Here is the article on Indonesia Kim...I send it to the list because a lot
of people here need to be reminded of the political role these people
represent despite some of the heroic efforts on the parts of individuals..
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Two weeks ago, amid growing social turmoil in Indonesia over the economic
crisis racking Asia, the dictator Suharto was re-elected to a seventh term
as president. In mid-February, the government banned public protests and
deployed massive police and army forces on the streets in an attempt to
ensure order. Nevertheless, large anti-Suharto protests have occurred almost
daily on universities across Java over the past month. These have been met
with fierce repression whenever students have tried to take the protests
outside the campuses.
Indonesia is a powder keg. Engulfed by Asian financial crisis, the
Indonesian rupiah has undergone a massive devaluation&emdash;some 70 to 80
percent since July 1997. Business collapses, soaring prices and shortage of
goods have led to panic buying and so-called "food riots," raising the
spectre of economic chaos and further social unrest. Already bridling under
the extreme corruption of the Suharto dictatorship, the middle class has had
its expectations of success under the Asian "economic miracle" utterly
dashed as international market forces hit home.
For the working class, the austerity measures dictated by the imperialist
bloodsuckers of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) mean deepening
immiseration. Millions have already been laid off, with building and factory
workers worst hit. Unemployment is now officially reported to be 8 million,
from 2.5 million in mid-1997. The staterun SPSI (All Indonesia Workers
Union) predicts that the number of workers who don’t earn enough to cover
their daily needs will reach 40 million out of a workforce of 90 million
this year. The situation has been heightened by the worst drought in 50
years, with villagers pouring into the cities like Jakarta in search of
work. While the economic crisis has sparked worker unrest, it has also fed
the growth of Islamic fevour. This has had serious consequences not only for
the largely Christian Chinese minority, who have met with violence and arson
at the hands of rampaging mobs, but for women workers who have played an
increasingly strong role in strikes and protests.
>From Thailand and Indonesia to the Philippines, massive imperialist
investment over the past two decades, centrally by Japanese capital, has
created a vibrant, young proletariat. This is the force which can and must
fight to sweep away the bloodsoaked Suharto dictatorship, not by looking for
alliance with an illusionary "democratic" wing of Indonesian capitalism, but
through socialist revolution against the entire capitalist-landlord ruling
class and its imperialist patrons.
To lead this struggle to victory requires the forging of a
Leninist-Trotskyist party which seeks to link the class struggles in
Indonesia with those of workers throughout Asia and across the world. The
road to emancipation of the working class of the region&emdash;and with them
women, the peasantry and oppressed ethnic and national
minorities&emdash;lies in the fight for a socialist federation of Southeast
Asia, linked to the struggle for proletarian revolution in Japan, Australia,
the U.S. and other imperialist powers and for workers political revolution
in China to stop the threat of capitalist restoration there.
The Family; Mainstay of Social reaction
Fighting for the right to organize in independent trade unions and for wage
increases and better working conditions, including maternity leave rights,
women have played a militant role in workers struggles over the past decade.
This is exemplified by the case of Marsinah, a young militant who became a
hero for millions of women and youth after she was brutally murdered in the
wake of labour struggles in East Java in 1993. Many of these new
proletarians are recently arrived from villages where traditional jobs have
been replaced by mechanization or lost through encroaching urbanization.
While horribly exploited in the factories, these young women also find some
freedom from the social pressures of family and village life, particularly
the pressure to marry, including through arranged marriages.
Central to women’s oppression in Indonesia, as in all class societies, is
the institution of the family&emdash;an economic and social unit subjugating
women as dependent domestic slaves and serving, along with organized
religion, as a mainstay of social reaction. Suharto’s "New Order" military
regime, ushered in with horrific 1965 anti-Communist bloodbath in which over
a half a million people were slaughtered, has strongly inculcated an
ideology relegating women to the role of wife and mother. In 1974, the
government passed a national marriage law which in its original form
provoked widespread revolt from Islamic leaders because it threatened to
abolish polygamy and weaken the role of the Islamic courts which mainly deal
with family law and inheritance. To appease the Islamicists, the final,
revised law codified and greatly expanded the role of Islamic courts,
allowing as well for the institution of polygamy, although somewhat
circumscribed. The law also codified the wife’s role as family housekeeper
and the husband’s as the family protector and provider.
