The dominant orientation was a two-stage strategy. First there would be a democratic revolution to get rid of all the existing dictatorial features, such as the military’s "dual function" that allows it to intervene in politics. Then, using the expanded "democratic space," the way would be open to launch a struggle for socialism.

The more theoretically inclined based this approach on Vladimir Lenin’s "Two Tactics of Social Democracy." Few knew that in 1917 Lenin effectively abandoned the two-stage approach of "Two Tactics," and with the publication of the "April Theses" moved to a conception close to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. I circulated what was apparently the first-ever Indonesian language edition of the "April Theses."

It’s true that initially, both Marx (during the 1848 revolutions) and Lenin thought a prior democratic stage was needed. This was because they were operating in semi-feudal societies. They thought a transition to capitalism was needed to lay the basis for socialism, and part of that was the establishment of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. Even so, they saw the working class as the key revolutionary force, and pointed to the cowardice of the bourgeoisie. And in any case, everyone agrees that Indonesia today is already a capitalist society.

The argument for a "democratic stage" today is vaguer. It effectively says conditions aren’t ripe for a socialist struggle, so a democratic struggle is all that’s possible. This view is based on real and important facts. The word socialism, let alone communism, scares a lot of people. The left forces are still weak, and relatively isolated from the workers and peasants. Under these conditions, it’s dangerous to carry out socialist propaganda openly.

Moreover, the labor movement is still underdeveloped–a crucial point, since the whole argument for socialism relies on workers’ potential not only to struggle, but to take and hold power. There is a huge working class of up to 80 million people. Yet so far, government-backed "yellow unions," entrenched during the long years of dictatorship, have the most members. Unions independent of the state have only organized a minority.

For Marxists the working class is crucial. Peasants may be more numerous in some parts of the Third World, the urban poor may be more oppressed; but only workers can collectively seize and democratically run the key means of production, and launch a national challenge for political power. But while a lot of Indonesian leftists accept this in principle, in practice they often orient to some other class.

In Yogyakarta, for example, I met students trying to relate to the peasants. They pointed out that in some rural areas, villagers have strong local collectivist traditions and are fighting to defend their way of life against capitalist encroachments. Of course, revolutionaries should try to link up with these struggles, but on what basis? As Marx argued, peasant "communism" has the potential to assist in the transition to socialism, but only under working-class leadership. Without that key factor, peasant movements can also be reactionary–after all, their immediate desire is to go back to the past. Moreover they’re localized and incapable of mounting a coherent national challenge to the state, so creating a revolutionary peasant movement depends on our ability to build a revolutionary workers’ movement. Meanwhile, the long-term trend is for capitalism to undermine local collective traditions, so that the peasantry also has powerful non-collective (petit-bourgeois) tendencies. And in any case, rural laborers–workers–are growing in numbers even in the villages.

Others argue for orienting to the urban poor. Sections of the left periodically turn in this direction after disappointments in organizing workers. For example, it was pointed out to me that when radical trade unionist Dita Sari went on trial in 1996, few workers came to the court to support her.

The argument is that the workers are not yet politicized, whereas the urban poor are potentially explosive. There is something in this. The urban poor did provide the mass base for the sensational struggles of November 1998. Moreover, we shouldn’t see them as just shiftless vagrants; this category includes pedicab drivers, buskers [street entertainers], even some bus drivers–groups with a certain degree of organization who would take part in the labor movement if it were stronger. In fact, two young buskers were on the platform at the 1999 Jakarta May Day rally. The trouble is that the urban poor are unstable, hard to organize and can be all too easily mobilized by bourgeois liberal or reactionary elements too. After all, who provides the mass base for Megawati’s rallies, and also for race riots?

If you think primarily in terms of a limited democratic struggle, orienting to the urban poor might make sense. But as soon as you think in socialist terms, the problems with this element are obvious.

