Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

HANS ANTLÖV 193
state-based officials, and restrictions on party politics give the New Order
government almost unlimited powers to regulate the activities of both institutions
and individuals. Thus, there is only a limited ‘civil society’ in Indonesia, if one
means by this a stratum of people who are not incorporated within the state. This
is the fundamental reason why the middle class in Indonesia has not opted for
democracy; it is often more profitable to maintain the old structures.
A national administrative network reaches down to the village level in even the
most remote parts of the country. Following the national Pancasila ideology,
politics must operate in a spirit of consensus and mutual assistance. 3 To avoid the
cleavages which estranged people from each other under the Old Order, the New
Order regime has released the rural population from the restraints of manipulative
party political activities, a process that is referred to as the policy of the floating
mass. It is said that the conflicts and cleavages of the earlier period prevented the
rural people from devoting their full energy to economic development and political
stability. Party political activities in the countryside are under heavy restrictions.
The New Order policy has been to ban all party-political activities except for a
short election campaign preceding the general election every five years.
Who then are the new rich in the village of Sariendah? It is a difficult count, but
in one hamlet (out of 12) where I have collected material, 17 out of 147 households
were in 1989 classified by neighbours as rich. Ten of them had gained their wealth
during the last twenty years, and could thus be considered OKB–an approximate 8
per cent of the population. As has been shown by Edmundson (1994), households
in Java pass over time through different wealth standards, depending on life-cycle
and luck in enterprise. Thus, we need to look beyond pure monthly income to
delimit the new rich. The fluctuation in incomes does not occur randomly. During
the New Order it is the politically correct households that have gained the most, as
‘political entrepreneurs’ using their skills and connections to maximise both market
profits and state support. These are the landowners who have benefited from the
green revolution and cheap credit, the traders and the entrepreneurs who have
taken advantage of the rural demand for services, and the factory workers who
combine their work in Majalaya with farming or trading in Sariendah. Three of the
new rich in our sample hamlet are farmers; two are contractors in building; two are
minibus operators; two are civil servants in Bandung and Majalaya, with low
nominal incomes but substantive extra incomes; and the last OKB works as a
village official. All have in common the fact that they do not have single sources of
income, but combine their primary salaries with money from trading and
commissions from various services. And they are loyal clients of the state.
THE AGE OF MONEY
I contest the proposition that it is sufficient in rural Indonesia to have only
entrepreneurial skills in order to become rich. Without political connections it is
almost impossible to get the permission to establish a small company, to apply for
subsidised credit, and to find the correct distributors. In the increasingly outward-