Sutan Sjahrir and the failure of Indonesian Socialism

Sjahrir 1 Abad, 5 Maret 1909 - 5 Maret 2009

Sutan Sjahrir and The Failure of Indonesian Socialism

Lindsay Rae

INTRODUCTIONSutan Sjahrir was a leading figure in the struggle for Indonesia’s independence. By most standards he achieved eminence and suffered political decline at a remarkably early age. By twenty-five he had made sufficient impact in the nationalist movement for the Dutch to cast him into a lengthy exile. At thirty-six he brilliantly seized an opportunity and became Prime Minister of his country, and for two years guided the young republic through some of its most difficult days. His work at this time was to have the most durable impact, largely determining the character of the Indonesian revolution, as a national rather than a social revolution, and shifting the emphasis of action towards “diplomacy” rather than “struggle”. As a young, western-oriented intellectual leader, he was successfully setting the pace of political developments, and with western liberal democracy at the height of its prestige, he appeared to represent the future. But by the__time Indonesia’s independence strugglc ended in 1949, he was 40, and already pushed From the centre of political life; he was never again to hold high office or exert decisive influence.

The years before his death were years of progressively deepening political Failure, ending with several years of imprisonment at the hands of the republic he had helped to create.Judgments of success and failure in political life often prove difficult, and this is particularly so in Sjahrir’s case. In his political career it is easy to point both to outstanding “successes” and to devastating “failures”. He showed great foresight and a capacity for penetrating analysis in his attitude to the war, and considerable courage in his actions during the Japanese occupation. His success in recruiting a dynamic and talented following among the young intellectuals of occupation Jakarta has been sympathetically described by Legge. His political skill was evident in his grasping the moment to take power from the “collaborationist” politicians who constituted the Republic of Indonesia’s first cabinet in 1945, but the same events also demonstrated his integrity and acuity. The analysis contained in his pamphlet Perjuangan Kita (Our Struggle) displayed both penetrating honesty and a cool perceptiveness. He anticipated the Cold War and its implications for Indonesia at an early stage. And he represented the Republic at the United Nations most impressively, thus playing a major part in gathering international, and especially American, support for the Indonesian cause, which proved decisive in overcoming Dutch intransigence.

These are testaments to his brilliance and high character, and demonstrations of his “success”.Sjahrir was a committed nationalist with a deep abhorrence of colonialism, and hence his role in creating an independent Indonesia marks his career as one of high achievement. However, in contrast to some who worked for independence, he was never merely a nationalist, and he had good reason to be profoundly disappointed with the fruits of independence. Nationalism took a place in his political thinking alongside tolerance, democracy, internationalism, socialism and modernity. Moreover these strandsin his thinking stood in a relationship of priority to one another, as the tests of political life would show. in the development of an Indonesian society to match his ideals, his ambitions remained largely unfulfilled. Indeed, from his loss of the Prime Ministership in 1947, his career followed a path of successively more intense periods of disappointment and remoteness from power. Thus, having been one of the principal architects of the Indonesian victory, he was subsequently unable to move the political current of the new Republic decisively in the ideological direction he favoured.In the brief period of Indonesia’s experiment with multi-party parliamentary democracy, the party which was Sjahrir’s vehicle, the Indonesian Socialist Party (PSI), proved an electoral failure. The PSI’s precursor, the undivided Socialist Party (PS), had been a major force during the revolutionary period, and the PSI itself had constituted a significant minority voice in some of the parliamentary cabinets of the early fifties. The party had in fact maintained a degree of influence on government far greater than its true level of support, or even its rather generous representation in the unelected provisional parliament of 1950-55, would have warranted. In the event, the party polled a mere two per cent of the national vote when elections were finally held in 1955. The party suffered further decline in the late fifties, and was banned in 1960 under Sukarno’s “Guided Democracy”. In 1962 Sjahrir and several other leaders, mostly associated with the PSI or the modernist Islamic party Masjumi, were imprisoned. After the 1965 coup attempt the politicians were released but neither party was revived in its original form.Legge argues that despite this apparent failure, the PSI “stream” in Indonesian political thinking represents a distinctive “moral and intellectual strand within Indonesian public life”. Certainly significant elements in the political elite and in the wider society have continued to concern themselves with themes which were important for the PSI, such as modernity, egalitarianism, social justice and respect for individual rights; but for the most part___national policy has not emphasized these goals either before or after 1966. Public policy during the Sukarno period mostly favored "neo - traditionalist” responses to the challenge of social change and the diversion of political energies into external causes such as the campaign to gain control of West Papua and the confrontation campaign against Malaysia. The New Order government has stressed economic growth, the maintenance of social order and cohesion, and the control of such democraticinstitutions as exist. Nonetheless there is clearly some link between the success of the regime’s economic policies and the type of economic thinking developed by those associated with the PSI in the earlier period, and indeed some former PSI members such as Sumitro have been directly involved in this policy-making. Likewise, some of the methods and standpoints which Sjahrir and his circle adopted may have continuing app to universal or humanistic values: Y.B. Mangunwijaya, a great admirer of Sjahrir, lists humanitarianism, anti-fascism, democracy, clean government, honesty in politics and historical awareness as elements of Sjahrir’s thinking and action which he believes to have continuing relevance. Relevance, however, does not mean prevalence. Legge proposes pragmatism and rational policy-making as central elements in the PSI’s, and Sjahrir’s, mode of political action.

