Jona Everdeen/Urs Hecker
Mass protests have been taking place in Indonesia for weeks, escalating dramatically since the murder of 21-year-old motorcycle taxi driver Affan Kurniawan by a police armoured vehicle on 28 August. Initially, there were massive clashes with paramilitary elite police units. At least eight people were killed, hundreds injured, 20 have been reported ‘missing’ since then, and more than 1,200 have been arrested.
Indonesian workers and young people have been protesting repeatedly for years against the exploitative, corrupt and authoritarian system. But now the pent-up anger is being expressed on a scale not seen in a long time. But why now? And what exactly are the masses in Indonesia fighting against?
Indonesia’s position in the imperialist system
Even though Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world with over 280 million inhabitants, it has very little say in the decision making of world politics and must clearly be considered a semi-colony. Accordingly, the oligarchic bourgeoisie, which, as in many semi-colonies, is very closely intertwined with the military and deeply embedded in the political landscape, plays a dual role as (an often very brutal) ruler over the workers and the poor, but at the same time as vassal of imperialist powers, which extract extra profits from the country through their economic superiority.
Like many such countries, Indonesia is particularly affected by the imperialist crisis. This tends to lead to an ever-increasing withdrawal of capital, accompanied and conditioned by the formation of blocs and new tariff barriers. This flight of capital also means a weakening of the national bourgeoisie, progressive deindustrialisation and thus a decline in the material foundations of the bourgeois regime in general. For the working class, it means mass layoffs, falling wages, further displacement into the informal sector and employment far below their qualifications. The latter affects young workers, students, women and young people in particular.
This development, caused by the imperialist world system, reaches its peak in so-called ‘failed states’ such as Somalia, where deindustrialisation has progressed to such an extent that the main social classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, are in a state of disintegration and a bourgeois central state is correspondingly difficult to maintain.
Indonesia is still a long way from this point, but, here too, since the Asian crisis at the end of the 1990s, a trend towards deindustrialisation and capital flight has been gaining ground. While industrial production still accounted for 32% of GDP in 2002, according to the Financial Times, this figure had fallen to just 19% by 2024. This has been accompanied by mass layoffs and the impoverishment of the working class. According to trade unions, over 80,000 workers were laid off between January and April alone. By 2023, almost 60% were already working in the informal sector, and the trend is rising. With rising unemployment and precarious working conditions, food prices rose massively, causing the middle classes and parts of the petty bourgeoisie to slide further and further down the economic ladder.
In Indonesia, as in other semi-colonies, these economic developments are laying the groundwork for an increasingly authoritarian and unstable bourgeois state, as well as for socio-political revolts by workers and young people.
The creeping path to autocracy
Even before Prabowo Subianto Djojohadikusumo took over from his predecessor, Joko Widodo, it was already becoming apparent that the ‘third largest democracy in the world’ was moving in an authoritarian and, above all, neoliberal and socio-politically reactionary direction. This took the form of a new criminal law that imposed severe penalties for ‘spreading communist ideology’ and curtailed the freedom of young people, women and queer people on the basis of ultra-conservative moral concepts. For more on this, please read the article published at the time: ‘Extramarital sex and communist ideas banned: ’Against reactionary laws in Indonesia! – REVOLUTION„! Widodo also directly attacked wage earners with the so-called ‘Omnibus Law’ or ‘Job Creation Law’, which massively weakened workers‘ rights and thus facilitated exploitation by the oligarchy and imperialism.
Widodo’s successor, Prabowo, on the other hand, is certainly not going to make a U-turn, as his biography alone shows. Not only is he the son-in-law of former dictator Suharto, but he was also one of his most important military officers and actively involved in several war crimes. However, he has been quite successful in sweeping this past under the carpet. Even though Prabowo does not openly present himself as a man of the military, his policies clearly show this. In March, he passed a law that guarantees the military more seats in parliament and thus more political influence. However, Prabowo stands even more for the country’s oligarchy, of which he is a part as a millionaire, than for the bloody past of the military dictatorship, in which several million people, mainly communists and members of national minorities, but also anyone else who criticised the regime, were murdered.
