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INTRODUCTION

The Text of From Jail to Jail

From Jail to Jail is a substantial work of over nine hundred manuscript pages divided into three volumes. It begins with an introduction explaining how Tan Malaka came to write it. Although long pressed to write his life story, Tan Malaka had not done so for several reasons. He explains as follows: first, “there was so much other work of greater importance”; second, such a project “was not a part-time job”; and third, his circumstances of being moved frequently from jail to jail, often with no chance of writing, made the idea impossible to implement. Finally, he expresses concern at the use to which such a work could be put by his enemies.

In March 1947, however, Tan Malaka found himself in relatively good circumstances in Magelang prison, Central Java. Housed in a separate cell and provided with pencil, paper, and a table, he decided to devote himself to writing “if only to fill in the time.” He did not have the source materials to work on more serious endeavors, such as his long-postponed treatise on Aslia, and so, as he describes it, he “was forced into writing these reminiscences.”¹

Such a preliminary statement expressing reluctance to concentrate on his own story, a desire to leave his “own history to history itself,” but finally capitulating to the demands of others is not an uncommon disclaimer. We see the Javanese nationalist, Soetomo, introducing his memoirs with a similar sentiment: “the purpose of the writer in writing this book of memories is the desire to accede to the requests of various people who would like to understand the story of my life.”²

In September 1947, in Ponorogo prison, Central Java, Tan Malaka penned his introduction, explaining the focus he had given his autobiography, a focus reflected in the title for the work.

What I write here is only a part of my life history. But it is a part I consider not to be less important because of its close connection with my efforts to realize the desire for independence in both the political and economic sense. I focus this story on several prisons, and so I shall describe the events surrounding each of these prison episodes . . . before, during, and after my imprisonment. . . . I have entitled this book From Jail to Jail. I believe that there is a relationship between jail and genuine freedom. Those who really want freedom for all must be ready and willing at every moment to suffer “the loss of their own freedom.” Whoever wishes to be free must be ready to be jailed. (Volume I, p. 4)

The prison image has been chosen by a number of Asian political leaders for the title of their autobiographical writings, for example, Mahatma Gandhi’s Jail Experiences as Told by Himself, M. N. Roy’s Letters from Jail, Ho Chi Minh’s Prison Diary, and Phan Boi Chau’s Prison Notes. It is further reminiscent of Sylvio Pellico’s Le Mie Prigioni (My Prisons), popular reading in Europe after its first publication in 1832.³

The image of suffering, exile, and persecution of those in the right, or holders of truth, is a powerful one with cross-cultural meaning. It takes many shapes: the Hindu ascetic, the Muslim fakir, the Japanesea ronin, the Christian martyr. In the Indonesian context it blends into the Javanese notion of sacrifice and self-denial as a means to acquire power, and into the Minangkabau view of isolation in the rantau (outside) as a necessary course to strengthen the alam (Minangkabau world).⁴ This concept was presented in exquisite form by Ho Chi Minh in one of the poems in his Prison Diary, used as the frontispiece to the present volume.

By stressing the harshness of his experiences, Tan Malaka sought to establish his credentials as a true leader. At the same time, by emphasizing the parallels in the behavior and attitudes of all the governments that had imprisoned him, he tarred the republican government with the brush of arbitrary and repressive policies that he so liberally applied to the imperialist powers. In so doing he sought to undermine the credentials of those then in power: by implication they had forfeited their right to govern, and might be expected one day to pay the price for their sins and surrender power to the true leader.

Structure of the Text

While the jail experiences themselves, and the consequent fugitive life that Tan Malaka was forced to lead, certainly form a consistent thread through the manuscript, they form the focus not for the manuscript as a whole, but rather of the most dominant of a series of interweaving themes, the autobiography itself. Violations of the rule of law by a number of different powers is a recurrent projection from these prison experiences, as are the role of imperialism and the overriding need for unity in the struggle to achieve its overthrow. A counterpoint to such a political emphasis is provided by the significant role of good fortune (or fate) in the story, and the style of romance and adventure, about which I comment further later in this introduction.

Tan Malaka asserts that his life history does not follow “the usual chronology from childhood to adulthood.” And the autobiographical sequences are so penetrated by these above-mentioned recurring themes that the course of events frequently is hard to follow. Time and again through the text a particular incident will serve as a springboard for leaving his own story to embark upon a moral or theoretical exposition, or for telling another tale in the “that reminds me of the story about” style. Tan Malaka often becomes so engrossed in the storytelling that he finds it hard to break off and return to the account at hand. His difficulty in keeping within bounds is illustrated in the following comment: “I have deliberately selected only a few episodes. . . . Even so, what I have written for this section has exceeded what I had planned . . .” (Volume I, p. 36).

The balance between the space given to particular incidents or periods may seem uneven in terms of their apparent significance, but it is often through the rendition of seemingly tangential issues that Tan Malaka gives the emphasis and structure he seeks to impart to his life story. The prison incidents themselves occupy but a brief period of his life—two periods of several months each in 1922 and 1932—prior to the longer detention during which he wrote the autobiography. It is clear, however, from his introduction and from his choice of title, that they provided the framework in which he wished to present his life.

In his exposition both of the past and of his own story, Tan Malaka employs historical materialism as his paradigm. While not presented as a “history of Indonesia,” this text may be regarded as perhaps the first to bring this paradigm into play on the broad canvas of Indonesia from prehistory to the contemporary struggle for independence, as I discuss later in my assessment of the significance of this text. Tan Malaka himself had used this tool of analysis as early as the 1920s, but in a more limited and directed fashion in support of his argument for Indonesian independence and for the organizational and political means to achieve this end. In From Jail to Jail, however, for the first time we see how the historical materialist approach shapes his perception of the development of Indonesian society from Homo erectus in Trinil, East Java, to the signing of the Renville Treaty in January 1948.

Before discussing the style and language used by Tan Malaka in this text, it is necessary to provide an overview of its structure, showing the interweaving of the various themes and their relative balance.

Volume I

Following the introduction, Tan Malaka precedes his own story with four short chapters in which he seeks to provide an ideological perspective through which to view his life story as “the struggle between justice and tyranny on the battleground of my own person and my own life,” and in which he moves from the general to the specific.

In chapter 1, “The Struggle Between Two Forces,” Tan Malaka introduces his readers to the concepts of repulsion and attraction in the physical world and their reflection in philosophy as thesis and antithesis, touching briefly on the differences between Hegel’s idealism and Marx’s materialism. Chapter 2, “Human Rights,” gives a lightning sketch of the development of class struggles to advance these rights through the English, French, and Russian revolutions. Chapter 3, “The Right to Self-Preservation,” focuses on the struggle for the rights of individuals to survive economically and politically, as illustrated in the destruction of feudalism. Chapter 4, “Laws and Regulations,” deals with individual rights as guaranteed in the democratic states of France, England, and the United States, paying particular attention to rights relating to arrest and detention, trial and punishment. He concludes the chapter by asking what meaning these rights have for the proletariat, who faces structural oppression within capitalist countries, and even more so for the oppressed of the colonies. Only at this point does he feel that the ground has been laid for a discussion of his own life, and chapter 5 begins the autobiography proper, with Tan Malaka returning to Indonesia in November 1919.

On board the ship as it pulls out of Amsterdam, he looks back at his five years’ teacher training in Holland, his political evolution in the wake of the unfolding Russian revolution and, in passing, he writes a few pages on his childhood and schooling in West Sumatra. In chapters 6 to 11 of Volume I, Tan Malaka continues his story in basically chronological order, through his employment from 1919 to 1921 in Deli, North Sumatra, as a teacher of the children of “coolies” working on the tobacco plantations; his period of political involvement in Java in the union movement, the PKI, and the radical nationalist education system, culminating in his election as PKI chairman in December 1921, his arrest in February 1922, and his deportation to Holland; his candidacy for the Dutch Communist party in the 1922 parliamentary elections and his fifteen-month stay in Moscow, including participation in the Fourth Congress of the Comintern; his dispatch to Canton, from where he was to function as Comintern representative for Southeast Asia; and his activities in this regard during 1923-1925.

Chapter 12, “The Philippines,” is a forty-page essay on the history of the Philippines, in particular of the nationalist revolution of the 1890s. In this major departure from his own story, Tan Malaka stresses two recurring themes of his autobiography: the common identity of the Malay/Indonesian/Filipino people and cultures; and the need for unity among various political currents, classes, and ethnic groups in the fight for national liberation. The lessons he draws in this section are echoed throughout the rest of the autobiography. The final two chapters of Volume I return to his own story, relating his activities in the Philippines from 1925 to 1927, the events surrounding his arrest and deportation to China in August 1927, and his flight to the tiny village of Sionching in South China, where he lived in seclusion until late 1929. Only in passing in chapter 14 does Tan Malaka discuss his role in opposition to the 1926 PKI-led uprising in Indonesia, the subsequent smashing of the party by the colonial authorities, and the establishment by Tan Malaka of a separate political party, PARI.

Volume II

Although one hundred pages longer than Volume I, the second volume contains only six chapters, providing a narrative account of Tan Malaka’s experiences from 1932 to 1945. It opens with Tan Malaka caught in the thick of the Sino-Japanese conflict in Shanghai in January 1932. Chapter 2 describes his arrest and detention in Hong Kong in late 1932 and his second deportation to Amoy. In chapter 3 he discusses in considerable detail his experiences in, and the social structure of, Iwe, another small village in South China, and his move to Amoy, where he established the Foreign Languages School in 1935. Again the Japanese army’s southern advance caught up with him, and Tan Malaka fled to Rangoon. Chapter 4 describes his subsequent journey through the Malay Peninsula, involving a substantial, somewhat romanticised, account of Malay history, again stressing the theme of unity raised in the Philippines chapter. It continues with his five-year period disguised as a Chinese schoolteacher in Singapore. When the Japanese occupied Singapore, once again Tan Malaka moved on, seizing the opportunity the war presented to go “Toward the Republic of Indonesia,” the title of the concluding chapter of Volume II. This chapter discusses his experiences throughout the Japanese occupation, living incognito on the outskirts of Jakarta for one year and then for two years as a clerk in a coal mine in a remote area on the southern coast of West Java.

Volume III

Volume III represents a radical departure from the narrative approach dominant in Volumes I and II. The introduction is actually a postscript covering the period March-October 1948 (including the Madiun Affair) and it completely wrenches the reader from the situation of August 1945 and the Proclamation of Independence, with which Volume II closes. Following the Introduction, Tan Malaka launches into a forty-five-page chapter entitled “Weltanschauung,” in which he gives a historical materialist account of the development of human society through primitive communism, slavery, and feudalism, paying particular attention to religious beliefs. He then moves on to discuss the emergence of capitalism and the associated development of philosophy, the ascendancy of science and dialectical materialism, and concludes with a few points of “dialectical materialism as applied to modern Indonesian history.” Chapter 2, “The State,” concentrates on the evolution of state forms and on differing ways in which the state is defined in order to serve different political interests. Chapter 3, “The Rise and Fall of States,” discusses changes in modes of production as the motive force for changes in state forms. Chapter 4, “Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis,” recapitulates much of the preceding three chapters, with an emphasis on the final stage of evolution from class society to communism via the dictatorship of the proletariat.

With chapter 5 the reader is brought back from abstraction to the historical reality of the proclamation of Indonesian independence in August 1945, the legitimacy of which is defended in terms of the right of self-determination. Chapter 6 elaborates on this right, examining the class forces in Indonesian society both before and after the Dutch occupation, and the effect of the Japanese occupation in accelerating the Indonesian revolution. Chapter 7, “From Engineer Sukarno to President Sukarno,” shifts from discussion of broad social forces to examination of a pivotal individual in historical context. It contains trenchant criticism of the political direction taken by Sukarno and also leaps ahead to a discussion of the surat warisan (testament) in which Tan Malaka was nominated as president should Sukarno and Vice President Hatta be killed or captured.

In chapter 8 Tan Malaka shifts back to narrative style, picking up the story where he left off at the end of Volume II. A detailed account of the events surrounding the proclamation leads in the ensuing chapters to a discussion of Tan Malaka’s opposition to the policies pursued by the government of the republic and to his establishment of a united front known as Persatuan Perjuangan (Struggle Front) in January 1946. Considerable detail of the Persatuan Perjuangan and its differences from the government is given in chapters 11 to 14. Chapter 15 is a thorough analysis of the two agreements signed with the Dutch (Linggajati and Renville) and why Tan Malaka regarded them as setbacks to the revolution. Chapter 16 recounts the arrest of Tan Malaka and a number of his followers in March 1946 (as the Persatuan Perjuangan challenged the authority of the government) and their experiences in detention. It includes the events surrounding the 3 July Affair (1946), presented by the government as the “coup d’etat of Tan Malaka,” and the subsequent trials in March 1948. From Jail to Jail concludes with the “Official Statement of the Government of the Republic of Indonesia” on the 3 July Affair, which is followed by Tan Malaka’s point-by-point refutation.

Volume III is distinguished from the earlier volumes by its relative lack of a personal narrative to balance the internal discordances and shifts of perspective. A number of its chapters actually are previously published articles by Tan Malaka, and the volume itself has more of the feel of a manuscript in preparation. The possibility that Volume III was compiled by someone else is countered by the introduction, which is certainly in Tan Malaka’s style, with puns, Minang proverbs, foreign expressions, and rhetorical flourish, and which gives an explanation of the different approach: “This volume differs from the previous two, both in origin and purpose. It has its beginnings in my detention in a prison in the republic and concerns the resulting judicial process. Therefore it is rather abstract and theoretical, tending towards the polemical” (Volume III, p. 3).

Concerned at the attention given to the individual’s role by bourgeois historians (Volume I, p. 39), Tan Malaka continually relates his own story to broader forces in operation: colonialism, imperialism, and national liberation struggles form the backdrop to his own saga. At times this relationship emerges naturally from the story as told; at other times it is served up somewhat artificially as a distinct didactic section, such as the introductions to Volumes I and III. These sections occupy some fifteen and fifty pages respectively at the beginning of the two volumes, and a further forty-five pages constituting the chapter of the history of the Philippines. As well as these one-hundred-odd pages, many other segments within chapters on his life story cover similar historical or theoretical topics.

These sections illustrate an essential feature of the autobiography: Tan Malaka’s concern that his own story be presented and interpreted as “instructive for the present and future heroes of our struggle for independence” (Volume I, p. 3). This concern permeates both the presentation of his own experiences and the didactic sections that precede Volumes I and III, as well as the detailed historical sections such as that on the development of the Philippine revolution in Volume II.