Certainly these elements have been to the fore since 1966, and this is no doubt in part due to the enduring impact of Sjahrir and the PSI on Indonesian political culture. But can this limited impact mask the essentially failed nature of Sjahrir’s endeavour? Rationality was certainly essential to Sjahrir’s thinking, but it stood alongside an ideological standpoint in which democratic values and a pragmatic socialism were indispensable elements, albeit that both of these were complex and qualified.Contrasts as dramatic as that between the politically successful Sjahrir of the forties and the political frustration of the late fifties leave open a great risk of oversimplification, even caricature. Hence it is important to indicate fine shades of difference if possible, highlighting the subtlety of the contrast as well as itssignificance. In this sense, the recounting of history can and ought to be a matter of “chromatic” technique rather than “dialonics”, as James Boon has proposed. The biographical approach carries a rich potential for fulfilling this need, charting the slow and the sudden changes over time, alongside the evolving and the static qualities of the self in the midst of other individuals and alternative selves. It ought to reach beyond binarism and typology to convey impressions of textures and tones of a life. For our present purpose, this means appreciating Sjahrir’s talents and achievements while squarely facing his shortcomings; one should not cancel the other.

CULTURE AND THE TASK OF BIOGRAPHY

In dealing with biographical subjects who come from cultures different to the biographer’s own, it is very easy to misjudge the significance of cultural factors in shaping the subject’s development, either by resorting too readily to cultural explanations or by underestimating their value. People live in a web of culture, but they are not entirely its prisoners; they remain individuals with distinct personalities and they can make choices. They can also work towards new cultural arrangements. Moreover, their lives are played out within a historical context, so that events well beyond their personal, immediate reach can affect their consciousness and behaviour. Part of the task of biography is to unravel these interconnected elements.Examining Sjahrir’s career, including the later, arguably “failed” phase, from a biographical perspective may make it possible to move closer to delineating the interplay of culture, personality and historical circumstance which determined the texture of his political career and his ultimate frustration. Two aspects of culture arise here: the cultural factors which helped to shape Sjahrir’s style, outlook and system of meaning, and the socio-cultural environment in which Indonesian politics of his time was played out.__The cultural element of Sjahrir’s make up is especially difficult, in two ways. First, how much did cultural orientation affect his political life? And second, how is one to describe or define the cultural framework of his life, when he was exposed to such a complex range of cultural intluences as was available to him in colonial Indonesia? He was born at Padang Panjang in the West Sumatran highlands, the heart of Minangkabau culture, but spent most of his childhood outside the Minangkabau area in the city of Medan. His family were securely meshed into the Dutch administrative and educational systems. Sjahrir’s education provided him with a deep grounding in western ideas and values:before ever setting foot on European soil, Sjahrir had spent years in a westernized cultural-intellectual milieu, and had thoroughly absorbed western values and techniques. Little of Minangkabau tradition or subjective self-identification seems to have remained with him, and he is the first choice of scholars wishing to illustrate the stereotype of a westernized Indonesian intellectual. The question of identification is important; it has been called “the most important psychological aspect of culture - the bridge between culture and personality”; hence, the means by which the private self accommodates the demands and options of life in society. To the extent that evidence of Minangkabau identification on Sjahrir’s part is wanting, we are entitled to question the importance of Minangkabau orientation as a factor in explaining or interpreting his career.The question arises here of considering adaptability to modernizing influences as a distinctively Minangkabau cultural attribute. A disproportionately large number of Indonesia’s twentieth century nationalist leaders and other intellectuals were drawn from the Minangkabau. This phenomenon reflects the broader success of Minangkabau in economic and administrative spheres. The view that cultural adaptability, influenced by the tradition of merantau (temporary migration by men beyond the Minangkabau area), played a major part in this is a persuasive