Tjelapar: A Village in South Central Java," in Koentjaraningrat, ed., Villages in Indonesia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 262-65.

16. Geertz, Social History, esp. pp. 4-9, 145-46; Leslie H. Palmier, Social Status and Power in Java (London: Athlone, 1960).

17. Geertz, Social History, pp. 31-33. 18.

Ruth T. Mcvey gives a brief but illuminating account of the difficulties experienced by Indonesian nationalist movements in establishing stable organization among these

strata in the 1920's in The Rise of Indonesian Communism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965). Note her summary comment that "Indonesian workers of the day tended to be interested in unions only during a crisis" (p. 138).

19. George McT. Kahin, preface to Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution, p. vii. 20. ibid., DP- 16, 32-33.

21. ibid., esp. pp. 105-9, 168-70, 332-42. 22.

Ibid., passim; George McT. Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1952).

23. B. Schrieke, "The Causes and Effects of Communism on the West Coast o f Sumatra," Indonesian Sociological Studies (Bandung: Van Hoeve, 1955), Part 1, Harry J. Bends and Ruth T. McVey, The Communist Uprisings of 1926-1927 in Indonesia: Key Documents (Ithaca, N.Y.: Modern Indonesia Project, Cornell University, 1960), McVey, Rise

of Indonesian Communism,

chap. 12.

24. See Harry J. Benda, The Crescent and the Rising Sun: Indonesian Islam under the Japanese Occupation, 1942-/945 (The Hague: W. van Hoeve, 1958); and Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution.

25. Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution, pp.343-45

.

26. ibid., pp. 345-47. 27. On the background to the Madiun affair, see Kahin, Nationalism, pp. 286-303, Ruth T. McVey, The Soviet View of he Indonesian Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Modern Indonesia Project, Cornell University, 1957), pp. 58-70, and D.N. Aidit, "We Accuse 'Madison Affair' ", in Problems of the Indonesian Revolution (Bandung: Demos, 1963), pp. 103-36. 28.

See Robert Jay, Religion and Politics in Rural Central Java (New Haven, Conn.: Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University, 1963), pp. 96-97.

29. These outlines were formalized in the first program of the renewed PKI-Program PKI

(Jakarta, 1953).

68

30.

Donald Hiridley, The Communist Party of lndonesia, 1951-/963 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), pp. 132-59, 160-76, Rex Mortimer, "Class, Social Cleavage and Indonesian Communism," Indonesia, 8 (Oct. 1969): 1-20. For an account of PKI political and organizational techniques in North Sumatra in which this aspect of its approach is stressed, see R. William Liddle, Ethnicity, Party, and National Integration: An Indonesian Case Study (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970).

31.

See in particular D.N. Aidit, "Indonesian Society and the Indonesian Revolution," in Problems of the Indonesian Revolution, pp. 4-62; Sociaiisme Indonesia day Sjarat2 Pelaksanaanja (Indonesian socialism and ways of achieving it) (Jakarta: .lajasan Pem baruan, 1962), Revolusi Indonesia, Lu mrbelakang, Sedjarah dan Haridepannja (The Indonesian revolution, its background, history, and future) (Jakarta: Jajasan Pembaruan, 1964), and Dengan Sastra dan Seniti/ang Berkepribadian Nasional Mengabdi Burgh, Tan! dan Pradjurif (With a literature and art national in character serving the workers, peasants, and soldiers) (Jakarta: Jajasan Pembaruan, 1964).

-

32. Hindley, esp. pp. 154-56, 33. For a regional study of a major manufacturing centre where these characteristics are pronounced, see Lance Castles, Religion, Politics, and Economic Behavior in Java: The Kudus Cigarerle Industry (New Haven, Conn.: Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University, 1967), esp. pp. 74-84.

34. On the August 1951 razzia, sec Herbert Feith, The Decline of Co nsrituiional Democracy in Indonesia (Ithaca, N.Y_' Cornell University Press, 1962), pp. 187-92.

35. See I-Iindley, pp. 54-59. 36. On the events leading up to the conclusion of a de facto alliance between the PNI and the PKI, see Feith, pp. 163-78. 37. Jay, Religion and Politics, pp. 91-94.