The modern reader may find these didactic sections trite and may resent the fact that they obstruct the development of Tan Malaka’s own story. From Tan Malaka’s perspective, however, they are essential. Without an understanding of the basics of dialectical materialism and the development of class society, the whole purpose of Tan Malaka’s life and the reason for his frequent detention would elude the reader, reducing his story to the level of the adventure thrillers written about him. Tan Malaka’s principal objective was to illuminate these questions to the Indonesian reader of the late 1940s. Neither the stifling Dutch colonial education system nor the mass literacy drives of the Japanese had provided any foundation in this regard, and Tan Malaka felt constrained to rectify this at every turn. Whether he succeeded in this aim is another question. In From Jail to Jail the didactic questions sit so oddly ill at ease with the narrative sections of the work, with their fluid style, that many readers may well skip over them. The lessons that emerge in the course of the story, even if sometimes expressed in exaggerated moralizing, have much greater effect.

The structure of the text, with its interweaving themes and episodes, is reminiscent of the traditional Malay hikayat, as described by Shelly Errington:

The episodes float next to one another, strung together rather than growing out of one another. There is a sense in which the hikayat hardly have boundaries: they consist of stories or episodes which floated around the Malay world and were on occasion caught, as it were, by a scribe and given a name. . . . Thus as we peruse hikayat, we are struck by the amount of repetition and therefore detachability at every level. . . . Within hikayat, incidents are often repeated in their entirety, as though nothing had gone before. . . . Thus the reader who expects a linear narrative of a storyline finds these repetitions tiresome, as though they were an interference to the story rather than what they are in fact: the story.

As the listener is carried into each image in the narrative, what happens and what is said in each frame is repeated in its entirety. This is one reason that hikayat, like wayang, are non-compulsive: each event is retold in its entirety, hence is separable from what went before. As in life, today’s events are not abbreviated merely because they occurred before. If we stand back from the text to view it as a whole, this style is “repetitious.” From the inside, as the story is being told, it is merely what happens. . . . there is no perspective from which to abbreviate the narrative. Without a privileged end point, there is no criterion for abbreviating, for stripping away the irrelevant.⁵

As well as in repetition, the text of From Jail to Jail echoes that of the hikayat in other ways, in particular its lack of a distinct chronology and its frequent change of vantage point. As shown above, Tan Malaka begins his life story only after an introduction and four chapters set the stage, and then he starts in November 1919, looking backwards at his life. At frequent times in the text he makes a leap from the story line. Sometimes it is a theoretical digression, at other times a temporal one. More often than not, the story is not picked up again at the point which was left behind. This structure echoes Errington’s description of the hikayat as “consisting not, in a sense, of narrative but of a succession of images,” where both “distant and contemporary events are of equal stature, as material, and their arrangement ‘in time’ may be a matter of indifference.”⁶

One must be careful not to exaggerate parallels with the traditional hikayat, for Tan Malaka at times was a very modern writer in his use of dialogue and informal prose, as well as his Marxist terminology and rhetoric. The text has many facets. A closer analogy might be drawn to the first Malay autobiography, which, although it bore the name hikayat, was very much the harbinger of a new genre. A. H. Hill, translator of Abdullah Abdul Kadir Munshi’s Hikayat Abdullah, remarks as follows:

Although Abdullah describes the events of his life in roughly chronological sequence his narrative lacks formal development. He discusses unconnected topics in no logical order, returning again and again to his favourite themes like the evil of debt-slavery and the difficulty of the Malay language. Much cross-referencing has been necessary to keep track of the many threads in the pattern of his life story as it unfolds. . . .⁷

Style and Language

The style of From Jail to Jail echoes the distinction between didactic sections of the text and those concentrating on Tan Malaka’s own life story. Within the latter sections there is a further variation between a personal narrative and an exaggerated adventure-oriented style.

Tan Malaka’s use of language, particularly in the theoretical sections of the text, indicates a certain biculturalism. The patois of terminology and images that emerges to elaborate Marxist ideas reveals the straddling of European and Malay/Indonesian cultures by the author, while the inconsistent application of one language or another and uneven levels of explanation reveal the lack of resolution of this bicultural tension. This leads to some awkward and at times amusing juxtapositions, illustrated in an extreme form in the following discussion of the role of Moses:

This superior leadership by one single-minded and determined person, who according to Jewish lore conferred alone with his one god in difficulty and danger and brought the Jewish people to glory, strengthened the belief in a single and all-powerful god. For the Jewish people at that time it was a case of the proof of the pudding is in the eating! (Volume III, p. 20)

The essential problem revolves around the fact that it was through immersion in the colonizers’ culture that most colonized nationalists developed their understanding of the nature of the social and class relations that bound their people, and developed their appreciation of the ways to fight against the colonizers. Tan Malaka was no exception to this pattern. On the contrary, he was among the earliest generation of Indonesians to go to Holland for an education. He spent a great part of his formative years in a Dutch environment, initially in the Dutch-run Sekolah Raja in West Sumatra, and then for six years in Holland itself, living for the most part with Dutch people and attending a Dutch teachers college.

It was during his years in Holland that Tan Malaka developed his political ideas, as depicted in chapter 5 of Volume I. Tan Malaka saw these changes as being progressive and occurring in stages: Nietzsche as thesis, Rousseau as antithesis, Marx and Engels as synthesis.

Step by step, pushed by circumstances within and around me—influenced and illuminated by the books I was reading, in accordance with the laws of quantity being transformed into quality—suddenly in spirit and in understanding I was in a state normally termed revolutionary. (Volume I, p. 26)⁸

It [The Bolshevik revolution] gave certainty to my spirit, which was still caught up in the struggle between thesis and antithesis. (Volume I, p. 25)

Tan Malaka was well aware of the tensions developing within him as a result of gaining knowledge and skills in an alien culture and society. He wrote as follows:

But I no longer had the will to continue my studies to become a head teacher in the Netherlands. If in Dutch eyes I had Europeanized myself enough, I could have attained the same level as Dutch head teachers. (Although I would naturally remain a European inlander.) Then I would have had the right to teach Dutch children. Further, as a European inlander, I could have Europeanized all the inlanders’ children. But I was not prepared to do this. (Volume I, p. 26)

Indeed, as Tan Malaka became more politically conscious, and aware of the damage done to Indonesian society through colonialism, his resolve was strengthened to use his teaching skills to bring new pride and self-confidence to his people and to have them look into their own past for inspiration and models. At the same time, he was fiercely determined to be treated as an equal by those Europeans with whom he worked. The anger he felt at expressions of white superiority was a dominant feature of his recollection of life in Deli plantation society. He wrote as follows:

Skin color! This feeling of being “different from the inlanders,” as reflected in the difference in skin color, would not vanish as long as the white Dutch people monopolized the position of capitalist colonizers over the brown colonized inlanders. The arrogance was coated with “politeness,” but if it had been left entirely to Dutch “politeness” we would still feel humiliated. We always had to be ready to bare our teeth and, if necessary, to attack. (Volume I, p. 51)

As to the effect this tension had on him, Tan Malaka gives a vivid description of the problems he faced in 1921, when he left the society of the colonizers:

It often happens that when we are spurred on by strong desires we forget that our physical beings are subject to the laws of nature. When my body was adjusting to the European environment, its climate, and my shortage of necessities, my health was severely threatened. It was restored only when I adjusted myself to the lifestyle there, one which I continued in Deli, in fact to an even greater degree.

At first I was not aware that I was now in Java, in a physical situation as different from Deli as the earth from the sky. I did not notice that houses in Java were not like those in Deli or Bussum, and neither was the food. Nor was I aware that the climate in Semarang was different from that of the other places. I forgot all this because I was in a new context, one in which I could speak freely to my comrades in the struggle.

Our bodily organs are not able to endure sudden major changes. Just as glass plunged into boiling water will certainly break, so even a strong body will fall ill if suddenly put into a different situation. But as glass will not break if it is slowly lowered into the boiling water, so this mortal human body must be gradually acclimatized to new and different surroundings. (Volume I, p. 64)

The autobiography is uneven throughout—in language and terminology, in writing style, and in content. At times it is a textbook, at times stirring propaganda, at times a wistful reverie or bittersweet reminiscence.

Didacticism in From Jail to Jail

The didactic sections are composed in a textbook style, tending towards simplistic explanations or renditions of Marxist analysis. It is clear that Tan Malaka had in mind an audience relatively unfamiliar with Marxism, or with non-Marxist Western “scientific” interpretations of history and human development. With frequent resort to analogy, Tan Malaka addresses considerable effort to relating Marxist concepts to a perceived “tradition,” making them both less inscrutable and less alien, for instance in the following:

When reading Engels’ book, I have been struck frequently by the number of similarities between (Indian) the original American society and that in several regions of Indonesia. As one example, let me mention in passing that I see little difference between ancient Minangkabau society, in the dawn of its existence, and this “self-acting armed organization of the population.” (Volume III, p. 48)⁹

To this end Tan Malaka makes frequent use of proverbs and myth, both from Indonesian (especially Minangkabau, his own ethnic group) and from European (especially Dutch) tradition. He uses terms with great traditional weight from these traditions cheek by jowl one with another: for example Adil dan Zhalim (Arabic for “justice and tyranny”) and seija-sekata (the Minangkabau concept of consensus) with “imperialism” and “capitalism.” Sometimes he makes unfamiliar ideas clear by analogy, such as explaining the legal expression non bis in idem in terms of the Minang customary law as kata dahulu ditepati, kata demudian ditjari-tjari, or the concept of separation of powers in terms of Minang or American history.

Tan Malaka also employs language conventions from the traditional Malay chronicle. He refers to himself in the third person as sahibul hikajat ini (the scribe of this chronicle), and concludes a section with the punctuating demikianlah (so it is), serving to provide a familiar reference point for his readers in the midst of the new concepts he is seeking to impart.

In most cases Tan Malaka seems content to use Marxist terminology without further explanation. “Capitalism,” “feudalism,” and “imperialism” are used right through the text in Indonesianized form (kapitalisme, feodalisme, imperialisme) but with no further definition. Some terms are given a translation into Indonesian, for instance, “surplus value” is explained as nilai lebih, and dialectical materialism as dialiektika berdasarkan benda (dialectic based on objects).

While by the late 1940s certain of these terms were in common usage in Indonesia, others would have been used only by the political elite, among whom Dutch was still prevalent during the revolutionary period. As Benedict Anderson puts it,

Since it [Dutch] was the school language of this whole generation of intellectuals which grew up before the Japanese Occupation, it remained the inner language of elite discourse, especially between nationalists of different ethnic groups. It was the medium for thinking about and absorbing ideas and institutions from the West (including Russia) which promised to liberate and elevate the peoples of Indonesia from the grip of their white masters. It also built up elite cohesion vis-a-vis the Dutch and the indigenous masses.¹⁰

The difficulty is to ascertain what meaning the readers of this text would have ascribed to these terms, either with or without an Indonesian “translation.” To that end, a text such as From Jail to Jail must be read against contemporary historical accounts of political actions. Today’s readers of the text, particularly Western readers of the English translation, must struggle against the tendency to project their own interpretation into the terms. Tan Malaka appears to have regarded two key Marxist concepts as requiring special attention. He uses the term “proletariat” very sparingly and developed his own term, murba, for use in the Asian political context (see below, pp. xci-xcv). The concept of class is clearly a problematic one throughout the text. At times he uses the Dutch word klas and at other times the Indonesian terms golongan or kaum occasionally even within the same paragraph. The following passage is an example:

A state can flourish as long as the old property- and power-holding class (kaum jang berpunja) is able to institute progress (technical, social, political, and cultural). This old state will fall and a new state arise, when the old is no longer capable of progress and the new, formerly oppressed, class is able to organize, struggle, and replace the old and carry out progress in all fields of society. (Volume III, p. 51)

Adventure and the Pacar Merah Myth

A strong feature of From Jail to Jail is the racy “adventure” style of much of the autobiographical account. Of course Tan Malaka’s life story lends itself to romantic overplaying, and this was indeed the theme of much of the commentary about him, in particular the Pacar Merah (Scarlet Pimpernel) stories (discussed below, p. lxxii-lxxiii) in which a thinly disguised Tan Malaka performs astonishing feats of romance and espionage.

What is of particular interest here is the reflection back into Tan Malaka’s own perception of his experiences of the tone of these reports and romances. Tan Malaka’s farewell to Hong Kong as he was deported to China in 1933 (Volume II, p. 52) illustrates this point, as does Tan Malaka’s colorful account of his arrest and detention in the Philippines and his subsequent deportation (Volume I, chapter 13). One could be forgiven for thinking one was reading Matu Mona’s novel Spionnagedienst, which describes in similar style the events of August 1927. Not only are publicly reported details of his arrest and interrogation recounted in this novel, but also matters such as the implications of the death of governor general Wood, and the attitudes of acting governor general Gilmore on Tan Malaka’s case and the visit of a woman to the jail, asking to see Tan Malaka, declaring herself to be his wife.¹¹

In turn, Matu Mona bases this section of his novel almost word for word on the Sumatran newspaper Pewarta Deli reports on 30 June and 1 July 1933 of Tan Malaka’s Philippine arrest, including the dialogue used in his interrogation and the dramatic element of his escapes. Tan Malaka’s apparent plagiarism in From Jail to Jail may be rather a case of Tan Malaka reworking his own earlier renditions of the tale, for I believe that it is more than likely that Tan Malaka himself sent the despatches from which the articles were written.

Personal Rapportage

Yet another style makes its presence felt alongside didacticism and adventure. This is Tan Malaka’s personal rapportage. Written in catchy and informal prose, this style is used both for events of historical importance and for anecdotal accounts of his own experiences.

Tan Malaka’s presentation of historical events at which he was present, as well as those reconstructed secondhand, bring alive the historic moments of the early days of the Indonesian revolution, such as his dramatization of the night before the proclamation of independence (Volume III, chapter 8), which characteristically intersperses narrative with dialogue and documentary evidence, and a summary of Tan Malaka’s conclusions reached from the event being described. His reconstructions of episodes of the Philippines revolution, in particular the execution of Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio, are moving vignettes.

A large proportion of the text is devoted, not to questions of great moment, but rather to personal, day-to-day, and what may even be described as inconsequential, matters. Here Tan Malaka is concerned to evoke an atmosphere and to show, from individual experiences, how different societies and personalities function. While from one standpoint Tan Malaka’s autobiography is tantalizing, elusive, and evasive—often avoiding naming names and debating policies—from another standpoint it is rich with the spirit of the many situations in which he found himself.

