Counter-revolutionary handmaidens

Counter-revolutionary handmaidens

Within weeks of Santen's lines being penned, the rotten fruits of the PKI's betrayal of the December 1957 movement began to emerge. A counter-revolutionary government was formed in Central Sumatra in February 1958 by coup leader Colonel Achmed Hussein and headed by Dr Sjafruddin Prawiranegara. This CIA-backed operation, only possible because of the PKI's disarming of the December 1957 rebellion, was a test run for the bloody coup that was to take place seven years later.

Fully conscious that this was a dress rehearsal for counter-revolution, the response of the Pabloites was to intensify their wretched boosting of the PKI. Quatrieme International's editor added a footnote which climaxed with the following purple passage:

"Since the 'rebels' main aim is to do away with Sukarno's 'guided democracy' in which is included the PKI, then any compromise will be at the expense of the PKI. In this case, the immediate perspective is that the PKI, under mass pressure, will be obliged, willy nilly, to execute a major policy about-face as was performed by the Chinese Communist Party in a similar situation in 1949, and to go past the bourgeois-nationalist stage of the revolution to the socialist stage of workers' power. Thus, in fact, but again without acknowledgement, operating on the basis of, and validifying the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution."

Thus the PKI, the hangman of the Indonesian revolution, was depicted as the unwitting instrument of the Permanent Revolution!

Added to this was the lie that the Chinese Stalinists, the mentors of Aidit and the other PKI leaders, had carried through the "socialist stage of workers' power" in 1949. In fact, the peasant armies of the Maoists brutally suppressed the proletarian uprising in 1949, murdered the Trotskyist opposition, and established an extremely deformed workers' state based on the Stalinist perspective of a partnership with the national bourgeoisie, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry. This was indeed the model upon which the PKI leadership based itself.

Not content with glorifying the Stalinists, the editor's special footnote then promoted the prospects of the national bourgeoisie undertaking a progressive transformation

Menguak Tabir Peristiwa 1 Oktober 1965 – Mencari Keadilan

as well. It suggested an alternative scenario premised on the Sukarno government leading a struggle against the CIA-organised "rebels":

"In the other event, that the Sukarno government takes a stronger line of opposition and resistance to the 'rebels,' a further polarisation of all the bourgeois and semi- feudal counter-revolutionary forces will be seen; confronting a shadow bourgeois- nationalist government and the masses. This confrontation of the masses against the new 'slaveholders' rebellion,' against the new 'Kornilov putsch,' will mean a new upsurge of the revolution, while the experience of this kind of revolutionary action by the masses will leave little chance of a relapse to the stability of a bourgeois nationalist regime."

The events of October 1965 were to prove the Sukarno regime to be no less accommodating to General Suharto's killers than the Kerensky government was to General Kornilov's coup bid in 1917. Sukarno displayed the essence of bourgeois nationalism by ending his political career as a puppet President for Suharto's military junta.

The conclusion of the editor's footnote should be inscribed on the tombstone of Pabloism: "In either case our optimistic perspective is justified. The Indonesian

Revolution is on the march! Its victory as a socialist revolution is now in

generation. (Emphasis in original) From 1957 to 1965 the Pabloites internationally perpetrated this objectivist cover-up

of the grave dangers confronting the Indonesian revolution. The work of the Pabloite section in Indonesia was central to the whole Pabloite world

perspective. It was discussed intensively at the so-called Fifth World Congress of the "United Secretariat" in 1957.

"Our Fifth World Congress, in discussing the progress and the road of the world colonial revolution, gave serious attention to the developments in Indonesia. Recognising the Indonesian situation as pre-revolutionary, it expected a revolutionary explosion very soon," declared the article by Santen. The entire Pabloite "United Secretariat" has blood on its hands. They aided and abetted the Stalinist betrayal of the Indonesian workers and peasants.

Chapter Five

Pabloites cover up Stalinist treachery The crisis of working class leadership was never posed so sharply as in Indonesia

between 1963 and 1965. The fate of the Indonesian workers and peasants depended entirely on overcoming and defeating the counter-revolutionary line of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) which bound the working class hand and foot to the tottering bourgeois nationalist regime of Sukarno while the US-backed military prepared for a bloody coup. The PKI Stalinists, led by general secretary Aidit, repeatedly demanded that workers and peasants hand back factories and plantations which they had seized. They then joined the army generals in taking cabinet posts in the Suharto government and backed the outlawing of workers' strikes.

Lifting the Curtain on the Coup of October 1 st 1965 – Suing for the Justice

The more it became obvious that the generals were preparing for a bloody coup, the more the PKI leaders worked feverishly to assure the bourgeoisie and the military that the PKI opposed the revolutionary mobilisation of the masses.

Aidit repeatedly declared that the state power in Indonesia did not have to be smashed but could be reformed from within to "strengthen and consolidate the pro- people's aspect," which included President Sukarno. The PKI leader gave lectures at army colleges in which he heralded a "feeling of mutuality and unity that daily grows strong between all the armed forces of the Indonesian Republic and the various groups of Indonesian people, including the communists".

The PKI leadership could only advance these positions because the Indonesian Pabloites were working equally feverishly to prevent workers from breaking with the Stalinists. They vehemently opposed the construction of a new revolutionary leadership.

The responsibility for the bloody counter-revolutionary consequences of this line can

be traced directly to the 1963 Pabloite Reunification Congress at which the American Socialist Workers Party consummated an unprincipled break from the International Committee of the Fourth International and joined the Pabloite "United Secretariat" of Ernest Mandel.

After leading the struggle against Pabloite liquidationism in 1953, the SWP leaders had in the late 1950s increasingly adapted to the pressure of the protracted post-war boom and the apparent quiescence of the working class. They abandoned the struggle for proletarian revolution led by a Bolshevik-type party and sought "regroupment" with petty bourgeois radicals and disaffected Stalinists. In 1963 they joined hands with the Pabloites in claiming that not only the Stalinist parties, such as the PKI, but also the bourgeois nationalist and petty-bourgeois nationalist forces in the backward countries, such as Castro in Cuba and Sukarno in Indonesia, could become vehicles for the establishment of socialism.

The reunification resolution declared that there was no crisis of revolutionary leadership in the oppressed countries: "In the colonial and semi-colonial countries ... the very weakness of capitalism, the whole peculiar socio-economic structure produced by imperialism, the permanent misery of the big majority of the population in the absence of a radical agrarian revolution, the stagnation and even reduction of living standards while industrialisation nevertheless proceeds relatively rapidly, creates situations in which the failure of one revolutionary wave does not lead automatically to relative or even temporary social or economic stabilisation. A seemingly inexhaustible succession of mass struggles continues, such as Bolivia has experienced for 10 years."

In other words, no matter how crushing were the defeats and betrayals inflicted on the masses, they would rise again. There was no need for a Trotskyist party. The criminal character of this opportunist complacency was soon to be spelt out in the blood of the Indonesian masses.

The 1963 conference was based on the rejection of the historical necessity of building sections of the Trotskyist movement in the backward countries. The Pabloite

Menguak Tabir Peristiwa 1 Oktober 1965 – Mencari Keadilan

resolution declared: "The weakness of the enemy in the backward countries has opened the possibility of coming to power even with blunted instruments." In Indonesia, the "blunted instrument" was to be the PKI.