The regime’s key vehicles for inculcating this ideology has been government
controlled women’s organizations such as Dharma Wanita and particularly the
PKK (Family Welfare Movement) which permeates both urban and rural areas
throughout the Indonesian archipelago. These organizations promote the
doctrine of Panca Dharma Wanita&emdash;the "Five Duties of women." This is a
companion piece to the regime’s Panca Sila doctrine, of Sukarno, Indonesia’s
first nationalist ruler following independence from the Dutch in 1948. Where
Panca Sila puts forward the five "principles" of belief in one god,
humanism, patriotism, democracy and social justice, Panca Dharma Wanita lays
out the five basic roles making the fundamental oppression of women in the
family: companion and supporter of one’s husband, caretaker of the
household, producer of future generations, prime socialiser of children and
an Indonesian citizen.
At the same time, the contingencies of economic development have required
the government to encourage women to take on employment outside the home,
even as they are supposed to maintain their primary role within the family.
Increased participation by women in the workforce has been accompanied by
greater access to education, at least for a layer of women, along with
declining birth rates, delayed marriages and greater population mobility.
One reflection of the position of middle-class and bourgeois women in
Indonesian society, where economic development has taken place alongside
continuing social backwardness, id the development of a distinct but small
Islamic feminist movement which tries to bridge the unbridgeable gulf
between access to the modern world and the demands of religion and the
family.
Imperialist capitalist investment has also led to the emergence of an
urbanized and educated, though deeply exploited, proletariat, particularly
in manufacturing. Twenty million workers live in urban areas like the
Jakarta-Bogor-Tangerang-Bekasih industrial belt. Women, particularly those
who come from villages and have little education, form the bulk of
superexploited workers in the prison-like factories in such areas. Huge
factory complexes in Tangerang are surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled
by "ex" military guards. Workers housed within the compounds&emdash;three or
four to a cell&emdash;are not allowed to leave without permission. Despite
such hellish conditions, the ability of women to work outside the home means
that their relationship to male workers increasingly becomes one of comrades
in the class struggle, not household slaves shut away from the world.
The struggle for women’s emancipation is tied to the proletarian class
struggle to overthrow the system of capitalist exploitation. We fight to end
patriarchal practices oppressive to women, like the polygamy system and the
bride price&emdash;legacies of social backwardness which are today upheld by
religious reactionaries in league with the capitalist rulers. Women’s
liberation can only come about through socialist revolution extending to
advanced capitalist countries. In a socialist planned economy, the family as
a social unit will be replaced by socialization of childcare and household
duties. Only then can relationships be entered into freely and without
economic compulsion.
As in the 1917 Russian Revolution, women workers will be in the forefront of
the fight against capitalist and semi-feudal enslavement in Indonesia. As
revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky said in 1924 of the newly liberated Muslim
women of the Soviet East: "There will be no better communist in the East, no
better fighter for the ideas of the revolution than the awakened women
worker."
Indonesian Prison House of Peoples
An important addressing the oppression of women in Indonesia is abortion,
which is illegal. This issue was highlighted earlier this year when a number
of doctors and nurses were arrested for performing abortions and their
clinics closed and files seized. At the same time, abortions are reportedly
not uncommon among middle-class women, who have greater access to education
and a certain degree of personal freedom, along with the money to pay for
the procedure. For poor and working class women, access to free, safe
abortion is an explosive issue. There is a huge stigma attached to pregnancy
outside of marriage, with illegitimate children and their mothers shunned by
society. According to a report in the Sydney Morning Harald (3 January),
1994 statistics revealed that 450 out of every 100,000 pregnant women died
in Indonesia&emdash;the highest maternal death rate in Southeast Asia.
Sixteen percent of these deaths were reported from unsafe abortions.
The fight for free abortion on demand is closely linked to the struggle for
free, quality health care for all. Medical care in Indonesia is poor even by
standards for so-called "developing" world. Along with very high rates of
death in childbirth are high infant mortality rates. In the countryside,
some 80 percent of pregnant women and children under five years of age are
undernourished. This situation is aggravated by the collapse of the rupiah
and skyrocketing costs for goods like medical supplies.
With a population of over 200 million, Indonesia is the fourth-largest and
one of the most densely populated countries in the world. The Suharto regime
has pursued an aggressive population control program from which single women
are excluded. While the government’s KB (Keluarga Berencana) program
provides free access to contraception for married women, many have been
threatened or bribed into participating. These pressures are intensified by
the involvement of the Indonesian military (ABRI) in the program as part of
its so-called "dual function" in military and civilian affairs&emdash;the
recipe by which bloody military terror has been repeatedly unleashed to
regiment and suppress the population.