The young Indonesian student’s experiences in an alien environment are poignant. In Holland, the food, the Dutch education system, the personal animosities among his landlords and fellow boarders, his illness, his developing political consciousness and consequent feelings of hostility and tension towards the colonial power—all are painted evocatively. Tan Malaka’s depiction of social relations on the tobacco plantation in Deli is another example. Life in Chinese villages in the late 1920s and early 1930s, with its privation and revolt, is depicted emotively, as are Singapore and Java under the Japanese occupation. Personal anecdote is used skillfully to make sociological and political comment.

These sections of the text reveal Tan Malaka as a keen observer of events, with a talent for sketching the mood of a scene and the personalities involved. His many years’ experience as a writer show in his ability to articulate a situation or problem clearly, illustrating it all the more forcefully by bringing it down to the level of individuals with whom Tan Malaka has a clear empathy. We see this, for example, in his depiction of the struggle between old and new ways in China in the 1930s through the tragic story of “A.P.” who was “married against her will” (Volume II, pp. 85-88) and in the happier romance of two young students (Volume II, pp. 71-74).

Tan Malaka’s personalization of political issues is seen strikingly in the character sketches of Sukarno, Hatta, Sjahrir, and Amir Sjarifuddin (Volume III, pp. 124-26), and in the longer chapter “From Engineer Sukarno to President Sukarno” (Volume III, chapter 8), which develops the idea of Sukarno’s concern with grande élégance and grande éloquence.

The grande-éloquence à la Sukarno was never concrete and definite, frankly confronting the obvious enemy close at hand. In the time of the Dutch, nationalism should have been directed against the Dutch East Indies government, but instead the enemy was carefully obscured with the words “capitalism-imperialism” . . . something abstract and distant. Similarly this grande-éloquence could construe the term “mass action” (which really means “the self-acting armed organization of the proletariat”) to mean “getting up at the same time in the morning” under Dutch rule, kinro hoji (communal labor) in the Japanese period, and, in this current revolutionary period, “cutting wood and sweeping the streets together.” (Volume III, p. 78)

Tan Malaka pulls no punches in criticizing the style and actions of his political opponents. His treatment of Alimin is quite different, as he recalls an event in 1926. This cri de coeur shows a real sense of betrayal, and is a typical illustration of Tan Malaka’s tendency to put tremendous value on personal relationships and honor. (The contrast with Alimin’s derogatory castigation of Tan Malaka, referred to in the quotation, is marked.)

Apparently Alimin did not trust this comrade. Only then did I begin to become aware of what sort of honesty he had shown me. I had always thought of him as honest and respected him, but now he would no longer be a comrade-in-arms for me. If he did not trust his lifelong friend in Singapore, how could he trust me, whom he had known barely a year. This feeling strengthened when I recalled Alimin’s testimony against his former leader Tjokroaminoto in the Afdeling B case. Since this affair, I have continued to regard Alimin as a friend but as a comrade-in-arms I have doubted his honesty. . . . To Alimin, who had admitted my “weakness” in his book Analysis, I address the following question: Can a revolutionary party survive if its members are not honest with each other? (Volume I, pp. 136-37)

In my opinion, these episodes of personal rapportage form the most fascinating sections of the text, covering as they do historical events with some bearing on the revolution, and revealing Tan Malaka’s skills as a writer. Further, it is here that we see his personality and political attitudes far more clearly than in the formalistic didactic sections or the overly dramatic adventure escapades.

Significance of the Text

In my preface I have discussed the reasons for selecting From Jail to Jail as the object of my study. It was Tan Malaka himself as a historical figure, as a symbol of perjuangan, as a link between the communist fighters of the 1920s and the physical struggle for independence from 1945 to 1949, that originally drew my attention. The proliferation of strange and fanciful stories and the corresponding lack of hard information about Tan Malaka led me to decide that translating his own presentation of his life’s story would be a worthwhile contribution to the task of understanding the Indonesian revolution. While the text cannot be abstracted from Tan Malaka himself in any ultimate sense, an examination of various of its attributes and features can reveal aspects in which the text has an intrinsic significance, aside from that of illuminating its author and his historical role.

As a Primary Source for the Indonesian Revolution

First and foremost, From Jail to Jail has significance as a primary source from the Indonesian revolution. Most participants in historical events are too involved to have time to document them. Diaries, of course, are the principal exception to this rule, but in most cases even the appearance of diaries may be delayed for years, until the author has had time to edit or censor their content, or until the author’s place in history is assured. It requires a peculiar set of circumstances to extricate a protagonist from the scene far enough to allow comment on events as they unfold. Such a set of circumstances was brought into play when Tan Malaka was jailed in March 1946, just as his Persatuan Perjuangan was displaced by the reemergent social-democratic prime minister, Sutan Sjahrir. A continuing keen sense of concern for the course of the revolution led Tan Malaka to write about developments occurring after his arrest, as well as to chronicle events that had taken place previously. Not until some years later did any of the other political activists from the revolution write their interpretations of that period. (I discuss these later in the context of the significance of this text as autobiography.)

Indeed, contemporary analyses of the Indonesian revolution even from nonparticipants were few and far between. As Anthony Reid has commented,

The importance of the revolution as a symbol of Indonesian identity and freedom has made it a difficult, perhaps increasingly difficult, subject for Indonesians to write about with candour. To the best of my knowledge only two serious attempts have been made to describe the revolutionary process as a whole, including its internal dynamics. Muhammad Dimyati, Sedjarah Perdjuangan Indonesia (Jakarta, Widjaya, 1951) is the earliest and best such account, dealing frankly with internal developments at the national level from a viewpoint sympathetic to Tan Malaka. The second volume of Iwa Kusuma Sumantri, Sedjarah revolusi Indonesia (Jakarta, Grafica, [1965?]), is a partial account by one of the leading 3 July detainees, but it does give some attention to the “social revolutions” and to events outside Java. Two slighter general accounts, Susanto Tirtoprodjo, Sedjarah revolusi nasional Indonesia (Jakarta, Pembangunan, 1962) and Samawi, 25 tahun merdeka (Jogjakarta, Kedaulatan Rakjat, 1970), stress the international aspect.¹²

In the late 1970s the situation changed with the publication of a major history of the revolution in eleven volumes: A. H. Nasution’s Sekitar perang Kemerdekaan Indonesia. The fact that it was nearly thirty years after the transfer of sovereignty that such a history appeared illustrates by exception the paucity, one could say even the absence, of contemporary analyses of any depth (of course the newspapers and magazines of the day carried numerous polemics and analyses). While From Jail to Jail concludes in March 1948 (with a postscript comment made in October 1948) and therefore cannot give a final judgment on the revolution, it can be regarded as one of the very few contemporary works to attempt to see a pattern and a logic in the crowded saga of events from 1945 to 1948. The major events are discussed and analyzed in Volume III, with the relevant forces and dynamics of each sitution forming the author’s main focus. It is appropriate here, in the discussion of the text’s significance, to draw together Tan Malaka’s perception of a number of events and situations with which he was involved or associated.

The Proclamation of Independence. Tan Malaka opens his discussion with the following words:

Forced by the people of Jakarta under the leadership of the pemuda headquartered at Menteng 31, on 17 August 1945 Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed the independence of Indonesia¹³ and chose a republican form of government. To me, this momentous event for the people of Indonesia meant stepping from the world of ideas to the world of reality in a period of little over twenty years. (I had written Naar de ‘Republiek Indonesia’ in January 1924 in Singapore.) (Volume III, p. 63)

These sentences sharply bring out the major points of his perspective on the proclaiming of Indonesia’s independence: first, that Sukarno and Hatta were forced to act by the people under the leadership of the pemuda, and second, that Tan Malaka should get the credit as the originator of the idea of “the Republic of Indonesia” (discussed in more detail below, p. lxxxv).

Tan Malaka devotes four chapters of Volume III to developing these two points as the focus for his discussion of the proclamation and its interpretation. Chapter 5 shows that in terms of international law and natural justice, the people of Indonesia had the right to make such a proclamation. Clearly, at the time Tan Malaka wrote this section (1948), this right was being violated in practice by the continuing Dutch occupation of large areas of the territory claimed by the republic of Indonesia. The very survival of the republic was at stake, and so Tan Malaka felt it necessary to prove the case for Indonesian self-determination by invoking the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations Charter.

Chapter 6 considers the revolution in Indonesian terms, clearly differentiating it from the French and Russian revolutions. It discusses “the technology and the economy; the sociopolitical structure; the culture and psychology of the Indonesian people,” showing the reasons Indonesia has chosen self-determination as a republic. The chapter examines the class structure of Indonesia under Dutch colonialism and the effect of the Japanese conquest of the Dutch forces, and of the Japanese occupation itself. Tan Malaka wrote: “The interpretation we place on our August revolution and on every step in our struggle is, then, very important since it is on that basis that we must develop the strategy and tactics for the defense of our revolution” (Volume III, p. 68).

Sukarno himself is the subject of chapter 7 “because it has a strong connection with the question of the Republic of Indonesia’s leadership in this revolutionary period.” This chapter makes trenchant criticism of Sukarno’s political role in cooperating with the Japanese, in making concessions to the Dutch in both the Linggajati and Renville agreements, and in curbing the militancy of the struggle for independence. Chapter 8 is in large part a dramatization of the events in the days leading up to 17 August.

The proclamation of 17 August was not what Sukarno and Hatta wanted; on the contrary, it took place against their wishes. A proclamation that had the full support of Sukarno and Hatta would have straight away been branded by the Allies as a Japanese proclamation. Many people are going to feel offended by this statement, but history is not a dream, a hope, or a fairy tale to please either the reader or those in power; it consists of real facts.

It appears that attempts have already been made to whitewash the history of the proclamation. It is to balance such attempts, to defend truth, and to pass on to our descendants its true history that I am writing this explanation of the events, based on what I saw and heard. (Volume III, p. 85)

Tan Malaka’s explanation and dramatization does indeed place the role of Sukarno and Hatta as “proclamators,” with chief responsibility for the proclamation, in a different perspective than the version of events given at the time, the version which still persists in official histories. In this, Tan Malaka’s account accords with those from the side of the pemuda and their supporters, such as Sidik Kertapati, Subardjo, Adam Malik, and Nasution. On the other hand, Hatta and Sukarno maintained that the proclamation was actually delayed by the actions of the pemuda, although neither denied that it would otherwise have been made at the session of the Committee for the Preparation of Independence of Indonesia established by the Japanese occupation forces, and therefore would have had, as Tan Malaka asserted, a substantially different impact and content.

The “Testament” Affair. The surat wasiat or surat warisan (testament) affair has been one of the principal grounds for the development of a negative image of Tan Malaka as a manipulator and falsifier. Tan Malaka’s interpretation is given in Volume III, chapter 7. He maintains that the initiative of handing over the leadership of the revolution to him, should Sukarno and Hatta be immobilized (for instance in an occupation of Jakarta), came from Sukarno himself, at their first meeting in early September 1945. Tan Malaka says that, at Hatta’s urging, three others were added to the list to inherit the leadership (Sjahrir, Iwa Kusumasumantri, and Wongsonegoro), and Hatta countersigned the document, which was given to Tan Malaka before he left Jakarta on 1 October 1945.

Opponents of Tan Malaka have suggested that he substituted a false text, deleting the other three names; that he used this text to build political capital even though Sukarno and Hatta were not immobilized; and that Subardjo did not give copies to the other three inheritors.¹⁴ No evidence has been provided to demonstrate the truth of such charges, and the existence of the testament has been verified by both Sukarno and Hatta. It certainly was not widely publicized at the time, and allegations of Tan Malaka’s misconduct in this “affair” were allowed to circulate when he was under detention in 1946-1948.

Perjuangan versus Diplomasi. Tan Malaka introduces chapter 10 as follows:

I based this conclusion on the following considerations:

1. the conflict between the desires and actions of the head of state and those of people and pemuda everywhere;

2. the conflict and hostility among the parties (e.g., Islamic versus socialist in Pekalongan and Priangan);

3. the hostility among the various militias as shown in Surabaya (shooting from behind);

4. the attitude and actions of the British in acknowledging Dutch sovereignty over Indonesia, and imposing that sovereignty by force of arms on the Indonesian people, who have proclaimed their independence; . . . (Volume III, p. 109)

The Battle of Surabaya was the final determinant in his assessment of the current course of the revolution, with Sukarno and Sjahrir in the leadership, and his conviction that that course had to change if 100 percent independence was to be achieved. Over the next five chapters he provides documentary evidence on the program of the Persatuan Perjuangan, its adoption and modification, and point-by-point refutation of the government’s program adopted to counter the PP program. Chapter 10 describes in great detail the cabinet of March 1946 in which Sjahrir regained the upper hand. It describes this period as one that “drew the line between the initial and secondary phases of the Indonesian revolution, between the phase of mass action and the phase of diplomacy” (Volume III, p. 132).

Chapter 15 is most unusual. It is a profit-and-loss political and economic analysis of the Linggajati and Renville agreements in algebraic terms. Couched in Tan Malaka’s caustic style, this fifty-page chapter makes fascinating reading as he dissects and attacks the treaties article by article. To my knowledge, it is the most comprehensive analysis of the implications for Indonesian independence of these treaties. Harsh though it is, this criticism of Tan Malaka’s received subsequent endorsement from Sukarno, who wrote that “Linggajati was a shower of ice water on the fire of revolution.”¹⁵

The 3 July Affair. Like the Testament Affair, the 3 July Affair (also known as the “coup d’etat of Tan Malaka”), has been used by his opponents to show Tan Malaka’s megalomania and readiness to use extralegal methods. In the concluding chapters of his autobiography Tan Malaka documents the arrest of himself and others on 17 March 1946, and his own experiences in various jails during the ensuing two years, up to the conclusion of the book in March 1948. The government’s “Official Statement” on the 3 July Affair is reproduced, together with his own refutation of the allegations made in that document. Tan Malaka maintains that he was not involved in either the kidnapping of Sjahrir, nor the show of strength at the palace on 3 July. Further, he asserts that his philosophy of mass action excluded such an approach to political change. Certainly, despite every effort over a period of two and a half years, the government was unable to lay charges against him. The introduction to Volume III was written in October 1948, after Tan Malaka’s release from jail and after the Madiun Affair (both of which took place in September). It contains the following bitter comment on the affair, likening the republican government’s actions to those of the colonial and imperialist powers.

