Analysis, which vigorously attacks Tan Malaka for his position in 1926. Alimin maintains that the strategy for the 1926 uprising was correct, opening the way for advances in Asia. He characterizes Tan Malaka as an “adventurer” and a “Don Quixote” who “functioned as Trotskyists usually have in other countries by muddying the nationalist movement” (p. 19). In 1961 the PKI’s Institute for History published its account of the 1926 uprisings, roundly castigating the Trotskyist Tan Malaka for his role. According to Pemberontakan Nopember 1926, Tan Malaka made contact with Trotskyists inside the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), which he attended in 1922-1923. As a result of these contacts, it alleges, Tan Malaka became a Trotskyist, most likely due to his origins “as a member of the nobility and an intellectual,” with a petty-bourgeois intellectual’s understanding of Marxism-Leninism. Supposedly Tan Malaka’s non-Marxist perspectives became evident at ECCI meetings from 1923 to 1925 and in his acceptance of the ideas of permanent revolution and the need for a world revolution to ensure the success of the Indonesian revolution.101 Aside from the factual inaccuracies of this account, which has Tan Malaka attending ECCI sessions some two years after his departure from Moscow, it is a good illustration of the persistent view of him in official PKI circles.
Others who continue to tag Tan Malaka as a Trotskyist and who do not speak from any official Stalinist position do so more in passing than to develop a particular critique of him; but, in general, I see this use of the term as derivative. In most cases Tan Malaka is not central to their research, and they have relied on secondary sources, thus giving new life to old errors in fact and analysis; or their research in Indonesia has been confined to anti-Tan Malaka informants who have passed on their own distortions.102
Most Indonesians who voice support for Tan Malaka take pains to deny that he was a Trotskyist, perhaps largely today for self-defense against the right, but also in the days of PKI ascendancy when Trotskyism was also a dirty word. A good example of such concern is the 1957 publication by Partai Murba in commemoration of the eighth anniversary of Tan Malaka’s death. This volume contains transcripts of addresses given at the anniversary meeting held on 19 February 1957. Semaun states that he has read every one of Tan Malaka’s works and found not a single sentence of Trotskyism—they are all in line with the doctrines of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The secretary-general of the Partai Murba, Wasid Soewarto, states categorically that Tan Malaka was neither a Stalinist nor a Trotskyist. On a lighter note perhaps there is significance in the fact that Tan Malaka was reported (by Muhammad Yamin) as having worked as a tailor during the Japanese occupation, a story as remote from fact as the frequent references to Trotsky engaging in that occupation in New York in 1917.103
The fact is, however, that Tan Malaka had neither contact with the Trotskyist movement nor an understanding of the ideas that differentiate it from Stalinism. His references to Trotsky are scattered and contradictory. He speaks highly of him when discussing the Russian revolution and Trotsky’s role as commander of the Red Army, but when it comes to the disputes between Stalin and Trotsky, he quotes from the official History of the CPSU, which he apparently came across for the first time in 1946 (Thesis, p. 34). He uses that hardly unbiased interpretation of Trotsky’s positions to refute the allegation that he is a Trotskyist. The fact that Tan Malaka can do this without even a hint of understanding that Stalin may have falsified Trotsky’s views reveals, perhaps more clearly than the actual refutation of the “charge,” how little Tan Malaka knew of what had gone on inside the International from 1928.
There is evidence that Tan Malaka read Trotsky’s The Real Situation in Russia (an English translation of Trotsky’s speech to the 1927 congress of the CPSU at which he was expelled from the party).104 I have found no evidence that Tan Malaka ever read any other of Trotsky’s works.
Trotsky’s own writings give no indication that he knew of the existence, let alone the political views, of Tan Malaka.105 One would have thought that of all Trotsky’s supporters, Henk Sneevliet (Maring) would have made an attempt to reach Tan Malaka with the ideas of the left opposition, but two recent biographies of Sneevliet provide no clues to such an endeavor.106
During the postwar period, the press of the Fourth International carried a number of articles expressing general support for Tan Malaka’s position on the need to fight for independence and to distrust negotiations with Dutch imperialism.107 In the knowledge that Tan Malaka was taking a stand independent of, and in opposition to, the compromise approach of the PKI, the Fourth International tended to take a particular interest in him; but they had no direct contact, and they had insufficient evidence on which to base a political characterization.108
As far as I have been able to ascertain, the Australian Trotskyists made no effort to contact the Indonesian exiles from Digul, whom the Dutch brought to Australia as the Japanese army advanced, so that the occupying force would be denied the services of these rebels. In fact, a part of this group, those who still considered themselves PKI members, followed the international Stalinist line of collaboration with the national bourgeois government against fascism, and agreed to work with the Netherlands Indies government-in-exile in Australia. Other radical nationalists and followers of Tan Malaka and PARI refused to take this stand and continued to oppose the Dutch. At the end of the war, as a result of Indonesia’s proclamation of independence, this division deepened into open hostility in the Indonesian exile community in Australia. Positions shifted somewhat, as the Communist party of Australia supported Indonesian independence and built solidarity for that struggle within the Australian trade union movement and labor government. Most ex-PKI members then participated in the Cenkim (Central Committee for Indonesia Merdeka) in Australia, where they worked together with Australians of many political complexions, but with none, it seems, who called themselves Trotskyists.109 Evidently, the small Trotskyist movement in Australia knew nothing of the existence of PARI and its members, who might have been likely to sympathize with their views.
In effect, Tan Malaka’s contacts with the international communist movement, in any of its manifestations, ceased in 1923 as he boarded the train from Moscow to Canton. Up until he left Canton for the Philippines in July 1925 (that is, for the next eighteen months), he had sporadic contact with Comintern representatives such as Heller and Voitinsky, and at the same time with some members of the Chinese Communist party. One might think that he would thus have been kept informed of current debate and developments in the International, but several snippets of information that emerge from his autobiography contradict such an assumption. First, although he spoke reasonable German and some English, he had no command of Chinese and virtually no Russian. Second, he was ill a good deal of the time he was in Canton—one of the major causes for his move to the Philippines. It was during this period that he addressed his request to the governor general of the Netherlands Indies to be allowed to return to Indonesia on compassionate grounds due to his ill health. As if these physical impairments to communication were not sufficient, the few glimpses he gives of his relationship to other Comintern representatives demonstrate that they saw the purpose of such communication as being to pass on instructions, not to discuss, debate, learn, or even to teach. Tan Malaka’s account of the order he received to take on Profintern as well as Comintern business, and to this end to learn English, publish a journal, and organize the Transport Workers of the Pacific, is singularly instructive. Similarly instructive is his demoralizing experience of rushing from Canton to Singapore and then back again when called to meet representatives from Moscow who had left by the time he managed to smuggle himself back across twenty-five hundred kilometers with no legal papers and in less than two weeks. Such cavalier treatment demonstrates more than any formal resolutions or reports what a low priority was assigned to educating and informing the comrades from the East.
On leaving China, Tan Malaka broke even these tenuous links with the International. In the Philippines he was able to maintain some direct if erratic contact with the PKI—and this in the period of its legal status and huge size. Of course after the debacle of 1926-1927 there was no leadership left with which to communicate. And if Moscow made no attempt to communicate with Tan Malaka over the question of the uprisings, as seems the case from all evidence, then it can