Another aspect of the population control program is the regime’s
"transmigration" policy, resettling landless poor from densely populated
areas, particularly in Java, to outlying and ethnically distinct areas such
as Irian Jaya and East Timor. This policy has stoked the flames of
long-standing ethnic and religious unrest. For example, the East
Timorese&emdash;have been struggling for independence against the genocidal
Indonesian military occupation since 1975. More Than 200,000 East
Timorese&emdash;fully one-third of the population&emdash;have died either by
direct murder, such as the slaughter of over 200 demonstrators in the East
Timor capital of Dili in 1991, or from disease and starvation.
The infant mortality rate in East Timor is one of the five worst in the
world. East Timorese suffer high levels of malnutrition, TB, malaria and
sexually transmitted diseases, while desperate economic conditions have led
young women into prostitution or forced marriages. East Timorese women, who
are largely Catholic and reject birth control on religious grounds, are
often coerced into compliance, intimidated when visiting healthcare
facilities where doctors and nurses are often accompanied by soldiers.
Covert sterilizations and injections are widely suspected, such as when only
female students at a senior high school were given alleged anti-tetanus
injections. Such barbarity underscores the very real fear of the East
Timorese that the Indonesian government intends to carry out the genocide of
their people.
Only a revolutionary overthrow of the existing capitalist imperialist system
can even begin to address the oppression, degradation and misery of women as
well as the rights and emancipation of national minorities throughout the
archipelago. Indonesia is a prison house of peoples&emdash;home to some 300
different ethnic and national groups who suffer under the repression of the
Java-centered bourgeois regime. Most notably, there have been struggles for
independence waged by the Acehnese of north Sumatra and the people of Irian
Jaya, as well as by the East Timorese. We call for the immediate
independence of East Timor&emdash;not through appeals for some imperialist,
UN-brokered deal as pushed by the Indonesian leftist Peoples Democratic
Party (PRD), but as part of the fight for workers revolution in Indonesia.
The reformist Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) in Australia promotes the PRD
’s class-collaborationist politics, fostering illusions in "democratic"
Australian imperialism. However, we make clear that the Australian ruling
class is no friend of the East Timorese or Indonesian masses. In a letter
last December to the Australian immigration minister, the Partisan Defense
Committee denounced the denial of entry visas to East Timorese activists at
the time as "an act of blatant political censorship, underscoring the
Australian government’s complicity in the Indonesian government’s slaughter
and suppression in East Timor." The letter went on: "Following the 1991 Dili
massacre the Australian military, stepped up its arming and training of the
Indonesian military, including of the elite Kopassus counterinsurgency
torture/killer units, who are the cutting edge of repression throughout the
archipelago." We also noted that this ban on East Timorese activists marked
another step in the Australian government’s racist war on immigrants,
refugees and Aborigines, the spearhead for broad-gauged attacks on the trade
unions and the working class as a whole.
Islam as a Political Factor
Some 90 percent of Indonesia’s 203 million inhabitants describe themselves
as Muslim, making Indonesia the largest Islamic country in the world.
However, particularly on Java where Islamic beliefs were syncretised with
pre-existing animist, Hindu and Buddhist traditions, a large proportion of
Muslims have been described as abangun (nominal). Alongside the abangun are
the santri , or devout, Muslims. Approximately 56 million belong in two
organizations reflecting the main strands of santri Muslims:the
traditionalist Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) based on the rural Islamic schools
called pesantren, and the urban-based, "modernist" organization
Muhammadiyah. With widespread resentment among the new middle classes at the
nepotism, cronyism and corruption of the Suharto clique, there has been an
increasing "santrification" of abangun Muslims.
The Suharto regime has nurtured a special relationship with the
"modernists," reflected in shifts in the army leadership and in the
formation in 1990 of the Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals
(ICMI), led by Suharto’s newly appointed vice president Habibie. Suharto has
also sought to appease conservative Muslim interests by elevating the status
of the Islamic courts and passing laws mandating, for example, compulsory
religious instruction in the schools. In the late 1980s, registry offices
were no longer permitted to perform marriages, making marriage between
people of different religions virtually impossible to obtain. The rise of
Islam as a political factor in Indonesia can only be as a force for
reaction. It is necessary to fight for the separation of the state and
religion and to combat theocratic reaction, including opposing
discrimination against all religious minorities.