My experiences over more than a quarter of a century in prisons in many parts of the world have never once concluded with a satisfactory feeling of justice achieved. In March 1922 the “East Indies” judiciary did not “permit” me to face “Gerecht, Recht en Rechtvaardigheid” (Judiciary, Jurisdiction, and Justice) Dutch style. In Manila at the beginning of August 1927 the United States, which idolizes “democracy and justice,” was not even willing to permit me to come face to face with its legal experts in its court of justice, as I had been promised when arrested. England, which brags about being “democratic” and praises to the skies its “British justice,” preferred to detain and isolate me in its Hong Kong prison for several months at the end of 1932. Even our republic, supposedly a nation of law, which claims to have had cause for our arrest in Madiun, had to think for two and a half years about constructing a charge against us. When Sukarni and I were freed on 16 September 1948 from the prison at Magelang, this charge still had not been formulated and presented to us. (Volume III, p. 9)

Besides being one of the few contemporary primary sources on the revolution, From Jail to Jail is of particular importance because Tan Malaka was the first “loser”; the principal advocate of the perjuangan course of action that lost out to diplomasi. It is, ipso facto, an analysis that runs counter to official histories and memoirs of those whose policies carried the day.

Tan Malaka makes no bones of the fact that this presentation of his life story is made to serve particular ends. He does not purport to be writing an unbiased and objective history of the revolution. His introduction to Volume III states as follows:

This volume . . . has its beginnings in my detention in a prison of the republic and concerns the resulting judicial process. Therefore it is rather abstract and theoretical, tending toward the polemical. Here I deal with such questions as my philosophy of life, the nature of the state, the Persatuan Perjuangan, negotiations between Indonesia and the Netherlands, and so on. All this is part of my defense against the “charge” that has been made against me (see the official statement).

This volume can in no way be a complete defense, since it appears that the office of the public prosecutor, which has the “right” to press charges, is unable to present a clearly formulated accusation. A clear and systematic defense naturally cannot be prepared on the basis of a “charge” that is still being awaited and is only a matter of speculation. This volume, then, is not intended as my defense, but should be seen rather as material for a defense that is as yet unformulated. (Volume III, p. 3)

In advancing his own defense, Tan Malaka is selective in his choice of matters to discuss and what lines of argument to follow. Does this purposeful and partisan intent make the work any less valuable as a primary source? I believe not. My research into the events described has found a high degree of accuracy in his depiction of events. His polemics are always presented clearly as his own interpretation or opinion. Tan Malaka’s account is not diminished by his being an actor in the events described, with a vital concern for their outcome. On the contrary, this very involvement and passion make the work such a valuable contribution to our understanding of the process of the revolution.

As Marxist Historiography

By 1947-1948, although many people and organizations had declared themselves to be Marxist in orientation or origin, a Marxist historiography had not yet developed in Indonesia. It might even be said that Indonesian historiography of any form was still in its formative stage. Before the war a colonial historiography, viewing Indonesia’s history through the prism of the colonial power’s “civilizing mission” and “modernizing influence” had dominated the official educational system, and the countervailing influence to such an interpretation came only from regional histories (predominantly in traditional chronicle form), historical fiction, and personal or family histories.

It was not until 1938 that a book declaring itself to be a “history of Indonesia” was published: Zainoeddin Saleh and Anwar Dusky’s Ringkasan sedjarah Indonesia (Padang: Express, 1938). In spite of its title, this book was criticized at the time as being so firmly in the mold of colonial history “that a reader might reasonably ask whether it was written by a foreigner.”¹⁶

During the Japanese occupation, Sanusi Pane’s Sedjarah Indonesia appeared, the first three volumes published in 1943 and the fourth in 1945. Together with Prijono’s Sedikit tentang sedjarah Asia Timoer Raja dan Sedjarah Tanah Djawa and Muhammad Yamin’s books on two Javanese heroes, Gadjah Mada: pahlawan persatuan nusantara and Sedjarah peperangan Dipanegara: pahlawan kemerdekaan Indonesia, Sanusi’s works represented the first antidote to the Dutch colonial perspective. The new rulers found acceptable images of past glory in the kingdoms of Java and in the subsequent 350 years of colonial Dutch oppression punctuated by failed rebellions in various parts of the archipelago; and there was an implied greatness to come with the overthrow of the colonial power.¹⁷

But a Marxist view of the history of Indonesia, discussing classes in terms of either their origin or their conflicts, was most certainly not permitted, even less so by the Japanese than the Dutch colonial power with all its exorbitante rechten (extraordinary powers). It was in secrecy that Tan Malaka wrote his treatise Madilog (materialisme, dialektika, logika), fear of its discovery being the main reason for his move out of Jakarta in mid-1943 (Volume II, p. 154). As to his intention in writing Madilog, which he described as “a bridge to the philosophy of the western proletariat” (p. 13), prominent Indonesian historian Mohammad Ali commented,

It was because he wanted to put his imprint on the process of mental change in his people that Tan Malaka wrote Madilog as the basic exposition of his philosophy, which he also formulated in a booklet Pandangan hidup (Way of Life). What Tan Malaka offered was Materialism-Dialectics-Logic or dialectical materialism as an outlook on life, so that Indonesian man could free himself from a cosmocentric world.¹⁸

Within the next few years a number of histories appeared, concentrating on the nationalist movement and the revolution: L. M. Sitorus, Sedjarah pergerakan kebangsaan Indonesia (1949); A. K. Pringgodigdo, Sedjarah pergerakan rakyat Indonesia (1950); and Muhammad Dimyati, Sedjarah perdjuangan Indonesia (1951). With the exception of Sitorus, there was no attempt to analyze the forces in motion on a national or international scale. Sitorus utilizes a wide canvas, though his text runs only to sixty-six pages. Beginning with a chapter on the meaning and function of the study of history, he concentrates on the prewar nationalist movement, giving the viewpoint of the PKI; only in the last six pages does he discuss, and necessarily rush through, the Japanese occupation and the revolutionary period up to November 1948 (with no mention at all of the Madiun Affair).

It was Tan Malaka’s role to articulate what I believe to be the first Indonesian Marxist view on the evolution of Indonesian society, up to and including the nationalist movement and its culmination in the physical struggle for independence. Of course, it must be stressed that Indonesian Marxists, Tan Malaka included, had commented on Indonesian history even before 1920 and that analyses of the nationalist movement had been made through the 1920s and 1930s. Tan Malaka’s own perspective on the early stages of the movement was articulated in great detail in Massa actie, written in 1926.

In the late 1930s a Dutch historian (S. J. Rutgers) and a Russian historian (A. Guber) cooperated on publishing the first overall Marxist approach to Indonesian historiography. Entitled simply Indonesië, Volume I appeared in 1937 and Volume II some ten years later, at the same time that Tan Malaka was writing From Jail to Jail. Tan Malaka makes no reference to this work, and it is highly unlikely that he would have seen a copy, since it was suppressed in Indonesia by the colonial authorities.

From Jail to Jail comprises in large part Tan Malaka’s observations on the course of human history. Some sections are viewed through the prism of his own experiences. Others are expressed as a retelling of historical events, such as the Philippine revolution and the Sejarah Melayu. Still other sections stand as discrete expositions of the theory of historical materialism, as in the introductory sections of Volume III. Tan Malaka presented his paradigm of historical materialism as follows:

With Marx and Engels’ identification of the cause or condition for change in human society, the history of humanity changed from being the product of chance or destiny without cause or clear direction to one with an origin, a direction, a cause, and consequences. With this change, history was lifted from the world of mystery to that of reality, and society could now be studied intellectually. (Volume III, p. 32)

Applying this tool of analysis to recent Indonesian history, Tan Malaka summarizes his position:

1. Prior to the proclamation, the environment and society of Indonesia, through the intervention of Western society, technology, and modern organization, had established a sociopolitical, productive, and distributive system that could be termed a Dutch colonial capitalist society (thesis);

2. Within the womb of Dutch imperialist society, views developed that conflicted with those of that colonial capitalist society. In essence, they were directed toward establishing a new society using all the instruments of technology and Western science for production, a society based on mutual assistance and distribution as well as freedom and equality among the human beings and nationalities of this world (antithesis); and

3. With the proclamation of 17 August, the people and pemuda began to act to put into practice this view of establishing a new world and society on this, our part of the earth (synthesis). (Volume III, p. 43)

It is clear from this schematic presentation that Tan Malaka took the view that “Indonesia” existed prior to the proclamation of independence. Indeed, he uses the concept “Indonesia” even when speaking of prehistoric days. On the other hand, however, he could say, “The true Indonesian nation does not yet have a history of its own except slavery. . . . The history of the Indonesian nation will first begin when it is freed from imperialist domination” (Massa actie, p. 13). This was, and continues to be today, a hotly debated issue among historians of Indonesia.¹⁹

I shall discuss in my concluding section of this introduction my views on the importance of understanding the isolation that Tan Malaka experienced from Marxist theoretical discussions during the 1930s. Indeed, I argue that his political evolution ceased in the early 1920s and that he had little access to the intense debate in Marxist circles from that time on. The relevance of this view here is that, although written in the mid-1940s, From Jail to Jail should be analyzed in terms of the early 1920s. In this regard, the work of Arif Dirlik on Chinese Marxist historiography from 1919 to 1937 has considerable bearing on the subject, for a number of characteristics noted by Dirlik find an echo in Tan Malaka’s work.²⁰

One such characteristic is an eclecticism incorporating various strands of Western thought. Tan Malaka discusses his progression from Nietzsche as thesis, Rousseau as antithesis, and Marx/Engels as synthesis. From Jail to Jail reveals, however, that attitudes and sympathies from Nietzsche and Rousseau persisted into the Marxist Tan Malaka’s Weltanschauung. A certain mechanical reductionism expressed so clearly in the evaluation of the Linggajati and Renville agreements, and admiration of power, in particular military might (shown in the description of the Japanese conquest of colonial Southeast Asia), bring echoes of Nietzsche in their wake. Rousseau’s romantic view of human nature and society forms a recurring contrapuntal theme to the text (for instance in a certain idealization of village life).

In his “lightning” sketch of the development of human thought and progress preceding Volume III, Tan Malaka displays this tendency toward an eclectic blending of a number of schools of thought, with particular emphasis given to Darwin. One can see parallels here with Marxist analysis developed in China during the 1920s in which “historical materialism appeared as a variant of evolutionist theory based on economic change.”²¹

In Vietnam, too, eclecticism and a Social Darwinist approach was predominant in the historiography of the 1920s, particularly among the bourgeois historians, although it was roundly denounced by the Marxist historians from about 1930 “as reactionary capitalist propaganda designed to legitimize ruthless exploitation of the lower classes.”²²

Further, Tan Malaka echoes the Chinese Marxists in presenting economic change based on technological change as the motive force of history, with a concomitant downplaying of the role of social and class relations in the process: “forces of production” rather than “relations of production” form the focus of his attention, as we see in the following discussion.

It is clear, then, that in the three periods of Western society [500 B.C. to 1500; 1500 to 1850; and 1850 to today] . . . the relative position and value of the three principal cultural streams—religion, philosophy, and science—have changed. The conflict between these three streams and the corresponding changes in leadership of the social-political regime have had their roots in changes in the system of production based upon the existing technology.

From 500 B.C. to A.D. 1500, when supreme authority over society and the state was held by the priests and the nobility, productive labor was carried out by slaves (in Greece and Rome) or serfs (in Western Europe in the Middle Ages when technology included the water- or wind-driven mill). When the nobles and the philosophers held supreme authority in Western Europe, from 1500 to 1850, production was turning towards manufacturing, and steam-powered factories came into use. Finally, during the bourgeois period from 1850 to the present (1948), while the bourgeoisie has held social and state leadership in Western Europe and America . . . production has been controlled by finance capital and monopoly. The technical basis of production progressed swiftly from steam power to electric, oil, and now atomic power. (Volume III, pp. 25-26)

The smashing of the PKI in 1926-1927 put an end to any development of a Marxist historiography in preindependent Indonesia. Dirlik points to a similar cutoff of the debate in China at the same time, with the imposition of a strict party line from the Kremlin. In Indonesia, as indicated in Ruth McVey’s study of the PKI’s early period, the debate had not reached as rich a level as it had in China.²³ It is beyond the scope of this work to compare PKI and CPP historiography, but such a study could be extremely valuable and could explore the importance of such factors as the stultifying nature of the colonial government in Indonesia vis à vis the uneven repression in China, the Confucian tradition of scholarship and historiography versus the fragmented and demoralized scholarship in Indonesia, and the debilitating effect of the exile of many PKI leaders.

As Autobiography

From Jail to Jail has significance in another regard: as the autobiography of an Indonesian written in the 1940s it is a rare document, and, as the autobiography of an Asian Marxist from that period it stands as one of a handful of texts.

Autobiography as a genre emanating from a particular time and place, and, as a particular cultural attitude towards self and society, has been the object of study in recent years for, among others, Erik Erikson, Roy Pascal, James Olney, and Georges Gusdorf. Gusdorf commented, “The concern which seems so natural to us, to turn back and look on one’s own past, to recollect one’s life in order to narrate it, is not at all universal. It asserts itself only in recent centuries and only on a small part of the map of the world.”²⁴ The relative paucity of autobiography in the Indonesian and Malay world has been remarked on by a number of scholars and has been ascribed to the lack of “individuation” in Southeast Asian societies, “in which, for one reason or another, the importance of the individual is subsumed within that of the community, or in which the individual must of necessity . . . be held to embody the virtues (or vices) of the society as a whole.”²⁵

A seminar on the topic was held in Melbourne in 1974, and the papers were later published. A. H. Johns discusses the Indonesian situation in his essay, “From Caricature and Vignette to Ambivalence and Angst: Changing Perceptions of Character in the Malay World,” in which he comments on the long gap in “expression of individuality” between the publication of the Malay official Abdullah Abdul Kadir Munshi’s autobiography, Hikayat Abdullah, in 1849 and Kartini’s letters, first published in 1911.²⁶ In his introductory essay to the papers from this seminar, Wang Gungwu modified Roff’s approach to the reasons for this late development of biography.

It is possible that deep down there is an indigenous indifference to the life of mere mortals which finds the idea of biography irrelevant if not useless; but more likely, the confusion of multiple and often conflicting foreign influences in the region has not permitted new ideas about the Self in Biography to take firm root and acquire strong adherents and stimulate local practitioners.²⁷

Born in 1797, a hundred years before Tan Malaka, Munshi was the first Malay/Indonesian autobiographer. His Hikayat Abdullah, written between 1840 and 1843, recorded the events of his life in Malacca and Singapore. With a background in Koranic, Malay, and English learning, he moved in Malay and European circles working, inter alia, as a scribe for Sir Stamford Raffles. His text has not only some structural parallels with Tan Malaka’s text (discussed above, p. xxxiii), but also parallels in autobiographical style. As his translator comments,

Abdullah was the first writer in Malay to bring realism to this art, to see events of everyday life from the standpoint of the common experience of mankind and not through the tinted spectacles of legend and romance. . . .

