MILITARY TAKEOVER IN INDONESIA
The Indonesian revolution has suffered a grave setback, The «bourgeois army, while still maintaining Sukarno in nominal power, has taken over control and launched a nationwide witch-hunt. Communist — party members are being hounded and arrested. Communist party papers are being suppressed, its leaders forced underground,
The brunt of this stinging defeat has been suffered by the biggest Communist party in the capitalist world. It claims 3,000,000 regular members, a People's Youth wing of 3,000,000, and a following of 20,000,000 in mass organizations of the workers, peasants, women, students and people working for the government. How could such a | massive political force undergo a mauling at the hands of armed forces totaling 350,000?
It is due to the strategic line of “revolution by stages," of forming blocs and coalitions with the "national bourgeoisie. n The Stalinist~educated leadership of the Communist movement in the colonial and semicolonial countries has applied this line again and again since the second Chinese revolution of 1925-27, notwithstanding its tragic results.
In Indonesia, the masses have surged forward repeatedly. Industrial and agricultural wage earners and poor peasants have otcu= pied factories and plantations, seized the holdings of the big landowners, and poured into the streets in great throngs urging a decisive struggle against inflation, exploitation and imperialism. Several times the situation has been propitious for a government of the workers and poor peasants to take power.
But each time, the leadership of the Indonesian Communist party, headed by the group of Chairman D.N.Aidit, has put the brakes on the mass movement and held the masses prisoner to "Nasakom" -- the "national front" of the three main political groupings, the Sukarno Nationalists, the Religious Teachers, a Moslem group, and the Communist party.
Hach time the masses surged forward, the Communist party sought to channel their militancy against the single target of foreign imperjialism, failing to organize systematic, nationwide struggles against the semifeudal landowners, the money lenders, rich merchants, and corrupt administrators of enterprises that serve as seed beds of a new industrialist bourgeois class,
In this way the fighting energy of the masses was not concen=trated on the central task of winning power, but was split up and dispersed into numerous partial actions,
Meanwhile the bourgeois army, the center of the counterrevolutionary forces, quietly strengthened by American imperialism and
beefed up with shipments of armaments sent by the Soviet bureaucracy, sought to increase its popularity and its political standing by staging easy "successes" against imperialism, as in West Irian and North Kalimantan, biding its time to turn against the revolutionary mass movement,
It is true that in recent months the Aidit leadership made a shift to the left, radicalizing its orientation somewhat. Aidit even called for arming of the workers and peasants,
But he did not call upon the masses to arm themselves. He asked Sukarno to arm them. Sukarno, of course, gave this appeal the brush off,
Finally, on September 25, only a few days before the attempted coup of the "September 30 Movement" which precipitated the present situation, Aidit told the masses to act boldly against the "bureaucratic capitalists," and to take control of the former imperialist enterprises which had been confiscated or nationalized.
The shift came too late. "Bung (Brother) Karno" cannot be praised day in and day out without sowing immense confusion among the masses and disorienting them in the problem of winning power, It is impossible to remain silent year after year about the reactionary danger represented by the army without paving the way for the masses to be taken by surprise when the- reactionary generals finally decide that the time has come to strike.
The hesitant and wavering attitude of the Aidit leadership stood out starkly during the decisive week of the army coup. Nota single appeal, not a single indication of what to do, not a single list of slogans of action was issued by the Indonesian Communist party to the masses of workers and peasants. They were left leaderless in face of the enemy. Confused by the contradictions in past policies, abandoned by their leaders in the hour of greatest peril, they stood stunned as the generals brought the sword down.
The role played by the left-wing army officers under Lt.Col. Untung is not yet clear. It is possible that these officers, informed about the impending coup being prepared by the reactionary generals, sought desperately to throw it off balance by striking first. It is also possible that they actually tried to topple the Sukarno regime through a purely military conspiracy which General Abdul Haris Nasution then seized as a pretext for his own coup.
If the latter hypothesis proves to be the correct one, then it must be listed as a putschist adventure in which a handful of reso~ lute men attempted to substitute for the power of the masses. It is quite wrong to-think that an attempted coup d'état by reactionary generals cannot be blocked by a strong mass movement; or that putschists can succeed whereas the masses are doomed to failure, There are many examples in history where powerful mass mobilization, sup-
ported by relatively weak popular military formations, have successfully blocked reactionary army circles from taking over a country. This occurred at the time of the attempted Kapp putsch in Germany in 1920. It happened again in Spain in July 1936. The latest instance was in the Dominican Republic.
