Remembering the Indonesian Peasants’ Front and Plantation Workers’ Union (1945–1966)

Abstract

The absence of a strong national peasant and agricultural workers’ movement in Indonesia can be traced back to the violent destruction of the Indonesian Peasants’ Front (BTI) and Plantation Workers’ Union (SARBUPRI) in 1965–1966. This contribution reflects on their role in building a progressive movement of peasants and workers in the face of continual attempts to squash them by the Indonesian state and military. How did the cadres learn about the situation and problems in rural areas, and what were their priorities in working with the peasants? Unpublished reports from the last round of the BTI's local-level ‘participatory action research’ conducted in 1965 provide some answers to these questions.

Keywords:

• Indonesia
• peasants
• plantation workers
• communism
• 1965–1966

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ina Slamet for access to unpublished BTI reports, and to Ann Stoler for helpful comments, particularly on North Sumatra.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹The official autopsy on the generals’ bodies, by a team appointed by Suharto, states clearly that no other wounds or evidence of mutilation were found on the general's bodies except the gunshot wounds which had killed them (Anderson 1987).

²See especially Wieringa (2002, and various other publications).

³Abbreviation for Surat Perintah Sebelas Maret (‘Instruction of 11 March’).

⁴ ‘Tuan-tanah jahat, lintahdarat, tukang-ijon, kapitalis birokrat, tengkulak jahat, bandit desa dan penguasa jahat’ (Aidit 1964, chapter 2).

⁵The stencilled monographs on village conditions followed a standard format, starting with a day-by-day account of the researcher–activists’ movements and discussions, and a personal account of their experience of the ‘three togethers’. The main report introduced the village (location, history, sources of livelihood, population, health and disease, education, religion, and art/culture) and went on to describe food production and agricultural practices and problems, the rural class structure, agrarian labour relations and wage levels, and detailed illustrations of household budgets of rich farmers, middle peasants and landless worker households. These descriptive data were the basis for analysis of the forms of exploitation (penghisapan) to which food producers were subject, the balance of political power in the village, the state of organization and development of the ‘revolutionary peasant movement’, and the peasants’ ‘subjective consciousness’. The final sections then drew conclusions on the constraints to increasing food production, and the appropriate steps needed to overcome them.

⁶ Bimas = mass guidance; gotong royong = ‘helping each other'.

⁷The corporations were allocated huge areas of rice fields (often around 50,000 hectares) and were paid around USD 50 per hectare for providing the inputs and management.

⁸Tempo (2010).

⁹hkti.or.id and hkti.org.

¹⁰Accessible English-language books on the subject include Cribb (1990), Zurburchen (2005), Roosa (2006), and Kammen and McGregor (2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ben White

Ben White is Emeritus Professor of rural sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. His research has focused mainly on processes of agrarian change and the anthropology and history of childhood, youth and gender, especially in Indonesia. He is a founding member of the Land Deal Politics Initiative. Email: [email protected]