The great value of his work lies not in the dry record of a period well-served by the chronicler and the annalist, but in the intimate pen-pictures he gives of the personalities of his time. The author is at his best describing a person’s sifat, his appearance manners and attitude to those round him from which his character is inferred.²⁸

I know of only two Indonesian autobiographical works to be published during the next hundred years: Pangeran Achmad Djajadiningrat’s Herinneringen (1936), and Soetomo’s Kenang-kenangan (1938). One might stretch a point and mention two compilations of letters: Raden Adjeng Kartini’s Door duisternis tot licht, written in Dutch, 1899 to 1904, and published in English as Letters of a Javanese Princess (1964), and Sutan Sjahrir’s Indonesische overpeinzingen (1945), published in English as Out of Exile (1949).

Even today, nearly forty years after Tan Malaka wrote From Jail to Jail, autobiography remains a relatively rare genre in Indonesia. Short articles and even slim volumes on an individual’s role in particular historical events are more frequently encountered (for instance, in the proliferation of works on the proclamation of independence), but to step back and view one’s life as a whole, imparting some political pattern and moment to disparate events, is still a relatively rare phenomenon.²⁹ A further indication of the foreignness of autobiography to the Indonesian literary tradition is the high proportion of these works written in a foreign tongue, either English or Dutch, even as late as the 1970s.

In other parts of Asia autobiography is more frequently encountered. Wang Gungwu comments on the East Asian “tradition of eulogistic, didactic, and historical biography” (as distinct from modern biography in the European style) and on the relatively prevalent British-style memoirs in South Asia, particularly those written by administrators and officials in the colonial state apparatus. Directly “political” figures, however, have contributed rather less frequently to this genre. As to Asian communist leaders, I know of no other who has written a life story from a point in life even resembling Tan Malaka’s From Jail to Jail. To the contrary, others have left only fragments featuring themes of adolescence and political awakening (as with M. N. Roy, whose Memoirs stop in 1923), or prison (Roy, as well as Ho Chi Minh, whose remarkable series of poems was entitled Prison Diary).

One may ask why Tan Malaka should do something so uncharacteristic of his contemporaries. The particular circumstance that led to the writing of From Jail to Jail undoubtedly was the jailing of Tan Malaka and his removal from the action of the revolution. At the same time he continued to be involved with the course of the revolution as it faced crises that threatened the very survival of the state. Other activists were jailed together with him, however, and they evidently did not feel the need to write such a work.

Clearly, Tan Malaka was different: his life had several distinctive elements that made an autobiography possible. First was the European influence in his formative years. A strong legacy from that influence, one of the main features of his biculturalism discussed above (pp. xxxiv-xxxvi), was his voracious reading habit which developed into a desire to write. Steeped thus in a literary tradition, Tan Malaka stepped outside the norm of Indonesia’s oral culture. In addition, his life story was so rich in experience that others thought it could be “instructive for the present and future heroes of the struggle for independence.” Clearly that was indeed the case. This combination of political experience, literary tradition, and removal-from/continued-involvement-in the revolution was unique.

And yet, the autobiography he chose to write was more than a straight polemic designed to influence the course of the revolution. The need to situate his personal story in a wide, theoretical context forced him to take the peregrinations noted above in my discussion of the structure of the text. Part textbook, part reminiscence, part polemic, From Jail to Jail is a precious document, not only a commentary on the times, but also a rare glimpse into the mind of an Asian revolutionary—a part of the unfolding revolution itself.

The Author of the Text

Tan Malaka as a Personality

The picture of Tan Malaka that emerges from his autobiography is one of a very sensitive person, entranced by the details of the daily life of people around him. His landladies and fellow tenants in Holland, the Europeans he worked with in Deli, Chinese peasants, and even the Japanese occupying troops are all portrayed with empathy and emotional involvement. This concern for his fellow human beings gives the lie to the picture of Tan Malaka as being violently anti-Dutch, a view that had some currency during the revolution and which has been repeated in more recent times.³⁰ Unquestionably he despised and polemicized unrestrainedly against the policies of the Dutch government, but he admired Dutch revolutionaries and expressed real compassion for members of the Dutch working class as he encountered them. Tan Malaka’s assessment of his benefactor, the Dutch capitalist Dr. Janssen, is a fine illustration of his ability to distinguish a person’s political role from personal traits and values:

Although possessing such noble ideals, he was sufficiently intelligent to sense the wide chasm between our political positions. It was not only on this occasion, nor only with white people either, that I was to experience the playing out of this tragedy of life: that you can go through good and bad with someone, eat and drink together, and yet be on opposite sides of the barricades. (Volume I, p. 59)

Breaking with a deep prejudice in Indonesia, Tan Malaka showed respect and sensitivity towards the Chinese and their culture.³¹ When imprisoned in Hong Kong in 1932, Tan Malaka was asked if he was of Chinese descent. His denial stressed that it was in no way based on racism. To be accepted by a race with the glorious culture and history of the Chinese would be an extraordinary honor for him. He wanted his Chinese readers to know this (Volume II, p. 39). The following autograph, which Tan Malaka (as Tan Ho Seng) gave on 7 April 1934 to an Indonesian Chinese student who lived in the same boarding house in Chip-Bi, near Amoy, illustrates this point on a personal level:

My dear Lie Tjwan Sioe

Among many other, perhaps two things are most difficult to do for a young man, at storm and stress period:

To concentrate on one and the same thing at one time and not be switched on to another rail.

To be self-conscious, without overestimating oneself and underestimating others or things to be done.

Sincerely yours

H. Seng³²

Leaving aside the pedagogical sections of the book, From Jail to Jail contains a good deal of lightheartedness and humor. The apparent joy with which Tan Malaka takes up verbal sparring with the British police officers during his interrogation is but one example of his concern to bring out the humorous side of his experiences. Others include the blow-by-blow accounts of the various attempts to capture him, sometimes successful but on several occasions concluding in his dramatic escape. The “pen-and-ink” sketches of Sukarno, Hatta, Sjahrir, and Amir Sjarifuddin (Volume III, pp. 124-26), which form one of the highlights of the book, are extremely witty, laced with Tan Malaka’s sharp political criticism.

His autobiography reveals a man who drew heavily on information and attitudes gained through his exposure to Western thought; rationality, materialism, and dynamism are the values he propounds. Throughout the text, however, Tan Malaka’s interest in superstition appears and reappears:

I shall leave it to the experts in superstition to relate these visits [to Borobudur] to my exile in March 1922 and my arrest in Madiun in March 1946. It is true that such strange occurrences are common in Indonesia. But for those who rely on rational explanations, I shall present only the facts regarding the struggle in which I was involved on those two occasions. (Volume I, p. 70)

The chapter on his arrest in Hong Kong begins in the following manner:

At the beginning of October 1932 one Ong Soong Lee [Tan Malaka], who could use thirteen different names without contradicting the name on his passport, and who carried a new trunk which coincidentally cost $13, rented room No. 13 in the Station Hotel in Kowloon, the city across from the port of Hong Kong. It was precisely on the day of the Double Ten or 10 October, the anniversary of the Republic of China, that the three thirteens played their role, as can be interpreted by those who believe that thirteen is an unlucky number. Those who rely on materialism can view the misfortune that befell me that night as the workings of cause and effect in the real world. (Volume II, p. 33)

While he did not claim to hold these superstitions himself, the fact that Tan Malaka sees the coincidences in these sequences of events is in itself revealing. The degree to which he did adhere to superstitious or religious beliefs is never clearly answered. In From Jail to Jail he mentions only that he regards religion as “a private matter” (Volume III, p. 27). Conscious of the fact that his readers would be, almost without exception, believers of one religion or another (principally Islam), Tan Malaka devotes considerable space to the development of religion and its role in society.³³ In the days of his chairmanship of the PKI, one of his principal concerns was to resurrect the bonds that had tied the party to the mass Muslim organization, Sarekat Islam. He spoke strongly at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922 of the need for the International to recognize the progressive role of pan-Islam as a anti-imperialist force. Some commentators have regarded Tan Malaka as a follower, and, indeed, even as a leader, of Islam.³⁴ Rudolf Mrázek has given considerable emphasis to Tan Malaka’s view of Islam as an advance over the “ancient culture, full of error, passivity and fossilized ideas.”³⁵ Certainly Tan Malaka saw Islam as a historical advance over animism and, indeed, Hinduism, but this no more makes him a believer than his views of capitalism as an advance over feudalism make him pro-capitalist.

Indeed, as early as 1922 Tan Malaka had placed his support of pan-Islam firmly in the context of the struggle against imperialism:

Alongside the crescent, the star of the Soviets will be the great battle emblem of approximately 250 million Muslims of the Sahara, Arabia, Hindustan and our Indies. . . . let us realise that the millions of proletarian Muslims are as little attracted to an imperialist pan-Islamism as to Western imperialism.³⁶

The man who emerges from this text is one with simple tastes and pleasures. The only possessions he mentions with affection are books, and he even envies Trotsky, sent off to Siberian exile with crates of them, while Tan Malaka, always on the run, had to discard his books on more than one occasion for fear they would incriminate him. One particularly poignant episode recounts him throwing his notebooks into the sea off southern Burma for fear of discovery on arrival in Rangoon (Volume II, p. 92). The bookshop on the corner of Jacobijnestraat, where he lived in Haarlem, remained a fond recollection from his school days in Holland, as did the Raffles Museum in Singapore and the museum library in Jakarta, where he spent time during the Japanese occupation.

Aside from his books, those who knew him during the revolution recall that he only devoted some attention to a Chinese walking stick with an elaborately carved handle in the shape of a dragon’s head. Apparently as Tan Malaka left for East Java in November 1948, he took the handle with him, leaving the stick itself in Yogyakarta with Hasan Sastraatmadja. The handle was returned sometime in 1949.³⁷ With only a walking stick, a few books, and a rucksack containing a change of clothes and a blanket—something he was careful always to have with him—Tan Malaka cut a simple figure. His habits were similarly spartan. According to Adam Malik, he would rise early and start work by 5:00 A.M. He was disciplined and ordered in his work. His handwriting was tiny, designed to use very little paper, and he used his own acronyms and abbreviations so that no one else could understand what he had written.³⁸

When he was working one could not disturb him. When he finished he was exhausted, and he would ask for satay and black tea or hot water with sugar.³⁹

He had an extraordinary power of attraction. Nonsex, non-alcohol. Like the Indian leaders seeking moksha (liberation) through self-denial.⁴⁰

This picture of extreme simplicity is given also by people who knew Tan Malaka during the Japanese occupation, when he lived in anonymity in Bayah, West Java, working in the office of a coal mine. In contrast to the other staff, Tan Malaka had no servants, and he did all his own cooking, washing, and cleaning. Not so unusual, he had few clothes, and he wore his somewhat crumpled and patched outfits for several days at a time. He was distinguished by his “uniform”: long socks and shorts, pith helmet, and his walking stick. He is remembered as a strange fellow who kept to himself, never inviting anyone to his house and seldom visiting others; often going off by himself for long walks along the beach or to fish from a certain rock by the river. No coffee and no cigarettes: he would drink only hot water or tea. He bathed only in the evening, sometimes simply wiping his body with a wet towel, as one observer put it, “in the European way.”⁴¹

Tan Malaka had not always been so aloof. His classmates in Holland recall him as being quite an extrovert. In school he was somewhat of a wit—joking and telling stories of home, calling himself “Prince of Malaka,” and always at the ready to put on an act, whether behind the teacher’s back or on stage by request. He read everything he could lay his hands on concerning the French and the American revolutions. A classmate recalls that he had a photographic memory and would recite whole sections of his previous night’s reading. This talent was to remain with him throughout his life, as his autobiography reveals. His sporting ability showed itself on the soccer field, where he preferred to play without shoes as he was accustomed to back home, and in the swimming pool where he used his own style and swam “like a water rat.”⁴² During the 1922 Dutch election campaign, when Tan Malaka was a candidate for the Dutch Communist party, his comrade Henk Sneevliet commented that particular attention was being paid to Tan Malaka by Fenny Struyvenberg, a student in Leiden with whom he stayed during his visit to that city. “She is filled with admiration for the energetic Malay, captured by him,” wrote Sneevliet to his wife.⁴³

A personal note on Tan Malaka’s Moscow experiences comes from J. de Kadt, who also attended the June 1923 plenum and evidently spent a lot of his time in Moscow with Tan Malaka who, De Kadt reports, “here, too, was particularly popular.” They went together to hear Trotsky speak; Tan Malaka had arranged front-row seats. At the last moment Trotsky could not come, so Tan Malaka delivered a short speech in German, which was evidently well received. De Kadt goes on to say as follows:

And then we were able to beat the retreat and drink away our disappointment, for in Tan Malaka’s dreary and messy room in a huge apartment building he had a good stock of Caucasian wine, which I found delicious although a little on the sweet side. His friend, one of the many Comintern secretaries, was a particularly likeable young woman, with an earnest and vocal presence, who was as deeply attached to the cause of the Comintern as to Tan Malaka.⁴⁴

Music and sport were important to Tan Malaka from his early years. He played in orchestras and on soccer teams in his school days in Bukit Tinggi and through his years at the teachers’ training college in Holland. His long and recurrent illnesses must have limited his capacity for physical exercise from the days when he swam the Ombilin River in West Sumatra, but even in Bayah he devoted time to organizing football teams among the mine workers, and in 1976 there was still a small monument to Tan Malaka on the site of the old playing field His musical interest persisted to the revolutionary period. Paramita Abdurrachman, Tan Malaka’s secretary and Subardjo’s niece, recalled long hours of discussion and enjoyment of music. She was an accomplished pianist. Subardjo played viola, and Tan Malaka in his youth played the cello. Abdurrachman recalled that Tan Malaka would whistle long obscure passages from classical music and that he loved to sit for hours and hear her play. He favored romantic composers, especially Schubert. He used to quote Napoleon to her, saying that music weakens the revolutionary spirit and that she would have to choose one or the other.