The past few years have seen an increasing number of violent attacks by
Islamic mobs on Sino-Indonesian and Christian churches, such as the attacks
that broke out in towns around Tasik-malaya in West Java in 1996. Today, the
Chinese minority, which includes fabulous wealthy elite, is being made a
scapegoat for the economic crisis besetting Southeast Asia. The British
television program ITN World News carried a report recently that at least
one of the recent anti-Chinese pogroms, in the town of Praya on the island
of Lombok, was organized by the government security forces. In the wake of
the attack, many Chinese residents simply fled, too frightened to reopen
their shops. Muslim shopkeepers interviewed by ITN described how they were
warned in advance by cops to stay out of the marketplace that day. They said
that the "rioters" had never been seen in the village before, but had been
bused in by the police. It was only when the mob, finding Chinese shops
closed, moved on to non-Chinese areas that security forces stepped in.
The capitalist rulers have long fostered national and communal divisions to
ward of multiethnic class struggle. Chinese Indonesians have historically
been the target of racist reaction. In the 1965 bloodbath, ethnic Chinese
were singled out by anti-Communist mobs. In the wake of the massacres,
Chinese organizations affiliated with the Stalinist regime in Beijing were
proscribed and all Chinese language schools were closed down. Only since the
re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Indonesia and China and the
expansion of tourism and trade between the two countries has Jakarta been
compelled to make some concessions. In 1994, the ban on teaching Chinese was
eased and Chinese-language tourist pamphlets were permitted. However,
restrictions on the import, sale or distribution of Chinese-language
material remain in force, and the prominent display of Chinese characters on
buildings is banned. This year, the Suharto government even banned public
celebrations of the Chinese New year.
Today, anti-Chinese attacks are reaching a level not seen since 1965. In the
absence of a revolutionary proletarian party uniting workers across ethnic
and national lines, discontent is likely to be further deflected in the
direction of pogroms. Every manifestation of anti-Chinese chauvinism must be
fought down the line by class-conscious workers throughout Indonesia. Down
with the anti-Chinese terror!
Throughout Southeast Asia, there are millions of poor and working class
Chinese who are class brothers in the struggle against capitalist
exploitation. The need for a united, internationalist proletarian struggle
is underlined by the fact that increasing numbers of Indonesian workers have
been compelled to cross the straits to Malaysia and Singapore, where Chinese
make up 30 and 78 percent of the population, respectively. There they often
replace Chinese, Malay and Indian workers in the lowest-paid, hardest and
dirtiest jobs. Over a million Indonesians legally worked overseas in 1997.
Alongside them are an estimated equal number of so-called "illegal" workers,
whose ranks have been swelled in the past year as thousands cross the
straits to find work and even food. In the past three weeks, almost 4,000
Indonesians have been rounded up by Malaysian security forces, part of the
mass of foreign workers throughout Southeast Asia who have been deported
since last summer. We say; No deportations! Full citizenship rights for all
immigrants!
For Permanent revolution
Just as the Dutch plundered massive wealth from Indonesia during its
colonial rule, the country today is a rich source of superprofits for the
imperialists, with impoverished workers brutally exploited in the factories,
oil fields, mines and rubber plantations. Particularly in land starved Java,
industrial expansion has transformed the rural sector, with peasant
households displaced by development projects. One result has been a
significant depopulation of villages, particularly of women. Those from
rural areas moving to the cities in the search of work cannot fail to notice
the vast gulf between the rich and the poor. In Jakarta alone, millions live
in shantytowns without running water or electricity.
Indonesia is a country where Leon Trotsky’s theory and program of permanent
revolution is manifestly applicable. In the backward countries in this
century, the epoch of imperialist decay, the democratic gains achieved by
the earlier European bourgeois revolutions, such as political democracy and
agrarian revolution, can no longer be carried out by bourgeois nationalists,
who are weak and dependent on their imperialist masters. The 1917 Russian
revolution showed the way forward for countries like Indonesia. Under the
leadership of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, the capitalist class
was expropriated and a workers state erected on the foundations of a
planned, collectivized economy&emdash;the pre-condition for an egalitarian
socialist society. This happened in a country with a small but socially
concentrated working class, alongside a large, backward peasantry and many
national minorities.
The Bolshevik Revolution represented an enormous leap forward, particularly
for women. The new Soviet government immediately removed all impediments to
legal equality for women, giving them the right to vote, making marriage and
divorce simple matters of civil registration, legalizing abortion and
outlawing discrimination against homosexuals. Daycare facilities and
communal dining rooms and laundries were established to free women from
household drudgery.