"But the workers are backward," say experienced and dedicated labor organizers, so we have to listen. Why do they say this? "The workers don’t watch TV, they don’t read newspapers, they’re stuck out on the urban fringe, they still have ties to the village environment." OK, that’s true up to a point. Even so, these realities don’t need to be so discouraging.

It’s important to remember that the working class is not just factory hands. Until recently, it’s true, white collar employees didn’t identify themselves as workers–however the crisis has begun to change that. At the 1999 May Day, a representative of the bank employees’ union (which arose because of mass layoffs) declared his members to be part of the working class. Still, the factories are very important.

I said to the comrades: Maybe factory workers don’t own individual TVs, but there are TVs in the warung (cheap eating places) or they can visit friends, and this is a collective environment where they can discuss what they see. Surely they can afford to buy one newspaper and share it around? "Yes," they replied, "but they switch off the news and turn to the soaps. They buy women’s magazines, not newspapers."

Let’s assume it’s all true. In the midst of a terrible crisis and widespread political ferment, why do workers behave this way? Because "politics" as commonly understood is remote from their lives. If you have to work 10 hours a day for a pittance, there is little time and energy left to think about "democracy," so long as this means nothing more than parliamentarism. After all, parliamentary democracy is unlikely to improve their wages or conditions.

The main political demand with resonance among workers is the call to get the military out of politics. That’s because they have direct experience of how the army attacks their strikes. Workers are not really indifferent to politics. We just have to make it relevant. That’s why specifically socialist politics are so important, because we take the workers’ needs and struggles as our starting point.

Which is not to say we’ll be able to win the great majority of workers to socialist ideas in the short run. Because of the weight of capitalist oppression and ideology, workers in any country are "backward" until they move into struggle. It’s a question initially of winning a minority, even a quite small minority at first. These can then begin to win over others.

It’s also true that the term "socialist" makes a lot of Indonesians nervous, largely due to the legacy of the extreme anti-communism of the Suharto era. To overcome this with workers, or most other people, we have to make our politics concrete and show their immediate relevance. The Marxist tradition offers many examples of how to do it.

The 1848 revolutions taught Marx that the bourgeois liberals couldn’t be trusted and that a specifically socialist struggle was needed, but he also understood the need to develop it out of the existing movement. He tried to take liberal democratic slogans and give them a socialist twist. Indonesian revolutionaries can do the same today; in fact the People’s Democratic Party (PRD) took a step in this direction after Suharto fell. To the common democratic demand to put him on trial, they added the slogan: "Nationalize the wealth of Suharto and his cronies!" That makes sense to most people, given that the wealth comes from corruption and theft. It’s a democratic demand, yet in practice it opens up socialist possibilities.

The way is then open to argue further: If all the businesses of the Suharto family and its cronies are to be nationalized, who will run them? Given that everyone is for democracy, why not have the workers run them democratically? It isn’t so hard to work socialism into practical agitation for democracy and reform.

If the left just argues for democracy, it can end up making serious compromises. Consider the 1999 elections. The PRD ran candidates, which I thought was a reasonable strategy, but highly controversial on the left.

The PRD’s critics accused them of legitimizing the system. They had "accepted" the elections, despite all their objectionable features such as a continuing military presence in parliament, vote rigging and high levels of corruption. How could they make this compromise? The PRD, in turn, insisted they did not accept the elections. Their election platform was anti-electoral. "Even if we’re elected, we won’t accept the outcome."

Surely this missed the point. I put it to comrades that in Australia, we have no direct military interference in politics. Ballots aren’t rigged, there is no direct vote-buying. We have everything that they are demanding as part of the "democratic revolution." Even so, whether or not we adopt the tactic of standing for office, socialists never accept the elections, because the resulting parliament will still be a capitalist institution and the resulting government will implement anti-worker policies. I added: The implication of your approach is that if you get "real" liberal democracy, you’ll have to accept the outcomes, which means accepting what the government does. That makes it harder to resist later on, when a "democratic" bourgeois government attacks the people.