one. In this view it is a paradoxical truth that the essence ofMinangkabau identity may lie in a readiness to accept extraneous cultural influences. And yet this fails to explain the great variation in the quality and extent of “deculturation” which various Minangkabau intellectuals exhibited. Swift points out that important Minangkabau politicians were to be found at all points on the Indonesian ideological spectrum but the differences among them go well beyond ideology in the narrow sense. One need only consider a selection of the more eminent Minangkabau intellectuals of the Indonesian mid-century - Hatta, Sjahrir, Natsir, Haji Agus Salim and Tan Malaka among politicians, and the writers Idrus, Chain! Anwar and Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana - to realize the broad spectrum of responses to cultural options: to Minangkabau identity, understandings of “Indonesianness”, responses to modernity and attitudes to tradition, religious adherence and outlooks, and styles of public action. Again, we are entitled to ask how far the concept of Minangkabau culture can take us in understanding why particular individuals developed the characteristics they did.Swift also convincingly argues that a central feature of Minangkabau public life is individual competitiveness. Some other ethnic groups, such as the Bataks, have achieved economic and other success in group frameworks but this, he suggests, would not satisfy Minangkabau ambitions, as they are less prepared to give group advantage priority over, or even a place alongside, individual accomplishment. If we apply this idea to Sjahrir, complex results emerge. His style of thought was certainly individualistic; he was an intellectual with independent habits of thought, and the PSI attracted and sought to produce self- sufficient thinkers. And yet, conditions permitting, he generally worked through groups, not as an isolated polemicist, and certainly he was always concerned to recruit a following, even though he did not extend this to a mass movement.Mrazek puts forward an interesting interpretation of Sjahrir’s early career in terms of a distinctively Minangkabau response to the outside world. He relates Sjahrir’s outlook, and especiallyhis “western” rationalism, to the interaction between the pre existing Minangkabau world view and the new dominance of the Dutch ethici which took hold in the early years of the century, and which had a prevailing influence in his education. This interaction was an effort to integrate or associate the western ideals of universalism, dynamism and rationalism with the tradisionals ideals of the Minangkabau. “Minangkabau was their culture but... Dutch-ness was the culture’s highest quality.”This argument certainly appears to reflect the education received by Sjahrir’s generation of the Indonesian elite, but it seems to fall short in explaining Sjahrir’s particular case, mainly because it fails to explain why Sjahrir’s response should have differed from those of others who experienced similar processes. As already noted, the products of this background ended up with all kinds of outlooks and attitudes to the conflict of tradition and modernity. Sjahrir’s rejection of tradition was quite thoroughgoing, and although it may be argued that his strongest objections were to Javanese rather than Minangkabau tradition, that surely is a function of the very modernization of the Minangkabau which may have brought him to such a position rather than to any active approval of the remaining pre-modern aspects of Minangkabau culture. In other words, he disliked backwardness, regardless of its ethnic associations, rather than reacting negatively to cultural ways because they were alien to the Minangkabau world view. His antagonism to Javanese tradition was doubtless intensified by the concrete frustrations represented by political rivals drawing on this tradition.This is not to suggest that aspects of Minangkabau culture have nothing to contribute to understanding Sjahrir’s development:where they can be related to his concrete experience, they should certainly be taken into account. Education is a case in point, to which I will return later; however not only the content of his education needs to be considered, but also its psychological significance.As well as Minangkabau cultural orientation sits the question of the extent of Sjahrir’s attachment to a developing Indonesian national culture. This is difficult not only because Indonesia’s national culture is not easily described, but also because national consciousness was still only in a formative stage in Sjahrir’s youth. Sjahrir himself played a significant role in the development of important symbols of this national culture. As a nineteen year old he participated in the youth congress which adopted the national anthem and the famous slogan “One nation, one country and one language”.