But in an isolated, backward country, these efforts could only hint at the
possibilities for women had socialist revolution spread to the advanced
industrial countries. In 1923-24, a consolidating, conservative bureaucracy
led by Stalin usurped power through a political counterrevolution. Under the
nationalist dogma of "socialism in one country" the Stalinist bureaucracy
opposed the fight for international extension of the revolution. It
glorified the backwardness of the young Soviet state and reversed many of
the Bolshevik measures to liberate women. Strangled by the Stalinist
bureaucracy the Soviet Union was finally destroyed through capitalist
counterrevolution in 1991-92. This was an enormous setback for workers and
oppressed the world over. However, it was not communism that died in the
Soviet Union, but its nationalist perversion, Stalinism. Today, we raise the
call for new October Revolutions&emdash;the only solution to the wars and
poverty rooted in capitalism.
No to Class Collaboration!
The austerity measures dictated by the U.S..-dominated IMF clearly
illustrate the dependent nature of the national bourgeoisie in the backward
countries like Indonesia. With unrest mounting under the rule of the aging
Suharto, the U.S., and other imperialists are likely to play a big role in
deciding his succession. We warn against any support to such bourgeois
"oppositionists" as Magewati Sukarnoputri- the daughter of
Sukarno&emdash;who was banned in 1996 from running in the regime’s rigged
presidential "elections." A recent historical analogue was Washington’s
promoting of the aristocratic Cory Aquino in the Philippines as a successor
to the venal, hated regime of Ferdinand Marcos in the mid-1980s. Backed by
fake leftists such as the DSP, who mislead the workers movement into the
trap of class collaborationism, Aquino whole heartedly defended the
interests of her class, the capitalist rulers, and their imperialist patrons
against the working class and oppressed masses.
Reformist "socialists" who seek to tie the working class and oppressed to a
"progressive" wing of the capitalist class follow the Menshevik/Stalinist
schema of "two-stage" revolution: fight for "democratic" capitalism today
and socialism some time in a future that never comes. As repeatedly
demonstrated by history&emdash;from defeat of the Chinese Revolution of
1925-27, which was drowned in blood by Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang
Nationalists, to the Chilean military’s overthrow of Allende’s popular-front
government in 1973&emdash;this program means the mass murder of communists
and workers.
In Indonesia in 1965, the predominant Javanese-based PKI was the largest
Communist Party outside of the Soviet Union and China, comprimising some 3
million members and another 14 million supporters in trade-union, peasant,
women’s and youth organizations. But the PKI’s political support to Sukarno
under the watchword of gotong royong –"national unity" with the
"progressive" bourgeoisie&emdash;paved the way for the massacres which
decimated the organized working class and destroyed the PKI. Under Sukarno,
the PKI gained cabinet posts, while using its authority to repeatedly ban
strikes and surpress militant peasant movements. Pledging to enforce "the
cooperation between the people and the Armed Forces in particular the Police
Force," the PKI served to strengthen the very repressive apparatus which
later came down on it.
This regime was an example of a popular front, a class-collaborationist
coalition in which the proletariat and oppressed are chained to the class
enemy. The Indonesian masses were politically, organizationally and
militarily disarmed when the generals, backed by imperialism, struck to
behead the PKI. In carrying out repression, reactionary Islamic
fundamentalists were unleashed against the PKI, its allies and the Chinese
minority. Members of Gerwani, the PKI-linked women’s organization, were
particularly targeted for murder, torture and imprisonment. Those who
survived were blacklisted and ostracized by their communities.
The U.S. and Australian imperialists were up to their necks in the 1965
massacres, providing the Indonesian generals with a hit list of 5,000
Communists. The mobilization of Islamic reactionaries was also promoted by
Washington. In 1950, John Foster Dulles, who later became U.S. president
Eisenhower’s secretary of state explained;
"The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values.
Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and
materialism. That creates a common bond between us, and our task is to find
it and develop it."
--quoted in Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (1973)
This "bond" was cemented in the blood of Indonesian workers and peasants.
The smashing of the PKI and stabilization of Indonesia as an anti-communist
bastion both emboldened Washington to massively escalate its war in Vietnam
and created the conditions for the development of a "defeatist" wing of U.S.
imperialism, which felt that withdrawal from its losing war in Vietnam would
not jeopardize its strategic interests in the region. Since that time,
Indonesia has played a key role in the counterrevolutionary ambitions of
imperialism in East and Southeast Asia, for example in the ASEAN anti-China
bloc.