Abdurrachman had previously been politically close to Sjahrir. She described to me the differences between the two men and Sjahrir’s disappointment over her shifting allegiances. In personality there was a great gulf between the two men, she recalls: “Sjahrir maintained a balance between work and relaxation, but for Tan Malaka relaxation was a weakness. . . . In Yogya he would get angry whenever I went out to a restaurant, saying one must not forget the suffering of the people.”⁴⁵

The legacy of his twenty-year exile hung like a shadow over Tan Malaka’s personality. While he retained the ability to make political judgments and to project the way forward, in the latter stage of his life he was hindered by a reluctance to act or to take center stage. He hesitated, held back, waited for confirmation of his views. Time and again he missed the moment for action completely. Suspicion of and lack of confidence in his supporters proved his undoing on more than one occasion. Tan Malaka clearly had a failure of nerve. For fear of being betrayed to the Japanese he withheld his identity, and his hosts, too, withheld their plans for political action from this mysterious man from Bayah who aroused their suspicions.⁴⁶

Tan Malaka himself points to the tragedy and irony of his separation from the proclamation of independence despite the fact that he was actually staying in the house of Sukarni (one of the activists) in the days leading up to the event: “It appears that the history of the proclamation of 17 August did not permit me to take part physically, but only in a spiritual sense. I deeply regret this. But history pays no attention to the regret of a single human being or even of a whole class” (Volume III, p. 88).

The fact of the proclamation, about which he had dreamed for twenty years, failed to give him the courage to come forward under his own name. For ten days he wandered around Jakarta, making desultory attempts to contact Sukarni and the others, who were by now also in hiding. Finally, he revealed his identity not to the pemuda in whom he placed political confidence, but to Foreign Minister Achmad Subardjo Djojoadisurjo, whom he had known in Holland over twenty years previously. Still his return was not to be made public and, until after he left Jakarta on 1 October 1945, he did not even know of the existence of the Komite van Aksi (Action Committee), many of whose members looked to Tan Malaka’s earlier works for their inspiration (Volume III, p. 98).

The poignancy of Tan Malaka’s mistrust and fear of being unmasked, and the political consequences of this preoccupation, was brought home to me sharply by Djajarukmantara, the commander of the local battalion of PETA (Defenders of the Homeland) whom he knew in Bayah. In the last year of the Japanese occupation, Djajarukmantara had frequent discussions with “Iljas Hussein” (Tan Malaka) on Indonesia’s present situation and political future, finding that they shared a great many political views. After the proclamation, Djajarukmantara returned to his home town of Rangkas Bitung, where he was appointed chairman of the local KNI (Komite Nasional Indonesia—Indonesian National Committee). One evening in September or October he heard a knock at the door, and on his doorstep was Iljas Hussein. His visitor did not dare come in or reveal that he was anyone other than Iljas Hussein. He said simply, “I know you. Continue your work. I shall send word.”

A week later a letter arrived signed “T. M. (Hussein),” summoning him to Jakarta. On arriving at the address given, Djajarukmantara was told that Tan Malaka had left town. No one knew when he would return, so Djajarukmantara was told to return home and await instructions. He was never contacted again by Tan Malaka or by any of his followers.⁴⁷

Djajarukmantara went on to become the Rangkas regiment commander and led the attack on the Dewan Rakyat (People’s Council), which had spearheaded the social revolution in Banten. This movement was led by Tje’ Mamat, one of Tan Malaka’s followers, and it was welcomed by Tan Malaka as an example of what should be taking place throughout the country. In this case it is clear that undue caution lost Tan Malaka a potential supporter of considerable influence.

Nor was this hesitation evident only in the very early days of independence. Even after meeting members of the cabinet and some of the pemuda who supported his views (such as Adam Malik and Sukarni), Tan Malaka still made no public appearance, deciding instead to travel incognito through Java on a fact-finding tour. He himself reports that it was only the sharp political crisis of leadership expressed in the Battle of Surabaya in November 1945 that made him abandon his wish to remain “behind the scenes” (Volume III, pp. 109-10).

When he did come forward to establish the Persatuan Perjuangan, Tan Malaka refrained from taking an active leadership position as chairman or secretary-general, preferring to be known as the group’s “promoter.” Even in February 1946, when the Persatuan Perjuangan had gained massive popular support and was within reach of governmental power, Tan Malaka held back, trying to force the government to take up the Persatuan Perjuangan program, rather than stepping forward himself to take the leadership.

Tan Malaka’s reticence was apparent on an individual as well as a political level. Abdurrachman recalls that he was convinced that

the Dutch were behind everyone who opposed him, and he was particularly haunted by the specter of Sjahrir being used by the Dutch. He was fearful of meeting new people, and always suspicious of their motives.

He was pessimistic, fatalistic—drawing himself away, not able to join in any more. . . . He could no longer live normally in a regulated life. It was very tragic. He jumped to suspicion of anybody new. It was hard for his young followers. They couldn’t go here, they couldn’t go there. It was a fear complex. He regarded quite ordinary events as betrayal.⁴⁸

The autobiography, while containing many details of personal lives, does so only when such details can be used to illustrate a political point, for instance the conflict in his boarding house in Holland or the romantic entanglements of the “modern” students in China in the 1920s, which contradicted traditional notions of behavior. Tan Malaka actually gives us very little information about his own personal life.

His reminiscences of childhood, even childhood games, refer only to punishment, incurred at the hands of his father or his teacher. His younger brother, Kamaruddin, is mentioned only in passing, in an admission that he (Tan Malaka) had brought misery and grief to his mother. He specifically asked his mother not to come on board the ship carrying him to exile in Europe when it called at Padang, since it would be too dangerous and distressing for her. Evidently he thought it safer for the family if he severed all relations, and according to his mother’s second husband she never received letters from him. However, she followed every story of his whereabouts and believed she had been led to a certain cinema to sit beside him on one occasion.⁴⁹ She died in 1934 without ever seeing her son again, a fact which weighed heavily on Tan Malaka’s mind. He felt he should make up for his neglect of his family by at least visiting his parents’ graves when he returned to Sumatra in 1942, but even this duty was not to be fulfilled, since fear of apprehension by the Japanese kept him away (Volume II, p. 132).

He makes no mention at all of those he was close to politically after the war or of reunions with his PARI comrades on their return from exile. This may be explained by the particular nature of Volume III. In fact, nowhere in the autobiography does Tan Malaka discuss having a close emotional or sexual relationship. S. K. Trimurti is frequently quoted as saying of Tan Malaka that he was “pure” in this regard and never viewed women sexually.⁵⁰

The autobiography as a whole presents little information on any lasting personal relationships, although he mentions a number of people with considerable affection. Even his Chinese friend Buna is mentioned only in passing, although he was clearly very close to Tan Malaka over a long period. Concerning this friendship Tan Malaka wrote, “I have touched on my friendship with Buna only slightly up to now. For the previous ten years [from 1927] I hardly had been separated from him. . . . He accompanied me everywhere to protect me, and we went through all kinds of difficulties and hardships together” (Volume II, p. 110). Paramita Abdurrachman comments as follows:

About love, he was very closed, though he did talk about a proposed marriage in Sumatra. In Europe, too. It was not a constant factor, but he was an ordinary man. He was consumed with his idee fixe, wanting only to live for the people. He didn’t see woman as a companion, but wanted to put her on a pedestal, with Rosa Luxemburg as the example. . . . He always wanted his followers to be 100 percent faithful, regarding other ties as not serious.⁵¹

In summary, then, Tan Malaka was above all an intensely political individual. From the day he left his teaching post in Deli, North Sumatra, until the day of his death, it was the Indonesian revolution that consumed his energies. He had taken up the vocation of the revolutionary, and from that time on all else was subordinated to that goal.⁵²

The Politics of Tan Malaka

The foregoing sections of this introduction, particularly the personality sketch, have pointed to the difficulties of developing a political characterization of Tan Malaka. The very nature of his life and the resultant confusion and ignorance regarding his actions and beliefs during fairly long periods have combined with the personal and political biases of political commentators to provide a fantastic array of interpretations. Tan Malaka has been described variously as communist, nationalist, national communist, Trotskyist, Japanese agent, idealist, Muslim leader, and Minangkabau chauvinist. It is my view that as a first step, Tan Malaka should be placed within the framework of Marxism. He must then be located more precisely in the spectrum of those people who carried forward the ideas of Karl Marx into the twentieth century and into the continent of Asia. Before discussing these questions and drawing my own analysis, it is useful to review the principal images of Tan Malaka that have appeared in the literature.

Tan Malaka in the Literature. The six-volume official Indonesian national history, Sejarah Nasional Indonesia, edited by three of Indonesia’s leading historians—Sartono Kartodirdjo, Marwati Djoenoed Poesponegoro, and Nugroho Notosusanto—reflects the governmental view of Tan Malaka that has prevailed since independence, through all the varying political complexions of those in power. Apart from some discussion of the Sarekat Islam schools, references to Tan Malaka before 1945 are limited to a bare mention in the section on the PKI in the 1920s. He receives somewhat more attention in the revolutionary period. The Sjahrir government’s ex post facto rationalization of his arrest in March 1946 is repeated, as are assertions of his involvement in the 3 July 1946 Affair, and the government’s charge at the time that the establishment of the Persatuan Perjuangan and the Testament Affair were early manifestations of Tan Malaka’s devious efforts to seize power.

Pro-PKI writers, such as Alimin Prawirodirdjo, have also presented this version of Tan Malaka’s activities during the revolutionary period, adding their own assertions that Tan Malaka was the principal cause of the disastrous defeat suffered by the PKI during the 1926-1927 uprisings.⁵³

Foreign scholars have, until recently, tended to echo this neglect and/or distortion of Tan Malaka’s role, relying for their information all too often on the “winners” in the struggle between perjuangan and diplomasi. The first and still the standard work on the Indonesian revolution, George McT. Kahin’s Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (1952), epitomizes this trend. Kahin himself recognized the bias in his 1970 preface:

the charge has been made, particularly by Indonesians, that I have shown a partiality for the viewpoints of certain Indonesian groups—especially Soetan Sjahrir’s Indonesian Socialist Party and Mohammad Natsir’s wing of the Masjumi—and a lack of objectivity in my treatment of their adversaries, particularly Tan Malaka and his followers. Undoubtedly some of my views were influenced both by the personal friendships I developed with leaders of the Indonesian Socialist and Masjumi parties and by my lack of access to some other leaders. During much of my stay in the revolutionary capital, Tan Malaka as well as noncommunist leaders of his political coalition were in jail and unavailable to me . . .⁵⁴

Such an acknowledgement cannot, of course, undo the effect of Kahin’s original perception of events having stood as the principal source upon which a generation of students and scholars have relied for their basic interpretation of the revolution. Those who have not conducted research on Tan Malaka have continued to rely on Kahin as a standard source of information, and so perpetuate an extremely negative image of Tan Malaka as an obstacle to the struggle for independence rather than a legitimate political activist with a different view of how that independence best was to be achieved and maintained.

In order to show how this negative image dominates Kahin’s account of Tan Malaka’s role in the revolution, it is necessary to quote in some detail from his Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia regarding a number of issues:

Tan Malaka and Subardjo were ambitious to assume the top positions in the Republic and at first separately and later jointly worked skillfully to attain them. (p. 148)

[Tan Malaka] proposed to [Sjahrir] that the two of them join forces to overthrow Soekarno. Tan Malaka would become President, and Sjahrir would emerge as cabinet head. . . . Sjahrir bluntly refused to take any part in Tan Malaka’s plan. . . . (pp. 149-50)

[Tan Malaka] personally contacted Sjahrir and told him of the Political Testament of Soekarno and Hatta. The evidence is considerable that Tan Malaka then suggested that means be found for removing Soekarno and Hatta from their positions so that the Political Testament might “legally” take effect. Many people feel that Tan Malaka had in mind nothing less than assassination. In the new government envisaged by Tan Malaka, Sjahrir and he would be dominant. Sjahrir would be president and Tan Malaka asked only the key ministries of Interior and Labor, with one other ministry going to Subardjo. Sjahrir refused to have anything to do with Tan Malaka’s proposal. (p. 167)

Tan Malaka and his lieutenants undertook to build a mighty political organization which would compete with and ultimately supplant the existing government as the leader of the Indonesian revolution. In the form of a mass movement—the Persatuan Perdjuangan (the Fighting Front), supposedly oriented towards mobilization of the widest possible national support behind the government rather than opposed to it, they launched their bid for power. (pp. 172-73)

[Upon the failure of this bid] . . . they made plain the unacceptability of the new cabinet and its program and their intention to take matters into their own hands. The government met this challenge immediately; its troops in Madiun on March 17 arrested and jailed Tan Malaka and six other important leaders of the Persatuan Perdjuangan. (p. 177)

Though a number of the PP’s leaders and much of its backing were concerned largely with the overthrow of Sjahrir’s cabinet, the plans of those who seized the initiative and launched the coup [of 3 July 1946] went much further. The conspiratorial leaders-Tan Malaka [et al.]—sought the overthrow of the entire government, including Soekarno and Hatta. (p. 189)

So persistent is this image of Tan Malaka that as late as 1974 Sol Tas repeated without comment the government’s version of the 3 July Affair, neglecting to mention that Tan Malaka was never actually charged during his two-and-a-half-year detention.⁵⁵ And M. A. Jaspan was able to write in 1966, “The Communists and their supporters were crushed at that time [Madiun] and several of their leaders, including Tan Malaka, were killed.”⁵⁶ This quotation illustrates rampant imprecision: Tan Malaka, far from being a supporter, was in political opposition to the PKI in Madiun; further, he was killed in February 1949, not in the Madiun fighting five months earlier, in which he did not even take part!

Japanese agent. A further, and more extreme, variation on the negative image of Tan Malaka is the persistent allusion to his being a Japanese agent, or at least to having fascist sympathies and some unspecified “contacts” with Japanese officials before and during the war. In his Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, George Kahin makes a guarded statement:

Some Indonesians speculate as to the possibility of a tie-up between these Japanese officers and Tan Malaka. They point to Tan Malaka’s consistent attraction to the idea of anti-Western, pan-Asian solidarity, the fact that several years of his exile were spent in Japan, the further fact that two of his books dealing with communism were published there, and finally to the fact that somehow he managed to get back to Java early in 1944. . . . Most relatively objective Indonesians, even those bitterly opposed to Tan Malaka, are convinced that he would never have lent himself to a role where Indonesia’s national interests would have been subordinated to those of any other nation, including Japan or Russia. . . . (pp. 118-19)

It is important to make clear that the assumptions made here are simply without foundation, aside from that of “attraction to the idea of anti-Western, pan-Asian solidarity.” As far as we know Tan Malaka never visited Japan. Two of his books did, indeed, give Tokyo as their place of publication, but it seems clear that this was a device to mislead the Dutch secret police as to his whereabouts, and that they were actually published in Singapore and Amoy respectively, as was publicized in 1927.⁵⁷ Tan Malaka actually returned to Indonesia not in early 1944, but in early 1942, when there was considerably less control over traffic from Malaya to Sumatra and Sumatra to Java.

