From Jail to Jail. Tan Malaka
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Tan Malaka was sent to Canton, from where he was to operate as Comintern agent for Southeast Asia. The trials and tribulations of such an endeavor, during which time Tan Malaka was plagued with illness and poverty as well as isolation, are described in detail in the autobiography (Volume I, chapters 10 to 14). The brightest part of this period was his time in Manila (in several periods between 1925 and 1927) on which the text breathes a new life as Tan Malaka writes with great passion on the Philippine revolution of 1896, emphasizing the importance of unity and militancy in the struggle for national liberation. During this period in Canton and Manila he wrote four major works on the Indonesian revolution: These bagi keada’an social dan ekonomi serta tjara bagi mengadakan organisatie dan taktiek di Indonesia (1924), Naar de ‘Republiek Indonesia’ (1925), Semangat moeda (1926), and Massa actie (1926).
The first of these works, read to the PKI’s June 1924 congress by Soekindar, gave a detailed outline of the actual economic and political conjuncture in Indonesia; the nature of the imperialist domination it then endured; the failure of the solely nationalist parties; the need for the PKI to rely principally on a proletarian base, while organizing nonproletarian progressive elements into allied organizations, such as the Sarekat Rakyat (which had grown out of the left wing of the Sarekat Islam), and promoting general anti-imperialist and nationalist movements. During 1924, however, the government became increasingly repressive, limiting the PKI’s opportunities for agitation. The executive responded by turning inward, abandoning the Sarekat Rakyat and, at a special congress called in December 1924, embarked upon a course designed for an illegal existence, with a perspective of revolution in the short term. It was in response to this course, which he regarded as misguided, that Tan Malaka wrote Naar de ‘Republiek Indonesia’ containing severe criticism of the party’s weaknesses and presenting a program and list of demands to be struggled for in the immediate period as well as charting the likely development of the Indonesian revolution. It was in this document that Tan Malaka laid out for the first time the major tenets of his views on the nature of Indonesian society and the tasks of the party.
The title of the work indicates Tan Malaka’s conviction that an independent Indonesia would also be a republican Indonesia. He regarded this as one of his most important contributions to the theoretical arsenal of the independence movement77 particularly since it was well before Hatta’s Kearah Indonesia merdeka (1932) or Sukarno’s Mentjapai Indonesia merdeka (1933).78 As discussed above, Yamin chose to emphasize this contribution by Tan Malaka in entitling his 1945 newspaper series “Tan Malaka: Father of the Republic of Indonesia.”
The PKI’s course was set, however, and in December 1925 (following disastrous strikes, more exiled leaders, and increasing restriction on party activities) a clandestine meeting of the leadership decided to launch the rebellion within six months. Tan Malaka continued to voice objections to this strategy, to outline an alternative course, spelled out in Massa actie, and to try to contact as many party members as he could to dissuade them from carrying out a premature rebellion. The uprising, which did take place at the end of 1926 in West Java and in early 1927 in West Sumatra, was quickly put down, and the PKI was brutally crushed.
Tan Malaka’s verbal and active opposition to the uprising has provided the focus for much of the discussion of the rebellion and its failure. His reasons for opposing the rebellion in part parallel those given by the executive committee of the Comintern to Alimin and Muso in mid-1926 when they visited Moscow seeking endorsement for the plan. Indeed, the Comintern may have based its criticism on Tan Malaka’s own report. By the time the rebellions broke out, however, the Comintern’s policy was shifting in an ultra-left direction, and the Java uprisings were hailed by the ECCI in a manifesto dated 20 November 1926. The uprisings occurred at the time of the ECCI’s seventh plenum, and were used by the Stalin faction as justification against the strong Trotskyist criticism of the Comintern China policy.
After the failure of the uprisings had become incontrovertibly evident, the Comintern once again criticized the PKI, this time for being ill-prepared. This was the line taken in the ECCI through 1927 and up to the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928. It was the principal grounds on which the PKI attacked Tan Malaka in the revolutionary period and as late as 1961. This important issue is discussed in the autobiography in Volume I, chapter 12.
Following the smashing of the PKI, in mid 1927 in Bangkok Tan Malaka founded a new party—PARI (Partai Republik Indonesia). Whether PARI was intended to be a continuation of the PKI, or whether it was conceived as a break from communism, is a matter of great controversy. The fact that he established a new party with a different name has been used as evidence of his “Trotskyism.” Tan Malaka scarcely touched on PARI in his autobiography, and his references in this and his other writings are contradictory and elusive. Scarcely any documentation remains, and of the two principal sources, both in the Dutch archives, one is a full transcription of the PARI statutes and the other a summary of a May 1929 revision of the original 1927 Manifesto. The statutes state PARI’s aim as “full and complete independence for Indonesia as soon as possible, and thereafter to establish a Federal Republic of Indonesia.” No specific mention is made of socialism, communism, or the international communist movement, although reference to PARI’s being independent of “leadership or influence from any other party or force, either within or outside Indonesia” could be seen as a rebuttal of domination from Moscow. The Manifesto, on the other hand, was devoted to an analysis of the PKI errors of 1926-1927 and the failure of the Comintern to provide leadership, stating that “it is of the greatest importance for the whole of the Indonesian people that the fighters for Indonesian national and social freedom have clarity regarding the inglorious collapse of the PKI.”
The Manifesto concludes that a new party must be established in the wake of the destruction of the PKI. It alluded to “serious drawbacks” to reestablishing the PKI, and states the PARI should be regarded as its replacement, describing the party as “proletarian-revolutionary” and founded “solely in the Indonesian interest.”
The analysis of the Comintern is of particular significance, given the scanty attention given to this matter in Tan Malaka’s autobiography. The Chinese experience was evidently expected to follow in Indonesia if a break with the Comintern were not made. He reached severe conclusions: “It would be in the interests of imperialism and not the Indies if Stalin made himself master of an eventual revolutionary movement in the Netherlands Indies.” He also said that “the people of the Indies have enough to do without sitting around waiting for the conclusion of the fight between Stalin and Trotsky.” The Manifesto shows PARI policy as indistinct and with internal contradictions as in the following: “PARI is a proletarian-revolutionary party that cannot ally with the actions of Moscow and the Third International, in that they were aiming to organise world revolution in the years 1918-23.” Whether this confusion was in the original document, or whether it has arisen from translation and summarization we are not to know. The tone as a whole, however, suggests that PARI broke with the Comintern because it betrayed the narrow interests of the Soviet Union and the bureaucracy itself.
PARI did not develop into the mass party envisaged by its founders. Operating with its leaders in exile, and under immediate and constant threat of prosecution not only by the Dutch authorities, but also by the other imperialist powers, PARI remained a small propaganda group. So fearful of detection were its members and agents that they devised clandestine methods of operation that placed almost insurmountable barriers between themselves and the people they were trying to reach. PARI did survive over a ten-year period, however, keeping cells alive in the main cities and in relatively small towns in Java (Cepu, Wonogiri, and Kediri) and in the Outer Islands (Palembang, Medan, Padang Panjang, Banjarmasin, Riau). Its publication Obor was circulated widely, although no copies appear to have survived the PARI security policy of destroying it after reading. Dutch intelligence agents kept uncovering PARI cells, arresting and exiling many activists, but the structure was continually reestablished, in contrast to the purely nationalist parties, which were short-lived in comparison. A case can be made for seeing PARI as a “connecting link” (to use Isnomo’s phrase) between the pre-1926 PKI and the physical struggle for independence twenty years later, keeping alive elements of the PKI program and perspective, and developing a layer of militants who were to play a role in the later