Javanese Mystical and Marxist Dialectics - Paul Stange

In Indonesia the difference is essential to understanding the communist attempt topoliticize the most mystically suffused portions of the population. My argument hereis that the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in effect functioned in terms ofJavanese mystical rather than Western Marxist notions of power. More specifically,the suggestion is that the Javanization of the PKI resulted from a confluence of socioeconomicand ideological factors rather than simply from the limits of the politicalsituation. The effect was to unite the most traditional and most revolutionarycurrents in common opposition to modern Islam and Western capitalism. At thesame time, there was a split within the party between an elite which identified withthe last stand of the traditional aristocracy and a mass base which in effectconstituted the shattered remnants of that same order. The point is that the elite andmass shared a vocabulary having different implications depending on theperspective taken. This helps explain the tensions leading to the coups and killings of1965 and 1966.In making the case, I begin with a sketch of the main historical and social forcesbefore moving into discussion of the classical tradition and its relevance to Sukarno'sGuided Democracy. From there to evaluation of the Aidit phase of the PKI andfinally to a summation of the relationships between the various traditions. A numberof critical conclusions follow. In the first place, I argue that both Javanese andpeasant perspectives are fundamental to vision of this history and that those becomeclear through a dialectical image which simultaneously clarifies structure andprocess. Then in terms of scholarly method, my suggestion is that an interweaving ofsubject matter and researcher is essential to insight - in opposition to standardnotions of academic neutrality and objective disengagement. From first to last, Istand with the Javanese mystic in his awareness that at base “all things are one” andwith the Marxist in arguing that no particular makes sense apart from the whole.Suharto’s current military regime emerged in Indonesia in the wake of obscure coupsin Djakarta and the virtually unopposed slaughter of hundreds of thousands in thevillages. While the details of the October 1965 coup are incidental here, the scope andease of subsequent killings suggested previously unsuspected rural tensions andcommunist weakness. Even perceptive academic estimates of PKI power failed toaccount for the rapidity of disintegration in the early months of 1966. 1