This is one of the ways in which the two-stage theory (democracy now, socialism later) politically disarms the revolutionary movement.

Faced with arguments about the need to introduce elements of socialist politics into the struggle today, hardly anyone directly disagreed. On the contrary, quite a few said this is precisely what they try to do–in private. They’re trying to combine legal and illegal work. The legal propaganda can’t go beyond democratic demands, they say, because of the repressive political climate and a lack of understanding among the majority of the population. However, among a smaller circle they’re already explaining that socialist solutions are needed.

Fair enough. I personally feel their legal propaganda could go a bit farther, but from our position of safety we have no right to tell them what risks to take. We can’t know just how they talk to their immediate periphery on a day-to-day basis, but I accept that quite a bit of education in socialism is taking place. My concern is that the strategic framework can become a huge obstacle to this effort.

Consider a PRD seminar held in Solo (Central Java) before the 1999 elections. Wilson from the party’s central committee presented a paper called "Let’s Create Democracy Without ABRI’s Dual Function." (ABRI is the old acronym for the military; the new one is TNI) The arguments in this were mostly quite good; but on re-reading the printed version later I came across this passage:

There will be some positive things for ABRI/TNI if the dual function is abolished, i.e.: "1. ABRN/TNI will be able to develop their professionalism in safeguarding defense and security in accordance with the mandate of the Basic Laws [constitution] of 1945.… 2. No longer will ABRI/TNI be confronting its own people because it is devoted to the interests of certain groups or powers.

I discussed this with various people including Wilson, making the point that even in the best bourgeois democracy, "security" means securing the interests of capital, so the military will continue to oppress and devote itself to the interests of the bosses. Wasn’t this passage fostering illusions? Some replied: "It’s true the military won’t be neutral, but we have to combine legal and illegal work. This is legal propaganda, and you can’t present a Marxist analysis openly here. Privately, one can make arguments that go further."

Perhaps. Yet the fact remains that this part of the legal literature reinforces illusions about capitalism, and that the legal formulations contradict the illegal propaganda. The former will have a much wider audience, and the revolutionaries will be seen by many to be saying that bourgeois democracy means a neutral state apparatus. If it’s not possible to cover these points explicitly in the legal propaganda, fair enough. But why include in that propaganda formulations that we know are untrue, and which breed illusions in the capitalist state?

This shows how the two-stage approach, by establishing in everyone’s mind that democracy is the key thing in the short run, can tempt us into accepting the logic of bourgeois liberalism. If we understand that liberal-democratic demands are simply the starting point for a socialist struggle, this danger recedes.

Ultimately all Marxist perspectives depend on the power of the working class.

In the 1960s, Indonesian labor was well organized, although there were perhaps no more than 500,000 industrial workers whereas today there are many millions. Under Suharto [president from 1967—1998], the old unions were savaged by repression and then incorporated into government-managed structures. In the course of the 1990s, attempts were made to create independent unions. The first attempt was called "Solidarity," but after one big strike it was repressed. At the time Suharto fell, there could not have been more than 10,000 members of independent unions in Indonesia. They have grown rapidly since, while at the same time some of the government-managed unions have become more independent. But the movement lacks tradition and experience. At the start of the economic crisis, it was also intimidated by the sudden appearance of mass unemployment. More recently its confidence has grown.

The Manpower Department reported that in January 2002 there were 61 nationally registered union federations, and beyond that many local union groups. According to an analysis by Poenky Indarti of the human rights group Kontras, 19 of the national federations are "old unions" derived from the Suharto-era official union federation. Another nine have a more complex history related to the Suharto era. Five are organizations of civil servants, 28 are new unions. The labor force is estimated around 80 million, with important concentrations of factory workers on the fringes of the cities of Java, as well as Medan in Sumatra.

Based on interviews with leaders of the 28, she says only eight are "strong and militant enough to speak up not only about labor welfare but also about labor policy and political issues…such as globalization and neoliberalization." Poenky says many leaders of the 28 are new to the labor movement, a few of them opportunists.