Benedict Anderson refers to “circumstantial evidence” of Tan Malaka’s Japanese links at the end of the war.⁵⁸ Citing a 1958 interview with former intelligence officer Nishijima, Anderson reports that he “was informed about Tan Malaka’s whereabouts through Subardjo, and that he himself had made a special trip to Bajah to seek him out.” However, in his autobiography, Nishijima refutes assertions that the Japanese had contacts with Tan Malaka before the proclamation of independence, and states that he met Tan Malaka for the first time in Subardjo’s house in late August 1945.⁵⁹ Subardjo has stated clearly that he met Tan Malaka for the first time after twenty years in August 1945.⁶⁰

While Kahin and Anderson make little of this possible connection, others have been less circumspect, notably Arnold Brackman, who asserts without providing any documentation as follows:

Tan Malaka saw in Tokyo a lever for ridding the Indies of Dutch rule. . . . Tan Malaka took the nationalist view that he served Indonesia by supporting Tokyo’s goal of Asia for the Asians. Although aware of the atrocities committed in China by the Japanese, Tan Malaka visited Tokyo and arrived at an accommodation with the Japanese. . . . Tan Malaka worked “behind the screen” for Admiral Maeda and Hitoshi Shimizu, the fanatical director of the Sendenbu (the Japanese Department of Propaganda). Tan Malaka broadcast regularly from Bantam as the “Voice of Tokyo.”⁶¹

The extent to which such extreme and inaccurate reports can gain a life of their own and gradually become accepted as fact is revealed by the 1973 entry for Tan Malaka in the Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern, which makes the following statement: “His condemnation of ‘Western imperialism’ led him to seek Japanese support on the eve of World War II, when he went to Tokyo. During the Japanese occupation of Indonesia he spoke on the radio and taught at a political school founded by the Japanese.”⁶²

It is easy to see how this pro-Japanese characterization of Tan Malaka arose: Tan Malaka’s link with Subardjo, his long-standing pan-Asian viewpoint, and the fact that “false Tan Malakas” had been promoted by the Japanese to propagandize on their behalf led to his inclusion, with Subardjo as well as Sukarno and Hatta, in the category of “collaborators,” despite the fact that he had lived incognito as a clerk in a remote coal mine during the occupation.⁶³ As Tan Malaka emerged publicly in early 1946, taking a militant perjuangan stance, he was tagged with the “made in Japan” label by those, especially in the Netherlands (including the Communist party), who were trying to push the republic to accept the Dutch back again, this time not as colonial oppressors, but as fellow antifascists.

The text of From Jail to Jail provides a great deal of evidence to counter these allegations. Unlike most Indonesians, Tan Malaka had first-hand experience of Japanese expansionism into China and down into southeast Asia. “Three times I was interrupted by Japanese attacks: in Shanghai in 1932; in Amoy in 1937; and finally again in Singapore in 1942” (Volume II, p. 112). In Volume II, chapter 1, Tan Malaka discusses in great detail the Japanese “imperialist” thrust into China, “to implement its . . . policy with the samurai sword, and to control its subject territory through a puppet government” (Volume II, p. 21). Furthermore, he discusses the economic basis for this process, and refers back to his prediction made in 1925 that Japan and America “will settle by the sword which of them is the more powerful in the Pacific” (Menudju ‘Republik Indonesia, ’ p. 47).

His description of the Japanese advance into Singapore (Volume II, chapter 4), and the detailed account of his own experiences during the occupation of Indonesia (Volume II, Chapters 5 and 6), leave no doubt as to Tan Malaka’s trenchant criticism of the repressive behavior of the occupation forces, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the collaboration of Sukarno and Hatta with the occupation forces, adding, “Not for one minute did I consider the possibility of ‘collaborating’ with the Japanese army, whether or not it won the war” (Volume II, p. 141). As a relief from accounts of repression and torture, Tan Malaka’s criticism is frequently presented in humorous form as he describes tricks and jokes the Indonesians carried out on their oppressors, or in sarcasm, as the following comment on the Triple-A movement shows:

All along the streets walls were scrawled with the slogans:

NIPPON the light of Asia!

NIPPON the protector of Asia!

NIPPON the leader of Asia!

The first time I saw these slogans I wondered why the movement was not called the Triple-N, for wasn’t the word Nippon also repeated three times, and wasn’t it always the first word in the slogan? The slogans seemed to me to hide the reality:

NIPPON the obscurer of Asia!

NIPPON the looter of Asia!

NIPPON the duper of Asia! (Volume II, pp. 150-51)

“Pacar Merah”. With as little basis in fact as the images previously discussed, although written in a sympathetic, if not sycophantic, tone, are the many fictional accounts of Tan Malaka’s life, generally giving him the appellation “Pacar Merah” (Scarlet Pimpernel), used for Tan Malaka at least as early as mid-1933.⁶⁴ In various combinations these stories wove information on Tan Malaka’s movements, as reported in the contemporary press, with fantasy and romance of foreign ports, superhuman feats, and elaborate stories of espionage and counterespionage.

The best known of these stories were in the series written by Matu Mona (pen name of the Medan journalist Hasbullah Parinduri) and published by Centrale Courant en Boekhandel. The first, with a foreword dated March 1938, was Spionnage-dienst (Secret Service). The central character, Vichitra, is a very thinly disguised Tan Malaka, and many of the other characters are clearly intended to refer to other PKI leaders such as Alimin (portrayed as Aliminsky), Musso (Paul Musotte), Subakat (Soe Beng Kiat), and Djamaluddin Tamim (Djalumin). From their prepublication advertising, at least two other of Matu Mona’s prewar works appear to feature Pacar Merah, although I have not found copies. They are Rol Patjar Merah Indonesia and Panggilan Tanah Air.

Pacar Merah featured in two books by Yusdja published by Tjerdas, also in Medan in 1940. Typical examples of roman picisan, the penny novelettes that were all the rage, they appeared in the fortnightly Loekisan poedjangga series. On 1 February 1940 the first appeared—Moetiara berloempoer: tiga kali Patjar Merah datang membela (Pearls in the mud: three times Pacar Merah comes to the rescue). On 15 May 1940 the publishers announced that the story advertised for the next issue was postponed, and was to be replaced, by popular demand, by the sequel to Moetiara berloempoer, entitled Patjar Merah kembali ketanah air (Pacar Merah returns to his native land). In April of the same year just as fanciful a tale was published using the hero’s real name. Tan Malaka di Medan appeared in the series Doenia pengalaman, again in Medan, this time by Emnast.⁶⁵

The fantasy approach to Tan Malaka did not disappear with the fall of the Dutch East Indies government and its secret police. Ratu Sukma epitomizes the style in a wild testimony of love and prostration before a highly romanticized Tan Malaka:

As soon as we heard Your name, as soon as Independence was regained, as soon as the Red and White fluttered, we all said

Ibrahim our leader

Tan Malaka Father of the Republic

Tan Malaka Defender of the Nation

Tan Malaka Leader of Asia

. . . The more the slanders came, the more You were scorned, the more Your name was stained, the greater was OUR LOVE for You.⁶⁶

Other examples from the period of the Indonesian revolution blend fact with a dramatic overplaying of the role of Tan Malaka’s political party, PARI, founded in 1927. Tamar Djaja, Trio komunis Indonesia: Tan Malaka, Alimin, Semaun berikut Josef Stalin dan Lenin (1946), and Sakti Arga, Tan Malaka . . . datang! [1946?], refer to PARI branches in Shanghai and Singapore, a PARI conference planned for the Punjab in 1934, headquarters in Tokyo and assistance from Japan, and freedom of action in China. Tamar Djaja adds with a flourish a tale of the capture of Tan Malaka by the Dutch intelligence in Teheran in 1936!

Later Matu Mona continued his series with Vichitra reappearing as a participant in the revolution in Penjelidik militer chusus (Special military investigator) (1951). Opposing the negotiations, the hero is clearly Tan Malaka, projected into the period after the Renville Agreement when, of course, the real Tan Malaka was still in jail.

Tracing the development of the Pacar Merah hero in Indonesian literature, both print and screen, and assessing to what degree it combines a transposition of the Scarlet Pimpernel to the Indonesian scene with the adventurous exploits of an indigenous protagonist—a latter-day Hang Tuah—would throw more light on this aspect of Tan Malaka himself and of his autobiography.⁶⁷

Reappraisals

In recent years, a start has been made on a reappraisal of these images of Tan Malaka. Benedict Anderson’s 1967 doctoral dissertation from Cornell University, “The Pemuda Revolution: Indonesian Politics 1945-6,” was the first work on the revolutionary period to look at Tan Malaka as a figure of some significance and to shift attention away from exclusive concentration on groups and individuals who held governmental power. It was this dissertation that formed the basis for Anderson’s later published work, Java in a Time of Revolution, that has served to provide a counterfocus to Kahin’s interpretation of the revolution.

The image of Tan Malaka presented in Anderson’s work is both more rounded and sympathetic. A brief biographical background is given (pp. 270-77), which discusses the isolation and illness which plagued or even dominated Tan Malaka’s life in the prewar period, and the difficulties he faced in returning to Indonesian politics after the proclamation as “both stranger and legend.” Anderson’s detailed account of the Testament Affair, “which was subsequently used with great skill by his enemies to blacken Tan Malaka’s reputation” (p. 283), the rise and decapitation of the Persatuan Perjuangan, and the 3 July Affair do much to counterbalance the “standard governmental” view outlined above.

In conclusion, Anderson identifies the removal of Tan Malaka from the political stage and the accompanying character assassination performed during 1946 as a turning point for the revolution, as the perjuangan option was put firmly off the agenda:

the silencing of Tan Malaka put an end to whatever prospects there might have been of Indonesia’s choosing the path of perjuangan rather than diplomasi. . . . the logic of diplomasi inescapably demanded the shoring up of traditional power groups and an adherence to conservative domestic policies, for the overriding necessity was to satisfy the expectations of first the Dutch and British, later the Americans. The ultimate result was to be that Indonesia attained her recognition as a sovereign state by the outside world, but not her 100 percent merdeka. . . .⁶⁸

To date, only a handful of works concentrating exclusively on Tan Malaka have appeared. Principal among these are Muhammad Yamin’s Tan Malaka, Bapak Republik Indonesia; Rudolf Mrázek’s “Tan Malaka: A Political Personality’s Structure of Experience”; Suharsono Isnomo’s “Perdjoangan Politik Tan Malaka: suatu tindjauan cita² Tan Malaka dalam usaha pembentukan satu partai persatuan”; Harry A. Poeze’s Tan Malaka, strijder voor Indonesië’s vrijheid: levensloop van 1897 tot 1945; and Alfian’s “Tan Malaka: pejuang revolusioner yang kesepian.”

Yamin’s work, originally published as a series of articles in the Yogyakarta newspaper Kedaulatan Rakyat in December 1945 and expanded into a book in early 1946, announced to the Indonesian public that Tan Malaka had returned to Indonesia. Until then, only those at the center of Jakarta politics, and the pemuda who met Tan Malaka on his journey to Surabaya, knew that the legendary revolutionary had returned to Indonesia. The title signifies the author’s attitude towards Tan Malaka as the father of the Republic of Indonesia. Yamin’s intention was to reestablish Tan Malaka’s credentials as a national figure, to bring to public attention the return of a political leader of an earlier era; and, by doing so, to bring into focus the possibility of a different political line being followed. Published in the month following Hatta’s “Political Manifesto,” these articles set the stage for the challenge that was to follow with the establishment of the Persatuan Perjuangan.

Yamin compares Tan Malaka to Lenin, Sun Yat-sen, and Quezon, all of whom he is alleged to “have known well,” and his contributions to defining the concept of the “Republic of Indonesia” are likened to those of Washington, Jefferson, and Mabini, all of whom are said to be regarded in their own countries as great heroes. His sufferings abroad are pointed out, as well as those experienced during the Japanese occupation, in contrast to “the leaders who possibly went astray,” a clear reference to Sukarno and Hatta’s collaboration with the Japanese. He is described as having “an outlook based on philosophy and dialectical materialism,” being “a sharp tactician, who is brave and cunning in seizing power for the oppressed.” In the light of Tan Malaka’s present place in history as interpreted officially in Indonesia, it is ironic to read Yamin’s prediction, made forty years ago:

if readers can think fifty years ahead, before them lying a world history book describing the formation of the Republic of Indonesia, then his name will be written up front . . . while his biography will be written in many volumes. . . .⁶⁹

In the expanded version, Yamin adds a foreword written in Purwokerto on 7 January 1946 and a conclusion based on Tan Malaka’s speech to the founding conference of the Persatuan Perjuangan made several days earlier. He gives more details of Tan Malaka’s life, and particularly of his writings, detailing what was published twenty years previously, what he had written in recent months, and what he planned to do in the coming period. Yamin also outlines the principal ideas of what he termed “the Tan Malaka doctrine”—“a political and social program with revolutionary tactics towards a proletarian republic of Indonesia.”⁷⁰

The book version contains several alterations, perhaps made at Tan Malaka’s instigation: his alleged friendship with M. N. Roy is removed, and the likening of his travels to those of Lenin and Stalin is changed to a reference to Lenin and Trotsky. Yamin asserts that “the revolution has most certainly got a new leader, ready with learning, tactics and effort,” and he appeals, “the people must choose between betrayal and true leadership.” This book was republished in 1981 to mark the fourth windu (eight-year cycle) since Tan Malaka’s death.⁷¹

Rudolf Mrázek takes a fundamentally different approach in his discussion of the persistence in Tan Malaka’s thought patterns and images from his Minangkabau upbringing. Published in 1972, his essay makes a valuable contribution in highlighting the danger for Western scholars in overlooking the underpinnings of political personalities emerging from traditional societies:

An understanding of the structure of experience is perhaps especially important for Western studies of Asian political elites. Many Asian leaders apparently conceptualize the Western or “modern” impact into an already established structure of experience, built during earlier parts of their lives under the strong influence of their traditional environments. Here a potential danger for the Western scholar lurks. What these political personalities retain of their traditional culture is very often remote from the “modern” mind of the scholar—frequently too remote even to be noted seriously by him. To complicate the problem further, the language used as a rule by these Asian leaders for expressing their views, including their traditional components, is so “modern,” so “Western,” that it can not be passed over. Indeed this is often precisely what is seized upon and analyzed at length by the Westerner.