In few countries is the overlap between the national bourgeoisie and the political caste as great as in Indonesia. All eight parties represented in parliament in 2024 spoke out in favour of Prabowo, most of them immediately after the election in February 2024. As a result, he now has such a large coalition that there is no longer any parliamentary opposition. This shows that apparently all the bourgeoisie’s cliques see him as the most suitable man to represent their interests, and that the workers have no force that would oppose the system on their behalf.
Salary increases for parliament, poverty for the masses
Let us now turn to the current situation. While there have been repeated protests in recent years, some of them violent (against the Omnibus Law, against the new criminal code, against cuts and, finally, against the inauguration of ex-general Prabowo and his neoliberal and military-friendly legislative changes), protests of a new magnitude have now erupted.
These were triggered by increases in special payments for members of parliament. In particular, the planned housing allowance for politicians, which was to be ten times (!) the minimum wage in the capital Jakarta, caused outrage. It became the straw that broke the camel’s back. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets, with students and trade unions at the forefront. Anger is particularly high because extensive austerity measures were introduced at the beginning of the year, which particularly affected the construction of public infrastructure, education and the health system. All this against the backdrop of the general trends described above of mass layoffs, wage cuts and displacement into the informal sector.
Repression and resistance
The regime initially responded with violence. The police brutally cracked down on the protests, leaving many injured and hundreds arrested. But they failed to nip the movement in the bud. On the contrary, when a special police unit ran over motorcycle taxi driver Affan Kurniawan with their armoured vehicle during a demonstration, it fuelled the anger of the masses to a higher level.
Police facilities and vehicles were now being targeted, not only in the capital, as had been the case in previous militant protests, but across the country. The protests escalated particularly sharply in Makassar, in the province of South Sulawesi (Sulawesi: the fourth largest island in the island nation), where a government building was set on fire. Elsewhere, the homes of particularly hated politicians from the ruling party were stormed and looted. Even the direct threat of military intervention, which had already been deployed at several points in Jakarta, failed to stop the protests. Prabowo was ultimately forced to back down in order to maintain his own power. He announced that he would cut certain subsidies for politicians (although he remained very vague about exactly which ones and to what extent), and he also strongly condemned the murder of Affan Kurniawan and announced that he would launch an investigation.
However, it is unlikely that he is serious about this, which also seems to be clear to Indonesian workers and young people. So far, they have remained unimpressed and are continuing their protests. In addition to the dissolution of parliament and new elections, they are also explicitly focusing on social demands, including higher wages and lower taxes for the poor masses. Similar to Kenya, anger over corruption and self-serving politicians closely linked to the national bourgeoisie has developed into an uprising against the system, with unionised workers and students at the forefront.
What does it take to win?
The workers and young people, who have now made the ‘Jolly Roger’ flag (pirate flag with skull and crossbones) from One Piece (Japanese manga series) the unofficial symbol of their movement, are showing great courage. However, courage alone will not be enough to fight for a better future. In recent years, we have repeatedly seen extremely courageous and combative movements in various parts of the world: in Latin America, for example in Chile in 2019, Colombia in 2021 and Peru in 2023; in Africa, for example in Kenya last year and continuing this year, as well as repeatedly flaring up in various countries across the continent; in Europe with the mass movement in Serbia; or in South Asia, where corrupt governments were even overthrown as in Sri Lanka in 2021 and in Bangladesh last summer.
But, just as in the Arab Spring 10 years earlier, the same pattern has been repeated over and over again: Even the greatest determination and strength must eventually come to a standstill if there is no revolutionary leadership capable of giving this movement a clear programme and uniting it in the struggle for power. It is the task of the most progressive workers and young people in Indonesia to build this leadership: a revolutionary workers‘ party.
To do this, they must develop a programme of action based on the method of transitional programmes and permanent revolution, linking the current movement with the struggles for national liberation (e.g. in West Papua), for land and against sexist oppression, and showing the way to overcome imperialist oppression through the revolutionary seizure of power by the working class. It is crucial to also link this struggle with the struggle for revolution throughout Southeast Asia and ultimately the whole world.
For, as shown above, Indonesia’s social and political problems stem from the imperialist world system and its crisis. Workers in Indonesia and around the world can therefore only achieve final victory if they unite their struggles into a worldwide revolutionary movement.
For this, we need a world party of the working class, a new revolutionary International.