The designation of Malay as the Indonesian national language marked an important step in the development of national culture, and a major move towards cultural independence, legitimizing for nationalistically minded Indonesians a medium for mutual communication which was not the property of the colonisers or of any one ethnic group. Twenty months earlier, not yet eighteen, he had been one of the founding members of the youth group Jong-Indonesie, subsequently Pemuda Indonesia, one of the first such organisations with a national rather than provincial character. This group adopted as its symbol the red and white banner later to become Indonesia’s national flag!Of course these outward trappings are mere symbols, but the rapid succession of new symbolic representations of national identity is indicative of the embryonic nature of Indonesian national culture at the time. It also powerfully underlines the point that the culture of nationhood, like all culture, is ever subject to change and reassessment by those who adhere to it. It offers its adherents options; individuals are to a greater or lesser degree able to choose their cultural reference points. Sjahrir worked to re-direct Indonesia’s cultural practice towards modernity and rationality; the course of events would show the extent of resistance to these endeavours.Both by circumstance and by his own efforts, Sjahrir’s youth and political career coincided with a time of momentous choices in the referents of Indonesian culture. It is interesting to note that unlike the immediately preceding generation of nationalistsincluding soekarno and hatta, Sjahrir was never a member of a parochial or regional organization; from the start his affiliations were with group which were national as well as nationalist. but it is difficult to use the characteristics of the emergent national culture to explain the kind of of political actor that he became. To the extent that a cultural milieu “produced” him, he was mainly a product of the colonial state, part of a generation who created for the first time a new cultural synthesis which could accurately he called “Indonesian”. He was in fact deeply aware of the absence of a single cultural framework within which an intellectual could operate in Indonesia. In Sjahrir’s view all Indonesian intellectuals were at a great disadvantage where culture was concerned: they were such a tiny proportion of the country’s people, and they were “only beginning to seek a form and a unity” in their outlook and culture!Nonetheless the emergent national cultural framework, fragile and fragmented as it was, is important to understanding his career, as it profoundly influenced the environment within which his political career and personal drama were played out. This took on deep significance after independence when the abiding cultural pluralism of Indonesian society emerged as a major factor in shaping the contours of politics.Cultural difference, or more specifically strong identification among the people with groups divided by cultural antagonisms, was a major element of Indonesia’s post-independence politics. The parties which proved electorally successful were those which managed to attract the support of a distinct socio-cultural stream in Indonesian society. This was especially so in Java, where society is riven by cleavages of cultural and religious orientation, which partly coincide with economic differences. Briefly, these cleavages produced four socio-cultural streams (aliran), each of which gave substantial support to a particular political party in the 1950s. The devout Moslems or santri (a minority at the time) were split between the religiously purist, modernist, more urbanized and more prosperous stream known as santri moderen, who mostlysupported the Masjumi party,and the religiously pluralist (i.e., tolerant of Javanese “impurities” in Islamic practice), conservative, and predominantly rural stream, especially strong in East Java, known as santri kolot who mostly voted for Nahdatul Ulama (NU). Among the non-devout, or syncretist, the aristocratic and bureaucratic elite (priyayi) generally supported the Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI), as did members of the lower classes subject to their influence. Many other members of the non-devout peasantry gave their vote to the Communist Party (PKI).

