Indonesia and Permanent Revolution [July 1998]

Recent dramatic events in Indonesia have thrust it to the fore as a hotpoint of world struggle. The demise of Suharto has sparked off claims that the Indonesian 'revolution' has begun. We reported on the causes of the latest crisis and political upheaval in the last issue of Class Struggle. After several weeks of mass struggles that brought the downfall of Suharto, we take a hard look at the way forward.

We should all remember that the mass murder of around 500,000 communists and Chinese in 1965 was the direct result of a Stalinist policy of class collaboration that disarmed the working class. Are we about to go down the same road today? We look at the analyses and programme the main left tendencies inside and outside Indonesia.We conclude that the legacy of Stalinism and of degenerate trotskyism means that none offers a convincing analysis or a revolutionary programme so desperately needed to win the struggle for socialism.

Worse, the default of the left primes the brave and militant Indonesian masses for another historic defeat. We cannot analyse the current situation without some background on the Indonesian political scene. The ruling bloc of Golkah and its "New Order" was forged in the years after 1965 when Suharto put down the failed coup and killed up to 500,000 communists and dissidents. The 'democratic opposition' around Megawate Sukarnoputri and the Democratic Party of Indonesia (PDI) is a weak force which is prevented from playing any serious role by the constitution and by political repression. Under the 1945 Constitution, the President is able to usurp power provided he controls the army. Though nominally elected by the Supreme Advisory Council (MPR) which meets every five years, the President can appoint over half its members, and in practice influence the rest. The Parliament (or the Peoples' Representative Council DPR) has little authority. Formally, it too can pass legislation. But the grip of Golkar is such that only opposition candidates which are acceptable to Golkar have been allowed to enter parliament.

Therefore while the President is not exactly a military dictator, by establishing a network of personal patronage around Golkar - the "crony capitalist faction" - and his control of the army, he is a near-dictator, i.e. a form of bonapartist dictator. The student led uprisings of recent weeks have shaken Golkar but it has not challenged is grip on power. The military (ABRI) remains the backbone of Golkah . Although the ruling bloc has its splits, none have emerged so far to suggest that it cannot rule. The replacement of Suharto by his deputy Habibie shows that the ruling bloc is capable of making concessions so long as they are cosmetic.

The popular extra-parliamentary left consists of mainly 'communist' and 'nationalist' groupings. Most see the way forward as one of a 'democratic' revolution based on 'people power'. The students who mobilised for the recent demonstrations largely share these 'democratic' aspirations. Many, influenced by Maoist ideas see the 'democratic' revolution as a stage toward a socialist revolution in the future. There is a widespread belief that the causes of all Indonesia's problems, are not so much Chinese entrepreneurs, but the Golkar regime and the "orang kaya baru" (OKB - the new rich its massive corruption and wealth. This is the view of the Western economic experts as well. The solution is to mobilise the popular masses and demand democratic or constitutional reform to clean up the cronyism and the corruption. But who is going to reform the constitution and how?

Full Text in Class Struggle No 22, June-July 1998

Communist Left (NZ) Programme -1983.

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1 The Historic Task

The Communist Left of New Zealand is a revolutionary organisation which as part of the international movement is committed to building the party that will lead the working class to achieve a dictatorship of the proletariat transitional to communism in Australasia and the Pacific as part of the world socialist revolution.

The productive forces of our time have outgrown not only the bourgeois forms of property relationships but also the boundaries of national states. Liberalism and nationalism have both become fetters upon the further development of the world economy. The world proletarian revolution is directed both against private property and against the national splitting-up of the world economy. The socialist revolution, in abolishing wage slavery will abolish the division of society into classes and all social and political inequality therefrom.

The path to this goal lies throught the smashing of the entire capitalist state, its army, its police, and its bureaucracy leading to its replacement by a new form of state which, from the moment of its inception, will begin to wither away. This new form of state constitutes the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Faced with the trend to proletarian revolution ona world scale, promising under world communism to end all poverty, all political and economic oppression and all war, raising all humanity to the level of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx, a society where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all, capitalism in its most moribund stage, imperialism, can respond only by moves toward fascism and global war – threatening an international nuclear holocaust to maintain the bourgeoisie as the ruling class. The increasingly naked barbarism of a reactionary and parasitic world imperialism must accelerate the building of the world party of socialism.

Read on:

James P. Cannonism, By Owen Gager.

From Spartacist: A Marxist Journal Vol 3 No 1 1973.

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There has been a long argument in the American Trotskyist movement over what went wrong, and when, with the longest standing American party claiming to be Trotskyist, the Socialist Worker's Party. This argument is now spreading far beyond the original small groups of American Trotskyists who began it, as it becomes clear that the Socialist Workers' Party has moved and is moving to the right even of the discredited Stalinist, hopelessly pro-Soviet, American Communist Party, and its trying to push the Mandelist Fourth International to more and more reformist positions, as shown in the political practice of the N.Z. Socialist Action League.

The argument as it has so far developed centres around personalities far more than around ideas. James P. Cannon, the undisputed leader of the SWP at the time of Trotsky's death in 1940, has retained his role as leader of the party until the present day, though as he has grown older more and more authority has been assumed by his supporter and co-thinker Joseph Hansen. Cannon enjoyed Trotsky's blessing as leader of the party, yet Cannon went wrong - or so American "anti-revisionist" groups like the Spartacist and Workers' Leagues see the situation.

They ask why Cannon went wrong and find the answer partly in the divisions of labour within the Party before Trotsky's death; where Cannon was the Party's main organiser and Shachtman, who left the SWP in 1940 because he believed the Soviet Union was "State Capitalist", its main theoretician. They claim that this division of labour should never have been allowed to grow up, and allowed Cannon to make theoretical errors later. It is also argued that in the discussion in 1953 in the Fourth International around Pabloism, the view that the colonial revolution of that period was the `epicentre' of world revolution. Cannon failed to take a stand against Pablo until Pablo won support in the SWP. Cannon's attitude, it was claimed, was "provincial".

Attention is thus focussed on Cannon's leadership and its deficiencies, rather than on the ideology of the Party, and the effect on that ideology of the Party's Social environment. The view that Cannon, as an individual, was responsible for the degeneration of the SWP is a version of the "great men make history" idealist methodology used to explain, of all things, revisionism in the Trotskyist movement.

A critique of revisionism, which fails to examine the historical development of theory as a guide to action cannot explain revisionism because it accepts rather than explains the gulf between theory and practice in an allegedly Marxist party. To argue this is not to deny that the criticisms so far made of Cannon do not point to 'symptoms' of revisionism within the SWP. But it does insist that the discussion so far has been about the symptoms of the revisionist disease, not the disease itself.

The reason why the so-called "anti-revisionist" groupings in the United States have not examined the growth of a Cannonist theory of the SWP is simple: they also share in the support of, and elaboration of, this theory. These "anti-revisionist" groupings defend Cannon's refusal to heed Trotsky's advice, after the split with Shachtman, that the Party headquarters should be moved from the petty-bourgeois intellectual milieu of New York to a working class centre like Detroit. In fact their headquarters remain, to this day, like the SWP's, in New York.

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