38. For the 1955 general election results, see Herbert Feith, The Indonesian Elections of 1955 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Modern Indonesia Project, Cornell University, 1957); and for figures on the 1957 regional elections, see Daniel S. Lev, The Transition to Guided

Democracy in Indonesia, 1957-1959 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Modern Indonesia Project, Cornell University, 1966), pp. 84-105. 39.

See Anderson, "Idea of Power," pp. 22-25.

40.

The PKI's emphasis on the "Indonesianization of Marxism-Leninism" also carried a strong implicit suggestion of the uniqueness and intrinsic value o f Indonesian ways. See D.N. Aidit, "Lessons from the History of the CPI," in Problems of the Indonesian Revolution, pp. 171-86.

41. Tunfuran unruly bekerdja dikalangan kauri Tani (Demands of work among the peasants) (Jakarta: Departemen Agitprop PKI, 1955).

42. See Ruth T. McVey, introduction to Sukarno, Nationalism, Islam, and Marxism (Ithaca, N-Y.: Modern Indonesia Project, Cornell University, 1970), p. 16. For a comment on the ambivalence of relations between the villager and the prijaji in traditional society, see Sartono, "Agrarian Radicalism," p. 85. Jay, Javanese Villagers, calls attention to its continued existence in the post-independence period (pp. 363-64).

43.

By 1957 class retained only a residual symbolic role in PKI propaganda, as is demonstrated by comparing Aidit's article "Indonesian Society and the Indonesian Revolution," which emphasizes a strict Marxian class scheme, and the Party's action statements, which stress immediate political tasks and conflicts along a "patriotic" and "unpatriotic" dichotomy-

69

See Anderson, "The Idea of Power," pp.34-37.

45. Ibo. See Ann Ruth Will fer, "The Neolraditional Accommodation to Independence: The Indonesian Case," in Lucian W. Pye, ed., Cases in Comparative Politics: Asia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 2.8-51.

46. D.N. Aidit, Ever Forward to Storm Imperialism and Feudalism (Jakarta: Jajasan Pembaruan, 1961).

4'7. See D.N. Aidit, "The Form of the Class Struggle in Indonesia at the Present Time . . . Is a Struggle of All the Indonesian People Who Are Revolutionary Against lm~ perialism (Monopoly Capitalism) and Feudal Remnants," Harlan Rakjat (People's Daily), Aug. 20, 1964. 48. D.N. Aidit, "Untuk Peiaksanaannja Jang Lebih Konsekwcn dari Manifesto Politik" (For the resolute implementation o f the political manifesto), Bintang Merak (Red Star), July-Aug. 1960, p. 308, Revolusi Indonesia, p. 72.

49. Aidir, Problems of the Indonesian Revolution, Dp- 314-17. The formula, of course, was taken over from the CCP. 50. Sartono, "Agrarian Radicalism," p.90.

51. Sartono emphasizes the centrality of these themes in millenariarl prophecy. Ibid., p.94. 52. The offensive was proclaimed in Aidit's report to the Central Committee of the PKI in December 1963. See Set Afire the Banteng Spirit! Ever Onward! N o Retreat! (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1964). 53. An account of the land reform campaign and clashes is contained in Rex Mortimer,

The Indonesian Communist Party and Land Reform, 19594965 (Melbourne: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1972). 54.

ibid.

55. See the article by D.N. Aidit in Review

of lndonesia,

May-June-July 1964, p. 31.

56. Benedict R. Anderson and Ruth T. McVey, A Preliminary Analysis o f the October 1, 1965, Coup in Indonesia, Ithaca, N.Y., Modern Indonesia Project, Cornell University. 1971. 57. All accounts of the Indonesian massacres note the element of communal conflict involved. See in particular the detailed account given in John Hughes, The End o f Sukarno (London. Angus and Robertson, 1968). I have noted elsewhere the concordance between areas where the most bitter clashes over land took place in 1964 and the areas where the death toll in the massacres was highest. Mortimer, Indonesian Com~

monist Party, pp. 63-67. 58. The mobilization of the ex-PKI vote for the government party in the 1971 elections is documented by Kenneth E. Ward, The Indonesian Elections of I97/: An Eas! Java Study, (Melbourne: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, No. 1, 1972). 59- I am indebted to Mr. Ron Hatley for information regarding the attachment of ex~PKI followers to these movements. 60.

Ruth T. lVlcV