By Doug Lorimer
In the wake of the July 27 riots in Jakarta against the military's assault on the offices of Megawati Sukarnoputri's liberal-democratic Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) and the subsequent crackdown by the Suharto autocracy against the left-wing People's Democratic Party (PRD), a number of left groups in Australia have either explicitly or implicitly attacked the PRD for attempting to forge an anti-Suharto alliance with the PDI.
In the August 9 issue of the Socialist Equality Party's Workers News, Peter Symonds wrote:
"Megawati has attempted to make an appeal to the peasants, workers and the poor, those hardest hit by mass unemployment and starvation-level wages.
"In doing so, Megawati relies on the support of groups like the Peoples Democratic Party (PRD) — an umbrella organisation formed by student and labour activists. The military has attempted to blame the PRD for the latest protests, branding it as 'communist'. In reality, the PRD is seeking to tie younger and more radical groups of workers, students and peasants to Megawati and the PRD."
Symonds concludes his article — which does not even mention the Howard government's alliance with the Suharto autocracy, let alone call for solidarity by Australian workers with the "peasants, workers and the poor" of Indonesia — by arguing:
"For workers and youth in Indonesia to find a way forward, the lessons of 1965 will have to be clarified and studied. No more trust can be placed in Megawati than in her father. An independent mass movement, led by a party based on a socialist program, is required to free the Indonesian masses from oppression."
The implication of Symonds' argument is that in attempting to forge an alliance with the PDI to mobilise the workers, peasants and the poor against the autocracy's suppression of democratic rights, the PRD is seeking to foster trust in the bourgeois leadership of the PDI. "Real communists", Symonds implies, would not attempt such an alliance.
Symonds seems unaware that real communists have always sought to forge alliances with liberal-democratic forces for concrete objectives such as the defence of democratic rights. In Lenin's classic 1920 work on communist tactics, "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, he noted that "the entire history of Bolshevism, both before and after the October Revolution, is full of instances of changes of tack, conciliatory tactics and compromises with other parties, including bourgeois parties!". Lenin pointed out:
"The more powerful enemy can be vanquished only by exerting the utmost effort, and by the most thorough, careful, attentive, skilful and obligatory use of any, even the smallest, rift between the enemies, any conflict of interests among the bourgeoisie of the various countries and among the various groups or types of bourgeoisie within the various countries, and also by taking advantage of any, even the smallest, opportunity of winning a mass ally, even if this ally is temporary, vacillating, unstable, unreliable, and conditional."
In its coverage of events in Indonesia, the International Socialist Organisation has also made this implicit criticism of the PRD. In an article in the August 9 issue of Socialist Worker Tom O'Lincoln, after noting that the Suharto regime "is trying to find a scapegoat, blaming the unrest on 'communists' and singling out the Democratic People's [sic] Party (PRD)", immediately warned that "it would be a mistake for workers to rely on Megawati".
Socialist Worker, too, failed to call for solidarity with the PRD in the face of the Suharto regime's repression.
O'Lincoln's warning was repeated by Michael Douglas in a page-long article in the September 9 issue of SW. Douglas held up the example of the Philippines to bolster the ISO's warnings to militant Indonesian workers, asserting that "in the Philippines just 10 years ago, a 'people's power' movement toppled the Marcos dictatorship.
"However, the movement tied itself to the reforming wing of the Philippine ruling class, led by Cory Aquino.
"The leftwing parties all held to the idea that the workers' movement needed to be restrained within the limits acceptable to Aquino and her supporters.
"Once in government, Aquino turned on her supporters and authorised the military to butcher the left."
Douglas' account of events in the Philippines bears no relation to reality. He has concocted this fairytale in order to avoid looking at the real lessons of the 1986 events in the Philippines and what the left did wrong.
The Maoist-led Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the main left-wing party in the country at the time, ordered its cadres in Manila not to participate in an anti-Marcos alliance with the liberal bourgeois forces led by Aquino after Marcos called elections in November 1985. As a result, the liberal bourgeoisie was able to take unchallenged leadership of the workers' insurrection against Marcos in February 1986 (the "people power" movement).
Aquino had no need to order the military to "butcher the left" because the CPP's abstention had discredited it among the broad masses and neutralised its ability to mobilise significant mass forces to challenge the consolidation of her regime.
Unlike Douglas and his fellow finger-waggers in the ISO, the PRD comrades know what really happened in the Philippines. The course of action they have taken to date — relying on the independent mass mobilisation of the workers while not ignoring any opportunity to win a mass ally, no matter how temporary, vacillating and unreliable — should give cause for confidence in their political abilities. The same cannot be said for their ignorant, pontificating critics among the ultraleft sects in Australia.