THE FALL of General Suharto is a great victory for the mass movement in Indonesia. The sight of thousands of student swarming across the parliament roof in Jakarta has once again kindled the flames of revolution. "Tomorrow it will be the president’s palace." said one. After 32 years of brutal and corrupt dictatorship, Suharto’s fall from power has shown the potential for a great liberation, reports Dave Packer.
The question is what kind of revolution will it be and how far can it go? The current manoeuvres of the ruling clique of bloated capitalists and sinister generals, with discrete support from the IMF and the White House, suggests that a counter attack is being prepared.
Their candidate to replace Suharto, former vice-president Habibie, is of course promising elections, democratic and social reforms and legal challenges to the Suharto family empire, but these are a smoke-screen.
His real objective is to divide the opposition, dampen down the flames of revolt, and stabilise Indonesia, for big business – with a little help from the IMF. Sending troops into the parliament building to remove the students there shows his true colours.
The generals who promoted Habibie, now with smiling faces, were the same men who only a month ago were organising the kidnappings and torture of political oponents of the regime.
Imperialism too is quickly, if reluctantly, washing its hands of Suharto: but only last month it was still turning a blind eye to his re-election fraud. No real solution for the masses is on offer from any of these quarters and the crisis, which is in any case global in scope, can only deepen.
Unfortunately for Asian and world capitalism, as Alex Brummer writes in The Guardian, (30.5.98), it is, "too late to re-bottle the globalisation genie", and like its neighbours in East Asia, the Indonesian regime remains in deep financial, economic and political turmoil. "The new world order trumpeted by George Bush at the start of the 1990s – as global capitalism and the forces of democracy marched on triumphantly – is looking extremely fragile." he writes.
But it was always a myth. The collapse of Stalinism and the Gulf war were never enough to establish a new imperialist order. Indeed the war successfully alienated the Arab masses from American and British imperialism.
Recession
The recently reported cracks in the Hong Kong economy, which is heading for recession, with output fallen by 2% in real terms in the first three months of 1998, threatens a fresh wave of collapses in the Asian financial markets.
The South Korean bourgeoisie, mired in its own protracted crisis, is now faced with major strikes from a militant trade union movement, while Japan is continuing to crack open at the seams, with sharply rising unemployment – the worst since the second world war.
Debt, deficit financing and corruption are not peculiar to Asia’s "crony capitalism", but a growing feature of late capitalism on a global scale. The crisis has spread geographically to Russia, whose corrupt, chaotic but paralysed capitalist roaders, with their massive government deficits vulnerable to external shocks, are finding that capitalism and imperialism are not always friendly when the chips are down.
It is a tragedy of history that the Russian proletariat, still the biggest in the world, is having to learn the lessons of capitalism the hard way.
In India the rupee has hit a record low, while the Pakistan government has suspended all foreign exchange dealings. It fears that, in the present climate of growing crisis in Asia, its tit-for-tat nuclear detonations may invoke financial and economic consequences.
The economic crisis in Indonesia is fast getting worse. Andrew Higgins of The Guardian (19.5.98) states what all the capitalists know and feared, namely that "Indonesia’s economy is a wreck."
He writes of "the anguish that pushed slum-dwellers into anarchic revolt, and turned a darling of the World Bank into a basket case."
Today, one in ten Indonesians are slipping below an income of 65p a day. Many of the directors in the big corporations and banks, together with other cronies at the centre of Suharto’s corrupt "crony capitalism" and family commercial and political empire, have already fled. So have other super-rich magnates. Some, including Indonesia’s richest man, Lim Sioe Liong, have had the sumptuous houses which they left behind pillaged and torched.
The Suharto family fortune based on a vast web of interlocking companies and banks, tax-breaks and other privileges, stands as an insult to the working class and the poverty stricken masses.
Everybody has heard about the taxi companies and luxury hotels, owned by one of his sons but they also feed off the state sector as well. The state oil and gas company, Pertamina has 120 companies and contractors among its suppliers, owned by the Suharto family in a complex system of corruption.
His sons have a monopoly of all crude and product exports, worth £1.8 billion in 1996. One of these companies alone netted £30 million profits last year. Altogether 1,247 separate, active companies have been identified to date! Then there are the huge charitable foundations… It is like the Mafia with state power.
Mass movement
Today, the mass movement is temporarily at bay, but none of the problems which led to the anti-Suharto revolt are being solved. The movement will surely reorganise itself on a more clear political basis. However, there are big political weaknesses on the side of the existing opposition parties and groups.
A few Islamic organisations have a mass following such as Nahdlatul Ulama which claims 34 million supporters. Their conservative business leaders were also reluctant to see the end of Suharto.
The Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals also had the ear of Suharto. These are the main national chauvinist organisations which consciously scapegoat Indonesia’s Chinese minority, helping to fuel the outbreaks of anti-Chinese violence by some of the urban poor.
Amien Rais is the most prominent opposition leader. He is a free marketeer who seeks US backing to replace Habibie as president.
He was responsible for calling off a planned mass demonstration in Jakarta, last week although over 700,000 people demonstrated in other cities. Nor has he called for mobilisations against Habibie, preferring to wait for promised elections even though they will probably be fixed. Worse, he has also called for anti-Chinese policies.
There are 20 million workers in the cities, and in recent years, trade union activists have succeeded in building independent unions. They remain fragmented but have waged some important struggles. This process of organisation, combined with the scope of the mass movement, opens up the possibility of socialist ideas gaining a hearing.
It is essential that the mass movement remains vigilant and mobilised, extending support to the continuing student protests on university campuses and outside prisons.
It must organise and prepare itself for new offensives and new conquests. However, with a rise to prominence of figures like Amien Rais, and with the pro-capitalist liberals either backing Habibie, or flirting with communal politics, the mass coalition is being stretched to breaking point. This is inevitable as different class standpoints emerge.
United front
The small forces of the Indonesian left should argue for a single united front; a mass action, pro-democracy movement, based on the working class and its allies, which rejects Habibie and all those associated with Suharto and the old regime.
It must argue for the main demands of the workers and the oppressed to be supported. This could open the way for a movement which could not only destroy despotism and the sinister power of the military, but also abolish exloitation and poverty by challenging the political and economic power of the bosses.
At a broader level, Suharto’s fall shows the world once again the power of the masses when they are mobilised and determined. It shows those who have become used to bending the knee and touching their caps, or just sinking in front of the tv, how they are capable of changing things through organisation and collective action.
It also shows that without an established and determined leadership, such movements from below are always in danger of falling into the hands of every kind of opportunist or charlatan, and can be easily manipulated and divided.
Finally, it shows that without a conscious socialist leadership, with a programme for socialist change, which has the ear and the confidence of the mass movement, compromise and dissimulation can snatch victory from the peoples’ grasp.