To some extent this division was also connected to regionalism. Masjumi derived the majority of its support from the strongly Islamic areas of the outer islands, while the other parties’ support was concentrated in Java. This difference in electoral behaviour reflected not only cultural and religious divisions but also growing regional disaffection with the central government. The PSI, like the other parties which lacked clear appeal to a single aifran, performed poorly in the election, and especially so in East and Central Java.There is no question about the close connection between socio cultural orientation and electoral behaviour, but need it have been so? And need this automatically have meant political failure for Sjahrir and the PSI? Hindsight raises some questions of relevance to assessing Sjahrir’s career: for example, the possibilities for promoting a political culture less tightly linked to aliran loyalties; alternative organizational and electoral strategies which the PSI might have pursued; the prospects of acquiring influence through better relations with other parties and political forces; and making better use of opportunities outside the framework of party and electoral politics.Conclusions about these questions must necessarily remain tentative but several themes recur in examining Sjahrir’s career which are useful in casting light on his character as a political actor, and may go some way to explaining his ultimate failure. His determined belief in rational thought and action, and his consistency in assigning a high value to educational enterprisesare of primary importance, and it is also important to understand his antagonistic relations with many of his political contemporaries.IIEARLY LIFEDetails of Sutan Sjahrir’s childhood are scarce, but some important factors are clear. He was the eighth son of Muhammad Rasjad gelar Maha Radja Sutan of Kota Gedang, a Minangkabau noble and a lawyer, who rose in the colonial administration to become chief public prosecutor in Medan and also an adviser to the Sultan of Deli? Kota Gedang was well known for the success of its sons on the rantau, especially in govermnent employment. Though the village’s population was only about 2500, no less than 165 men of the Kota Gedang lineages were government officials in 1915, about half of whom held posts outside West Sumatra. As a chief prosecutor, Sjahrir’s father was among the most successful of these. Competition was intense for access to European education, but the family’s rank and connections allowed Sjahrir the opportunity to attend Dutch-medium primary (ELS) and secondary (MULO) schools. He was a successful scholar, and education came to take a central place in his life. At the age of sixteen he travelled to Bandung to attend the more advanced Dutch middle school (AMS), where he followed the course based on “western classics”.This type of education was rather a late development in colonial history, and was provided to only a tiny section of society, but it was an education of great rigour and quality. Sjahrir prospered in this environment. In Bandung both his intellectual vigour and his bent towards political activism became apparent. His shyness and slight build meant that at first his classmates hardly noticed him, and when they did so it was because of his intellectual acuity and curiosity. Despite his small size, he was an enthusiastic sportsman, playing for a pan-Indonesian football team, ratherthan the Minangkabau team which also existed in Bandung at the time. He also loved music, and played the violin well. But it was as a student of outstanding ability that he caught his fellows’ attention. Hamdani remembers that “Compared to the rest of us, no subject seemed burdensome or difficult to Sjahrir.” Teachers always called on him to tackle difficult translations from Latin, German, French or English, but perhaps most significantly, he was unafraid to question his teachers about points of history and philosophy. He had an aptitude for asking the right question to bring clarity and understanding to his fellow students.His early political activism also centred around educational enterprises. He helped to lead campaigns against illiteracy, which eventually led to the establishment of the Cahaya “People’s University”, and he took part in didactic plays? He also joined a debating club, where he made a strong impression. One debate about feudalism and the abuse of outmoded tradition became heated and emotional, as many present were themselves children of aristocrats and state officials. Hamdani recalls Sjahrir advancing objective and convincing arguments which restored calm to the situation.HOLLAND: HOME AWAY FROM HOMEEducational success marked the progressions of Sjahrir’s early life: from Medan to Bandung, and then in 1929 from Bandung to the Netherlands to study law, first at Amsterdam and later at Leiden. Two years later he returned home without a degree, but not without an