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Australasian Spartacist No. 227 |
Spring 2015 |
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Fifty Years Since Anti-Communist Massacre in Indonesia Fifty years ago, beginning in October 1965 and continuing through early 1966, over a million Indonesian Communists, workers, peasants and ethnic Chinese were slaughtered in one of the most savage massacres in modern history. This bloodbath, a holy war against Communism, was carried out by an alliance between the army and Islamic fanatics with the direct involvement of the American CIA, aided and abetted by its Australian counterpart ASIS. This catastrophe for the Indonesian working class was a direct product of the support by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), as well as their mentors in Beijing and Moscow, to the capitalist government of Sukarno and his Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI). The PKI leadership preached “joint unity” with Sukarno and the PNI to form a “united national front, including the national bourgeoisie” which would carry out “not socialist but democratic reforms.”
This class-collaborationist program was based on the Menshevik/Stalinist dogma of “two-stage revolution,” which led to the bloody defeat of the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925-1927. The Indonesian proletariat was politically disarmed and was unable to defend itself when the Indonesian generals, led by Suharto and backed by the imperialists, struck to behead the PKI, the largest Communist party in the capitalist world. This resulted in 32 years of repressive military rule before the blood-drenched Suharto regime was toppled following two years of economic crisis and massive student-centred protests in 1998.
The key lesson of Indonesia 1965 is that the PKI’s class-collaborationist “united national front” was a program of betrayal and that the liberation of the workers and oppressed masses in countries of belated capitalist development like Indonesia requires fighting for the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution. This program holds that in semicolonial countries, where the capitalist rulers are tied by a thousand threads to the dominant world powers, only the proletariat mobilised independently and leading the oppressed masses can overthrow the local bourgeoisie and tear off the imperialist yoke. This task is inseparably linked to the fight for proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries, opening the road to socialism. It is necessary to build internationalist revolutionary workers parties in the semicolonial countries and in the imperialist heartlands as part of the fight to reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.
For a detailed analysis of the events of 1965, see “Lessons of Indonesia 1965,” Spartacist [English edition] No. 55, Autumn 1999.
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