The best response is a powerful general strike which paralyzes the enemy, throws him into confusion, forces him to divide and dissipate his forces, giving the labor movement a breathing spell in which to arm the workers and peasants and thereby prepare a truly effective counterblow against the reactionary threat,
But the responsibility for the Untung putsch -- if it turns out to have been a putsch -- must be laid squarely on the Aidit leadership, It is the old pattern: opportunism breeds adventurism, It is probable that inside the Indonesian Communist party, a left wing became more and more impatient with the wavering, opportunist policies of the Aidit leadership. Under pressure of the constantly rising tension between classes and political forces in recent months, certain elements in this left wing might very well have thought of turning to direct action as a possible way out. Feeling that a reactionary coup d'état could occur at any time, they might have despaired of convincing the party cadres and members of the danger before it was too late. Miseducated as to the real potential of mass action, lacking confidence in their capacity to mobilize the masses =~ if necessary against the Aidit leadership -- they might have thought that the situation could be saved through some kind of short cut.
Whatever the facts -- and these are not easy to determine as yet -- the opportunism of the Aidit leadership stands at the center of the setback dealt to the Indonesian revolution. And the leader ship of the Chinese Communist party and the pro-Mao tendency in the world Communist movement likewise bear heavy co-responsibility.
In several documents, the Chinese Communist party leadership has correctly criticized the opportunist policy of the Thorez and Togliatti leaderships in the French and Italian Communist parties, the servile subservience to the "national" bourgeoisie which led the Iraqi Communist party and the Dange leadership of the Indian Communist party to heavy defeats.
But in gross contradiction to these criticisms, the Mao leadership placed a rubberstamp of approval on the opportunist policies of the Aidit group inside the Indonesian Communist party.
This course was linked to the diplomatic maneuvers with which the Chinese government sought to counter the blockade of American imperialism and the hostile moves of the Soviet bureaucracy against the Chinese revolution. To seek friendly relations with bourgeois governments like those headed by Sukarno or Ayub Khan in Pakistan is not at all wrong in and of itself. A workers state has a perfect
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right and even duty to seek to maneuver among its bourgeois enemies and to take advantage of their differences. The Soviet government in the days of Lenin and Trotsky did this at the time of the Rapallo treaty.
What is impermissible -- it is one of the products of Stalinist miseducation and degeneration -- is to identify the needs and prerogatives of the government of a workers state with the political needs of the world revolution which are expressed on a party level. To confuse the two, converts the party into a mere instrument of the government with its passing diplomatic needs and tears the heart and brains out of Marxist political policy. Even Marxist theory becomes reduced to the role of apologizing for each twist and turn in.the field of governmental diplomacy.
Thus when the Soviet government in the time of Lenin and Trotsky signed a temporary pact at Rapallo with German imperialism against "Allied" imperialism, the Communist International did not stop calling for and seeking to help organize the overthrow of German imperialism through a proletarian revolution. The Communist International did not stop calling the rulers of Germany what they actually were ~~ ferocious capitalist exploiters of their own worke ers. .
But in Mao's deals with Sukarno and Ayub Khan, all the radical words about “uninterrupted revolution" are forgotten, These representatives of exploiting classes and butchers of striking workers are pictured as “progressive national leaders." A veil is drawn over the class nature of their regimes; debilitating illusions are sown about the possibility of creating a "bloc of newly emerging forces" against world imperialism,
This opportunist policy is not fundamentally different from the treacherous, revisionist line of Khrushchevism in the colonial and semicolonial countries with its gross illusions about "peaceful evolution," "national democratic states" and "noncapitalist forms of development" that still cannot be said to be moving in a socialist direction.
In Indonesia, Aidit appears only as a “left" variant of Khrushchevist opportunism. The Chinese Communist party leaders, who have covered up for all his opportunism and invested him with all the tremendous authority they have among the Asian workers and poor peasants as a result of the victory of the Chinese revolution, today share the responsibility for the defeat in Indonesia.
The defeat in Indonesia will not prove to be an enduring one. An important battle was lost but reaction is not definitively in the saddle. Experience since the end of the second world war has proved that the revolutionary movement in the colonial and semicolonial countries has been able to quite rapidly forge again to the forefront after suffering partial defeats.
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This recuperative power is due primarily to the objective conditions; i.e., the incapacity of neocolonialism and the national bourgeoisie to assure even temporary improvements in the abysmal living conditions of the millions upon millions of exploited colonial slaves.
These slaves are learning the power of revolt; and it takes more than a temporary defeat to force them back into numbed accept= ance of an intolerable existence.
The 3,000,000 adult Communists, 3,000,000 Communist youth and 20,000,000 members of mass organizations in Indonesia have not been crushed. They are only temporarily thrown off balance and left. leaderless, They are certain to rally, resume their struggle and compel reaction to retreat.
Their struggle will continue until the most conscious and critical Communist militants, united with the Indonesian Trotskyist cadres, forge a revolutionary party capable of leading the working class and peasantry upon the only road to victory --.the road to the conquest of power, the establishment of a workers and farmers govern= ment, the road of Fidel Castro, of Lenin and Trotsky, the road of the permanent revolution,
THE BRITISH TRY TO HANG ON TO ADEN
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