education. His lack of academic progress was not due to a deficiency of talent or energy, but to other calls on his enthusiasm, ultimately leading him home early to fulfil a political duty.The West excited him, and he thrived there? Not all the experience was new: his Dutch education had prepared him so thoroughly that he felt he was “recollecting things I had already known”. In Holland he became active in leftist political circles, including the Dutch Social Democratic Party, international trade union organization, and most importantly, in the nationalist student group Perhimpunan Indonesia (PI). In this organization he first developed a close alliance with Mohammad Hatta, with whom he would maintain a very special personal and political relationship, despite important differences, for the rest of his life. Several of the characteristics of Sjahrir’s political style which would be demonstrated again and again during his career were fixed at this time.But perhaps of greater significance than his formal political involvements was the social atmosphere and the opportunity for advanced intellectual exploration which Holland opened to him. His philosophical rationalism, already evident in Bandung, found its full expression and was given a firm intellectual grounding; and in Marxism he discovered a system of thought which served both his need for a coherent general philosophy and his need for tools with which to analyze the concrete situations of contemporary politics: the rise of fascism, and the historical significance of capitalism and colonialism. Importantly for the later application of his political thinking, Sjahrir was able to integrate his interpretations of the situation of Indonesia with an understanding of global forces and developments.The other major significance of his sojourn in Holland was that it gave him his first direct experience of a non-colonial society. His early life, especially his father’s position in the colonial administration, may have provided him with a close insight into the more unjust and demeaning aspects of colonial relationships. Rose suggests that he may also have been affected by witnessing the sufferings of Javanese labourers who had been brought to the Dutch-owned plantations near Medan. In Bandung he had suffered the experience of being chased by the Dutch police (while trying to read newspaper posters telling of the PKI revolt in 1927) and subjected to insults and violence from sections of the Dutch community. Like Hatta, Sjahrir was profoundly conscious of the psychological abnormality which these unequalrelationships imposed on Indonesian society, and he dwelt at length in his letters on the “inferiority complex” of the colonized. Colonialism had deeply corrupted Indonesia; but in exile he wrote that he “could never be so happy here as in Holland...where there are no colonial relationships...” Sjahrir’s depth of consciousness of the human destructiveness of colonialism was only made possible by experiencing the relative liberality of conditions in the colonialists’ homeland, where racial and cultural barriers were lowered. Thus Sjahrir’s two short years in Holland turned out to be a deeply liberating period for him, both intellectually and spiritually, amid of immense importance to the development of his career.When he first arrived in Amsterdam, Sjahrir shared the home of his much older sister Siti Rohana, who had been living there for sometime. Siti Rohana was herself an activist of considerable note, a journalist and pioneering feminist. Tas recalls that Sjahrir found her dominance something of an irritation and an embarrassment. Remembering that he had left the family home at sixteen, casting off whatever there may have been of “the puritanism of his Islamic Minangkabau background”, his chafing at having his freedom curtailed, however mildly, is hardly surprising.This minor problem aside, Sjahrir threw himself into exploration and experimentation with all the exciting possibilities that the West held. His thirst for new knowledge never lost its tempo, but his organized coursework quickly gave way to a more wide- ranging and personal search for answers to the myriad problems of life and politics. For a time he lived with a group of anarchists before returning to the mainstream of socialist thought.

He also enthusiastically pursued his musical interests, attending the free “people’s concerts”.He also developed a relationship with Maria Duchateau Tas, wife of his Dutch socialist comrade Sol Tas; she and Sjahrir were later married (by proxy) during his exile in Banda, although the colonial authorities would not let her enter the Indies, and hence they were never re-united. They were divorced in 1948._____________________Ket. : Buku Indonesian Political Biography, In Search of Cross Cultural Understanding adalah buku yang memuat uraian tokoh-tokoh Indonesia. Ada yang pernah baca ?. Teman saya Aboeprijadi (Tossi) mengirim tulisan diatas.