Javanese Mystical and Marxist Dialectics - Paul Stange

fact, he argues that individual scientists and technocrats contribute to systems withoverall directions frequently opposed to their individual convictions or awareness.So with all systems it happens that understanding of particulars is dependent onclarification of their relation to the whole.At the surface of Indonesian politics, political alignments and elite tensionscrystallized in the early phase of Parliamentary Democracy. While real power restedin the hands of party oligarchies rather than with either the parties or the populace,the election competitions of 1955 and 1957 served all too well by exacerbating latentconflicts and taking them all the way down to the village level. 13 The multitude oftiny parties which had appeared with the introduction of liberal government gaveway after the elections to four major parties-Masjumi, the Nahdatul Ulama, theNationalist Party, and the PKI. 14 Masjumi was rooted in modernistic Islam andurban based trading interests - geographically to the coastal cities of Java, to WestJava, and to the Outer Islands generally. The Nahdatul Ulama (NU) was based onrural East and Central Javanese syncretic Islam through the kijaji and pesantren(religious teachers and schools). The Nationalist Party (PNI) drew most heavily onthe Java centered bureaucracy, the partially transformed remnants of a prijaji (oldaristocracy) who had become bureaucrats under the Dutch. The PKI created its basefrom among the poorer and more traditional sectors of the Javanese peasantry, theabangan, and from estate and mine workers throughout the archipelago. 15The basic tensions coming out through the elections and clear in the constitution ofthe national elite focused on the split between Javanese and Outer Island interests -three parties were fundamentally Javanese and only the Masjumi represented thevery different world of the Outer Islands. 16 Feith has suggested that this basictension has been evident in the make-up of the elite since there has been an “Islamicentrepreneurial” group of more rationally oriented bureaucratic planners and a“Javanese aristocratic” group of less pragmatic and more traditional solidaritymakers. 17 As description, Feith's distinction is valuable, but as analysis it takes onfar greater significance when tied to Schmitt's contention that the differing policyinterests of the two groups have been rooted in fairly immediate economic concerns.Then the surface politics of parties and elites only makes sense when it is related tothe vastly different social worlds and historical experiences of the Outer Islands onthe one hand and Java on the other.