Ours to Master and to Own by Dario Azzellini

Author:Dario Azzellini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2011-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Historical Significance of Workers’ Control to Indonesia

As we have seen in the case of Indonesia’s labor-state relationship from 1945–1950, to understand the nature of organized labor at that time requires bringing into perspective the revolutionary situation that Indonesians were facing. This was a crucial period during which the Indonesian state was working desperately to consolidate its resources and establish power. As the revolution in Indonesia was spontaneous and the resulting economic conditions devastating, the Indonesian labor movement had an unprecedented opportunity to pursue its own interests, rather than focusing its struggle solely on defending the nation’s independence.

The Indonesian labor movement was also seeking a possible role within the juncture of political events and was thus not easily confined to the postcolonial state’s arrangement. This situation provided the material context for workers in Java to assert authority over the means of production, under the relative absence of state power. It created a space for the labor movement to gain self-control and to decide its own route, well beyond the workers’ prior skills and knowledge. During the period of state formation, workers’ control boosted the bargaining position of the labor movement so that the postcolonial state had much more to consider than simply absorbing the labor movement into its sphere of control.

It is evident that the experience of self-management made the Indonesian workers self-reliant within their own organizations. Although workers’ control and the self-management of railway stations and plantations exercised by the dewan pimpinan lasted only a few months, the experience prepared the labor movement to muster a strong defense against the postcolonial state’s eventual normalization drive to tame it.

Since the Indonesian labor movement had discovered that it could transmute nationalist determination into the advancement of its members’ interests under the self-management operation of the railway stations and plantations, this in turn served as a building block for the movement’s political capacity and, in time, for its political strength to stand before the postcolonial state. This gave rise to Indonesia’s postcolonial labor movement of the 1950s, which could maneuver and organize its interests for the protection of its members, allowing it to take its own initiatives and affording it a means for evading, if not resisting, the roles designed by the state. Thus the state-labor relationship in Indonesia had more of a dialectical character, rather than the monolectical kind, in which the state could immediately impose certain limitations on the development of an independent labor movement through actions of coercion and violence, as was the case in Egypt (see Beinin and Lockman, 1998) or through co-optation via the promotion of national labor law, as in the case of French Africa (Cooper 1996) and the Philippines (Kerkvliet 1999).

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