Indonesia’s Communists Helped Forge Its National Identity
After the bloody repression of the Indonesian left in the 1960s, Suharto’s regime wrote it out of the history books. Indonesian communists played a crucial role in developing national consciousness among workers and peasants against Dutch colonial rule.
Members and sympathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party gather in a sports stadium in Jakarta on May 23, 1965, to celebrate the party’s forty-fifth anniversary. (Bettmann via Getty Images)
In Communication against Capital, Rianne Subijanto tells the story of how socialists in 1920s Indonesia mobilized against colonialism. With rallies and journals, strikes and education, their movement introduced new ways of looking at the world and helped to bring the Indonesian nation into being.
Communication against Capital focuses on the first half of the 1920s and what Subijanto calls the pergerakan merah, the “red movement” that spread across what was then called the Dutch East Indies. After the military coup of 1965, the crucial role of the Indonesian left was suppressed and declared taboo. Subijanto’s book sheds new light on the extent of left-wing organizing, not only against Dutch colonialism but also against restrictive customs and traditional forms of exploitation.
Red Enlightenment
Key to this is what Subijanto calls a process of “red enlightenment.” The participants in the pergerakan merah viewed emancipation as “coming not from the transcendental — God or mystical spirits — but rather from something that was immanent: believing in the human capacity to both understand the world and to change it.”
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