Today, the Stalinist regime in Beijing has brought the Chinese
bureaucratically deformed workers state to the brink of capitalist
counterrevolution. As Trotskyists, we call for the unconditional military
defense of China and the other deformed workers states&emdash;Vietnam, North
Korea,Cuba&emdash;against imperialism and internal counterrevolution, while
fighting for proletarian political revolution to stop the bureaucracy’s
drive toward capitalist restoration.
Vast amounts of military equipment, training and funds have been provided by
the U.S. and other imperialist powers to prop up Suharto’s generals and
crush internal dissent. Agreements for joint exercises between the U.S..
Indonesian and Australia reflect not only the imperialists strategic
interest in China but their fears of instability in Indonesia itself. This
is critical for the U.S. as it pursues its ambitions in the region against
rival Japanese imperialism. The post Soviet world is marked by
intensification of such interimperialist rivalries, which had previously
been restrained in greater interest of Cold war anti-Soviet unity.
Indonesia has special importance to the imperialists because of its
strategic location. The Malacca Strait, running between the Indonesian
island of Sumatra and the Malaysian peninsula and Singapore, provides the
quickest shipping route between the Pacific Ocean and the oil-rich Persian
Gulf. In the event of imperialist conflict, control of the strait will be
vital. Indonesia is also the largest supplier of oil to Japan outside the
Near east, while 90 percent of Japan’s oil imports pass through Indonesian
waters. Reinforcing the appetites of Japanese imperialism toward Indonesia
is the memory of the U.S. naval blockade of oil which impelled Japan’s entry
into World War 2.
For a Leninist-Trotskyist Party!
Over the last decade, worker’s struggles in Indonesia have led to the
formation of independent trade-union organizations such as the Indonesian
Workers Welfare Union (SBSI), founded in 1992 by Muchtar Pakpahan, and the
Indonesian Centre for Working-Class Struggle (PPBI). The PPBI is led by Dita
Sari, who has repeatedly for her role in organizing strikes and protests,
such as a 1995 demonstration against the occupation of East Timor. It is
aligned with the left-nationalist PRD, which like the PPBI was formed in
1994. An umbrella group of student, worker and peasant associations, the PRD
includes many students who have gone on to organize trade unions, strike
struggles and anti-government protests in key industrial centres. A number
of them have been arrested in the course of these struggles. Free all
class-war prisoners in Suharto’s dungeons!
The courage and dedication displayed by these militants in the face of
military repression is evident. However, the PRD’s political support to
Megawati reveals its class-collaborationist strategy. The PRD explicitly
calls for alliances with the two legal non-government parties, the Islamic
based United Development Party (PPP) and the bourgeois-nationalist
Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI), and all other so called "democratic
forces." Political groups which are simply the left wing of the existing
capitalist order cannot offer any perspective for the liberation of women,
or anyone else for that matter. As part of the fight to forge a
revolutionary vanguard party of the working class, we seek to win the most
advanced workers to the understanding that the political independence of the
proletariat from the ruling class is a necessary pre-condition for
successful struggle against the capitalist system of exploitation and
oppression.
We seek to build an internationalist revolutionary party to act as a tribune
of the people, mobilizing the proletariat in defense of all the oppressed
against the common class enemy. Particularly in Asia, the fight for the
emancipation of women is a key component of this perspective. We call for
equal pay for equal work, and for their full integration into the workforce.
We champion the complete equality of women. The elimination of women’s
oppression requires a tremendous leap from the existing material conditions.
And this can only be achieved through socialist revolution, leading to the
creation of an international planned economy based on elevating human
production to meet the needs of all.
For Indonesian workers, revolutionary internationalism is a matter of life
and death. A proletarian revolution would immediately face hostile
imperialism. Thus the fight for proletarian power must be linked to a
perspective of workers revolution in the imperialist centres&emdash;Japan,
Australia, the U.S.&emdash;a perspective which requires the construction of
international vanguard parties. The Spartacist League of Australia, section
of the International Communist League, stands with our class brothers and
sisters of the region in opposition to all the imperialist machinations of
the Australian ruling class&emdash;from its depredation in Bougainville to
its role in spying for and training Suharto’s military terror regime. We
seek to break the most class-conscious elements away from the racist Labor
party&emdash;the key obstacle to forging the vanguard party necessary to
lead the workers to victory in this country. For a workers republic of
Australia, part of a socialist Asia! Reforge he Fourth International, world
party of socialist revolution!
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