The most important independent union is the Indonesian Prosperous Labor Union (SBSI) long led by Muchtar Pakpahan. It represents a mixture of social democratic and populist politics. In 1997, when SBSI was still facing Suharto’s repression but able to maintain a certain above-ground presence, I spoke on socialist politics to a meeting of their senior cadres, and gained a good picture of where they stood.

I offered a sharp critique of class collaboration, based around the practical experience of Australian unions in the Australian "social contract" arrangement known as the Accord. It had been a disaster for the unions, as many of them now recognize. One of the SBSI leaders offered a sharp reply of his own, to the effect that European unions had achieved great things through collaboration with employers and government, including "access" to management circles. SBSI’s immediate problem, however is that in Indonesia, neither governments nor bosses show the slightest interest in this.

Consequently, SBSI is locked into many battles for basic union recognition, against victimization, for modest improvements in wages and conditions and to stabilize its local organizations. SBSI claims something like a million members, but only a few hundred thousand of those would be dues-paying.

A very different type of union is the Indonesian National Federation for Labor Struggles (FNPBI) whose best known leader is Dita Sari. Its ancestor, the Center for Labor Struggles, broke up under repression in 1996 and the new body was established from local union bodies across the country after Suharto fell. The key leaders are PRD members and they give its agitation a revolutionary flavor. FNPBI is relatively small, with perhaps 10,000 members, but it maintains a high political profile both inside and outside the country.

Yet another type of union is the Greater Jakarta Labor Union (SBJ), also claiming around 10,000 members, and linked to smaller groups in cities such as Surabaya and Medan. They don’t feature the revolutionary political style of the FNPBI, but they have a philosophy of aggressive class struggle that distinguishes them from the SBSI moderates. The founders and leaders of these groups tend to come from working class backgrounds, quite unlike the leaders of FNPBI. On May Day marches, SBJ is known for its disciplined contingents. The union won a strike of 1,800 workers at the Mayora Indah candy and biscuit factory west of Jakarta, by militant mass actions including occupations and blockading freeways.

No account would be complete without mentioning the Maritime and Fisher Union (SBMNI) which has proved able to shut down Jakarta’s main harbor at Tanjung Priok by parking semi-trailers at key road junctions; and also the workers of the Maspion factories in Surabaya who have staged mass marches of up to 10,000. There are some impressive fighters in the ranks of organized labor.

Yet the unions had relatively little impact on post-Suharto national life until June 2001, when huge demonstrations centered in the West Java city of Bandung forced the government to retreat on reactionary labor regulations and soften the impact of fuel price rises. I saw thousands of workers in the streets and there was a festive atmosphere, but later a section of the big crowd–reported at 50,000 to 200,000–trashed the local government buildings.

The immediate issue was ministerial decrees about workers’ rights. The employers were up in arms about some very modest pension benefits, and had pressured the new labor minister to cut back entitlements. All the unions protested, even the yellow unions from the Suharto era. They now have to compete with new workers’ organizations, and are starting to become more active in the promotion of their members’ interests. Demonstrations began in Jakarta, then spread to Surabaya where thousands of unionists from the Maspion blocked streets and stormed government offices, and to Bandung where giant rallies paralyzed the city for three days.

President Wahid refused to retreat, but left a loophole: Provincial governments could stick to the old arrangements if they chose. Several provincial governments rushed to use this escape hatch including the one in Bandung. But the Bandung workers weren’t satisfied; they demanded the new decree be suspended nationally. After two days Wahid caved in. He also postponed fuel price hikes demanded by the IMF.

It was the former yellow unions that initially called the big Bandung rallies, and for that reason, some left activists were suspicious about them. But once workers were in the streets, they gained a sense of their own power and took the struggle much further than the union bureaucrats intended.

At a time when the military is rebuilding its position in national politics, organized labor represents the best hope for popular resistance. And if the left can sink roots in the working class, it represents the best hope for a brighter future.