Javanese Mystical and Marxist Dialectics - Paul Stange

passage of an agrarian reform bill offered a foothold on legitimacy for local PKI-BPIcalls for land reform. The bill itself was moderate almost to the point ofmeaninglessness, but its enactment led up to the aksi sefihak, the unilateral seizure ofland in the increasingly tense years before the coups and massacres of 1965 and 1966.By December 1963, Aidit demonstrated considerably greater satisfaction with PKIwork among the peasants. In his Political Report of the 7th Central Committee of thePKI, Set Afire the Banteng Spirit! Ever Forward, No Retreat!, he claimed Partysuccess in the creation of a three million member mass Party which was at the sametime a cadre Party. He claimed an additional seven million adult peasants in the BTI,a full quarter of the peasant population based on organizations existing in 50% of thevillages. He stated that the PKI was firmly integrated with the masses, that theunited front had become invincible, and that there were so many organized that noattempt to divide the Party could succeed. 63 He argued that the peasantry was thedriving force, the basis, of the revolution and that they deserved the major portion ofParty energy. At the same time, he held to the argument Marx and Engels made inthe Peasant Question in France and Germany thatit has never happened and it will never happen in history that a peasant'srevolution can be victorious without the leadership of the working class. It hasnever happened and it will never happen that the peasant forces predominateover the workers and are thus not beneficial to the revolution. 64Strategically he took an argument from Mao that the peasants could be important tothe struggle as a source of food, soldiers, a place of retreat, and a basis for attack onthe towns. 65 With the by then standard PKI formulas, he listed the major tasks ofthe peasant movement as the carrying out of the “six goods”, the expansion andimprovement of research, the expansion of the BTI mass base and creation ofcooperatives, and the spreading of Marxist-Leninist education. The “six goods”included reduction of rents and a law on sharecropping, reduction of interest rateson loans, increase in the wages of peasant laborers, an increase in agriculturalproduction and the extermination of rats, an increase in the cultural level of peasants,and an increase in peasant political consciousness. 66 Even while optimistic aboutPKI successes, he warned against cadre ideological laxness and concluded with fiveadmonitions: to combine patriotism with proletariat internationalism, to rememberthat organization was important but ideology still more crucial, to remain flexible in