To work towards becoming a member of the United Nations or some other international organization on the basis of equal status, democracy, and objectives of a murba-oriented world government. (Tan Malaka, “Keterangan Ringkas tentangan Maximum Program”)
As to the structure of the party, I have been able to find only later versions of the party statutes (from 1960).93 From these, it is clear that Partai Murba was established as a democratic-centralist party, with members obligated to carry out decisions of the party. This included members holding public office, which they were entitled to do only on the party’s authorization. Regular dues were to be paid to the party, including a proportion of the salary for public office holders; party members were prohibited from joining other parties and from acting contrary to the party’s interests; and the party had various disciplinary powers over members. On the other hand, members were assured of congresses as the highest decision-making bodies, from which the party council and executive were elected; members were entitled to vote in branch meetings and through delegates at congress. The executive had the responsibility to establish bureaus (organization, finance, agit/prop, etc.) and appropriate sub-bureaus and departments to direct various areas of work (workers, peasants, youth, and women).
The Gerakan Revolusi Rakyat was to remain a broader united front of mass organizations supporting the minimum program, and the newspapers Moerba and Massa were to function as the party’s official voice.94 Once again, as in the Persatuan Perjuangan, Tan Malaka refrained from holding any office in the party, remaining as “promoter” together with Rustam Effendi, the former PKI member and representative of the CPN in the Dutch parliament.
Partai Murba represented an evolution in Tan Malaka’s thinking, or perhaps, more precisely, a return to the views he held in the 1920s on the need for a revolutionary party on the Leninist model.
Conclusion
As illustrated in the areas elaborated above, Tan Malaka’s ideas changed little from the early twenties until his death.95 However, the considerable changes that took place within the communist movement mean that the characterization of Tan Malaka as an “orthodox communist” may appear quite reasonable in 1922, but was untenable by 1945, when the official communist movement had changed so markedly.
In the 1920s, and even into the 1930s, “communist” was the most frequently used appellation for Tan Malaka, though it was often embellished to become “notorious Javanese Red” or “communist subversive.”96 While Tan Malaka was chairman of the PKI, delegate to a Comintern congress, or Comintern agent for Southeast Asia, the term “communist” was a sufficient description. Even after Tan Malaka expressed severe and public criticism of the PKI and established his own party, PARI, in 1927, with no ties to the Comintern, the catchall label “communist” was still applied (except by his immediate opponents in the PKI who preferred to call him “traitor,” due to his opposition to the 1926 uprisings). It must be remembered that although the differences between Stalin and Trotsky were becoming apparent at this time, they had not yet hardened into an open split, and to be a communist was to be a supporter of the Third International and of the Russian revolution. It was hardly surprising, then, that this term was still used to describe Tan Malaka, particularly since so little was known of the nature of PARI and of his differences with the Comintern.
Since World War II, however, the term “communist” has been used in reference to Tan Malaka principally by anticommunists who regard it as sufficient to describe and thereby to condemn. It is in this unscientific sense that we see the term used to categorize Tan Malaka during the physical struggle for independence by, among others, the Dutch officialdom and the U.S. State Department.97
As the line between Tan Malaka and the PKI became clearer during the revolutionary period, some sought to label Tan Malaka a “national communist.” There was undoubtedly some basis for this characterization since many regarded him as a communist of some type, while seeing clearly that he had no ties with the international communist movement directed by Moscow which, until mid-1948, supported the government’s policy of diplomasi, not perjuangan. The “national communist” label gained some currency as people began to hear of Tito and his break from Moscow and then to apply the term to another “independent” communist, whose parallel with Tito was far from close.98 Though not used very often while he was alive, it has continued after his death as the most common descriptor for Tan Malaka.99 It is worth addressing here in some detail. Anthony J. Reid develops the concept most fully as follows:
At the end of 1945 it was abundantly clear that the most important cleavage was not between communists and social democrats. It was between those Marxists in both the above camps whose principal orientation was international, and those whose experience and sentiments were primarily or entirely Indonesian. For the former the primary issue was still the international struggle against capitalism; the strategy was the united front with the anti-fascist and bourgeois-democratic forces; and one of the assumptions was relative confidence in the Dutch and British Left, both now in power. . . . The great majority of Indonesians attracted to communism in 1945, on the other hand, saw it as the party of revolution par excellence, carrying on the defiant tradition of the 1926-7 revolt, prepared to match its rhetoric with action and to carry the revolution into domestic Indonesian social structures. The eventual success of the international Marxists in taming most of this group was one of the most important factors in curbing the whole social revolutionary movement. (Indonesian National Revolution, pp. 81-82)
Reid’s identification and separation of the two main streams of Indonesian politics during the revolutionary period is accurate and incisive and follows the diplomasi versus perjuangan dichotomy that Tan Malaka himself used as the litmus test during the 1945-1949 period, and that Benedict Anderson developed at length in his work Java in a Time of Revolution.
There is, however, in my view, a major flaw in the categories to which Reid assigns the two streams and in the labels he places upon them. Reid confuses the “primary issue” and the “strategy” and, in so doing, ends up with untenable categories. If “national communist” is taken to mean a lack of international perspective or a lack of understanding of how the international situation can affect the Indonesian revolution, then the term is clearly inappropriate for Tan Malaka. Similarly, “international Marxist” is a misnomer for the advocates of diplomasi. The line followed by the social-democratic parties of Europe against the colonial people’s struggle for independence (a line that was for a time also supported by the communist parties in the metropolitan countries and also in the colonies themselves) was a far cry from both internationalism and Marxism. If, on the other hand, “national communist” is taken to mean an ideology that embraces both nationalism and communism, and that implies a locally oriented approach without direction from above, then one can unquestionably assign Tan Malaka to this category. The very ambiguity of the term, however, makes it one best avoided.
The appellation “Trotskyist” has frequently been given to Tan Malaka. There is a certain basis for this characterization in that the hallmarks of Trotskyism are opposition to the bureaucratic degeneration in the Soviet Union and particularly to its expression in the subordination of the world revolution to the narrow interests of the Soviet state, issues which, as we have seen above, were pursued by Tan Malaka. Such criticism of the Stalinist policies advanced in Moscow, however, were made by many people other than Leon Trotsky, and there is no indication that Tan Malaka came close to adhering to Trotsky’s analysis of the reasons for these developments or the remedy for them.
This description of Tan Malaka stemmed originally from confusion over the identity of “Alphonso,” the delegate from Indonesia to the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928. This delegate, who was widely assumed to be Tan Malaka, was attacked by Bukharin as a “Trotskyist” for criticizing the Comintern policy of alliance with the national bourgeoisie in the colonial countries.100
A full-throated example of the PKI’s use