But this approach will lead merely to superficial conclusions, if the personality’s views are analyzed and compared with established political-science models in mind. Only an understanding of a political personality’s thought and behaviour as being determined by his structure of experience, can lead to genuinely critical evaluation. Only then does the political personality emerge, not as a “marginal man” or as a “hybrid,” but as an identity born from the clash between a human intellect and a human environment. (p. 48)

With such a perspective, it is scarcely surprising that Mrázek gives a fundamentally different image of Tan Malaka than Yamin or any of the other writers on Tan Malaka. It is difficult to do justice to Mrázek’s analysis of Tan Malaka’s views and his life experience in a brief commentary on his essay, as the eloquent and idiosyncratic argument deserves to be read in its entirety. In assessing Tan Malaka as a “political personality,” Mrázek asserts as follows:

Tan Malaka conceptualized his self, his private life, his innermost human problems as existing only through politics, never outside or independent of it. At the same time he did not depersonalize his life—he considered the concept of it to be one of the most important (perhaps the most important) value of his structure of experience. (p. 3)

Mrázek presents Tan Malaka’s life as a series of rantau (Minangkabau journeys from the heartland, or alam) and returns, in a thesis-antithesis pattern which serves to develop the “fruit of rantau—Tan Malaka’s view of the world.”

Both Tan Malaka’s view of his life and his view of Indonesian history were parts of one conceptual system. They were built out of common conceptual values, and their periodization was adjusted to a common rhythm. Tan Malaka’s two returns were conceptualized as concurrent with two of the most important milestones of Indonesian history’s movement toward the perfection of society—the revolutionary upheavals of the early twenties and the Revolution of the mid-forties. The biological limits of his life accentuated the climactic concept of time still further: the aging and ill revolutionary necessarily saw his second return as the last. Consequently, he had to conceive it as the ultimate thrust of his rantau power into the Alam. Concurrent Indonesian political developments had to be the decisive, successful Revolution. Thus, his second return was, in his view, the point at which the trajectory of Indonesian history and the course of his own life would intersect and join in the ultimate thrust of Madilog values into Alam—the thrust which would bring the epochal struggle for a Free and Socialist Indonesia to its victorious conclusion. (p. 38)

Throughout Tan Malaka’s writings, in spite of the Marxist-Leninist terminology used, it is the power of ideas to stimulate social progress that is repeatedly stressed, rather than the dynamic force of the class struggle. (p. 18)

Mrázek’s discussion of the persistence of traditional thought patterns and values in Tan Malaka’s Weltanschauung is indeed valuable, and would be an important section of a rounded biography of this “political personality.” But, in my view, it is a distortion to dismiss the Marxist-Leninist terminology Tan Malaka chooses to use in interpreting the world around him and presenting his Weltanschauung, but to accept every example of idealist imagery as representing the “real” Tan Malaka. Mrázek is extremely selective in choosing which parts of Tan Malaka’s “structure of experience” determined his “political personality”—heavily emphasizing Tan Malaka’s life as a teenager in Minangkabau while downplaying the effect of the years spent as a communist and political activist. Mrázek ends up doing precisely what he cautions against: in a somewhat Orientalist and patronizing approach he presents Tan Malaka as quaint, full of contradictions, in short, a “hybrid” or “marginal man.”

In 1973, Suharsono Isnomo submitted a sarjana ilmu politik (B.A. thesis in politics) to the University of Indonesia on Tan Malaka’s political struggle—a most unusual topic for New Order Indonesia. Isnomo’s particular theme was to trace back to Tan Malaka the idea of unity of various political currents as advocated by Sukarno and implemented in the concept of Nasakom (nationalism, religion, and communism). Isnomo sees Tan Malaka as the progenitor of this idea in Indonesian politics since 1921 when he advocated unity between the PKI and Sarekat Islam, and as its principal advocate through the 1945 period when he argued against a proliferation of parties and founded the Persatuan Perjuangan as a united front to forge unity among the disparate parties, groups, and militias.

I disagree with Isnomo’s view of Tan Malaka and Sukarno as having one and the same perspective on unity and on the one-party state. Although the desire for unity was most certainly a dominant strand in the thought of both leaders, there is an important distinction between the permanent unity across conflicting class lines advocated by Sukarno, and the unity of forces in the struggle for independence (united front) of Tan Malaka. I discuss the idea of unity of forces below in the context of Tan Malaka’s concept of murba and its distinction from Sukarno’s marhaen.⁷²

Isnomo ascribes Tan Malaka’s failure principally to his underestimation of the popularity of Sukarno-Hatta, and consequent overconfidence in challenging them, and to a lack of tactical flexibility in presenting his “hard” Minimum Program without any stages. He adds that the Minimum Program of 1946 was essentially that which Tan Malaka developed in 1924, that it resembled Mao Tse Tung’s 1937 program for the Chinese Communist party. In attempting to apply it in Indonesia, Tan Malaka ignored his own theories of the need for revolutionaries to work first from their own local conditions (p. 159). It is unfortunate that Isnomo did not go on to elaborate further as to how the Minimum Program was inappropriate to Indonesian conditions in 1946, and to be more specific on the analogy with the 1937 CCP program.⁷³

While Isnomo perpetuates many of the biases originated by George Kahin, upon whom he relies as a primary source for the revolutionary period, his presentation is exceptional in its portrayal of Tan Malaka as a serious and committed revolutionary whose ideas deserve study and scrutiny. In particular, his assessment of PARI as “a connecting link and a renewal of the struggle to overthrow Dutch colonial oppression” (p. 43) breaks away from the usual dismissal of PARI’s significance and assertion of Tan Malaka’s sabotage of the 1926 uprising.

Isnomo’s concern to rehabilitate Tan Malaka and the Partai Murba of necessity leads him to overemphasize similarities with Sukarno’s ideas, and at the same time to raise questions as to Tan Malaka’s commitment to certain aspects of Marxism (in particular, historical materialism and atheism). He concludes that the Partai Murba was “not a dangerous Marxist Party like the PKI” (p. 163).

In this way Isnomo echoes others, erstwhile Tan Malaka supporters, who choose to define him as a nationalist.⁷⁴ The rationale for so doing is clear: it is difficult to speak well of a Marxist, of a communist, or even of a socialist under today’s New Order ideology. It is therefore advisable to redefine an individual in noncommunist, if not anticommunist, terms if one wishes to continue expressing support for that person or the person’s ideas, or to admit having done so in the past. Tan Malaka’s ardent and undisputed nationalism, so clearly revealed throughout the text of his autobiography, as well as the life it relates, in his long struggle for “100 percent merdeka,” gives ample scope for such an interpretation. It is given added weight by President Sukarno’s investiture of Tan Malaka as “Hero of National Independence” in 1963.⁷⁵ “Nationalist” is, however, an inadequate label, leaving aside Tan Malaka’s equally strong commitment to socialism.

Harry Poeze’s book was presented in 1976 for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Amsterdam. It is, in fact, the only work of substance to focus exclusively on Tan Malaka, and its 605 pages present a wealth of hitherto unavailable data, principally from the Dutch archives. Meticulously researched, it is valuable also for the appendixes containing Tan Malaka’s early writings and excerpts from the archives. It is chronologically arranged and, as the title indicates, follows Tan Malaka’s life up to 1945 with Indonesia’s proclamation of independence. Poeze has succeeded most notably in illuminating the period 1927-1933, where he reconstructs the activities of PARI. Poeze even succeeded in deciphering the code used by PARI that baffled Dutch intelligence.

The book serves more as a compendium of every known fact on Tan Malaka for this period—the classic Dutch bronnenpublicatie—than as an analytic biography. Poeze does not begin to draw an assessment of Tan Malaka’s place in history, nor to place him in political perspective. Weighed down by details, even the quotations from From Jail to Jail seem to lose their vibrancy and color. The detached academic observer gives no clue as to his own feelings or political judgment on the subject of his biography, and the decision to stop in 1945 makes an overall picture impossible to achieve.

Alfian’s “quiet revolutionary” comes closest to my perspective on Tan Malaka. His essay was written as one of a series of biographical sketches of Indonesian political leaders published in Prisma in 1977 and later in a book entitled Manusia dalam kemelut sejarah (1978). Alfian relies greatly on Poeze, Mrázek, and Anderson for information, but presents his own assessment, in which Tan Malaka is seen as an independent and creative thinker, political activist, and theoretician—above all “his own master.”

In essence Tan Malaka’s ideas and struggle were directed towards the objective of freeing his nation, while at the same time totally and drastically restructuring it—politically, economically, socially, and culturally. (p. 151)

His admission that he accepted bolshevism in theory, and did not reject the possibility of using physical force to achieve independence can perhaps be seen as a consistent and responsible position, given his view of Marxism as a guide to revolution, not as a dogma. If one may conclude, then, Tan Malaka was in the true sense of the word consistent as a revolutionary. A revolutionary who accepted Marxism as a guide, but held nationalism even deeper in his heart. (p. 155)

Alfian argues strongly that Tan Malaka was not guilty of involvement or masterminding either the Sjahrir kidnapping or the 3 July Affair, even though those who acted “may well have been stimulated by Tan Malaka’s vision” (p. 169). As to his death, Alfian cries out,

a terrible fate befell him. He was killed at the hands of soldiers of the republic itself. And at that very time he was leading a guerrilla band carrying forward his revolutionary path to liberate his country. Could there be a more tragic death for a revolutionary fighter than this? The circumstances make this most tragic death indeed difficult to discuss, let alone to unravel. (p. 170)

Alfian sees Tan Malaka’s positive attitude toward conflict as the source of his strength; that Tan Malaka himself grew as a result of his dialectical interpretation of what happened to him. Alfian puts his finger very neatly on some of the problems that plagued Tan Malaka: the effect of his long exile in distancing him from the other political leaders, so that in 1945 they were suspicious of or at best simply unfamiliar with Tan Malaka, making it extremely difficult for him to communicate with them; and what Alfian terms Tan Malaka’s underestimation of the charismatic appeal of Sukarno, perhaps as a result of his negative attitude to Hindu-Javanese culture (stressed by Mrázek). He also accepts Mrázek’s analysis of Tan Malaka’s emphasis on the power of ideas to change society, asking pathetically, however, who today even reads Tan Malaka’s work?

In analyzing Tan Malaka’s role in Indonesian history, Alfian adopts a dialectical approach, presenting Sjahrir’s diplomasi as thesis, Tan Malaka’s perjuangan as antithesis, and Sukarno and Hatta’s kompromi as the synthesis that ultimately prevailed. He asks the question, what would Indonesia have become if Tan Malaka’s vision had been fulfilled?

Indeed it is difficult to say. Perhaps the revolutionary vision closest to Tan Malaka’s was that of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. As can be seen, the consistent implementation of that vision succeeded in brilliantly defeating two great capitalist-imperialist powers, France and the United States. The spirit of nationalism and belief in self-reliance, as shown by the Vietnamese people, proves that in the end a total revolutionary vision can be brought to victory even by people who are weak in weapons and materiel. Such a revolution goes on for a long time and takes many victims.

The Indonesian independence revolution has long since come to an end, and Tan Malaka was not able to see its conclusion. If he were still alive, would he think that his revolutionary vision had been achieved, in all its manifestations? In short, whether the “100% independence” he desired has been achieved? If my interpretation of Tan Malaka is correct, then he would answer “not yet.” If that were indeed his answer, then we would see a figure embroiled in controversy; a figure who seems unable to remove himself from conflict. (pp. 171-72)

After reviewing the image of Tan Malaka that has emerged in the broad corpus of political commentary on the Indonesian revolution, with particular emphasis on the five works of significance to concentrate on Tan Malaka, I turn now to my own interpretation, reached initially on the basis of the text of From Jail to Jail, and enhanced from interviews with people who knew him and from an examination of his other writings.

Tan Malaka as a Marxist

In his autobiography Tan Malaka recounts the evolution of his political ideology, first to revolutionary nationalism and then to communism while he lived in Holland during the First World War and the Russian revolution.

At that time, my thoughts had not yet developed to the stage of dialectical materialism and to an analysis of the slogan Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité in the context of capitalism and imperialism. My outlook did not yet include an image of bourgeois and proletarian classes alongside colonized and colonizing nations. Such a development came only as a byproduct of my search for a satisfactory understanding of the Russian communist revolution, which shook the world like a bomb in October 1917. It was only then that the old books on Marx and Engels’ philosophy came alive for me. . . . (Volume I, p. 27)

In 1918, on being greeted by a friend with the words “Hello, Mr. Bolshevik,” Tan Malaka comments, “It was then that I became conscious of the change that had taken place within me” (Volume I, p. 32). As discussed in Volume I, chapter 5 and my annotation, before he left Holland in November 1919, Tan Malaka had the opportunity to meet some of the Dutch socialists and communists, as well as other Indonesians active in the cause of Indonesian independence, and he made a number of speeches and wrote several articles in which he stood defiantly for Indonesian independence, making scathing criticism of the “socialists” whose “internationalism” counted for little since they did nothing to protest the colonial hold on Indonesia. By implication Tan Malaka was praising the communists who had come out for independence, but there is no contemporary evidence of a clear communist position on Tan Malaka’s part, even though he spent considerable time in communist discussion groups during 1919. It was these friends whom he met on his last day in Holland for a farewell rijsttafel meal.⁷⁶

During the following fifteen months Tan Malaka worked as a teacher of “coolie” children on a Dutch tobacco plantation in East Sumatra. “A land of gold, a haven for the capitalist class, but a land of sweat, tears, and death—a hell for the proletariat” is his description of the scene he went into (Volume I, p. 43). Tan Malaka soon became known as a radical for his attitudes expressed on the class and colonial divisions on the plantation, and for his involvement in the Deli railway strike of 1920. He made his first contacts with the PKI, founded in May 1920, and wrote several articles on the strike for the PKI newspaper Het Vrije Woord. His convictions were clearly becoming stronger, for in June 1920 in Deli he wrote his first substantial work, “Sovjet atau Parlemen,” in which he came out clearly calling himself a communist, and dismissing all hope of reliance on the parliamentary road to achieve socialism. The first part of this work was published in installments in the PKI newspaper Soeara Ra’jat in May-August 1921.

He chose to leave Deli for Java in early 1921, believing that the atmosphere there might be more conducive to setting up “an educational system suited to the needs and spirit of the masses” (Volume I, p. 63). This offer was received warmly by the PKI members who formed the left wing of the Sarekat Islam, and he was asked to set up Sekolah Rakyat (People’s Schools). Tan Malaka’s endeavors were not long restricted to the educational field, however, for skilled party members were a scarce resource. At the end of June 1921 he was elected chairman of the Serikat Pegawai Percetakan (Printing Workers Association). He also held the positions of vice-chairman and treasurer of the Sarekat Pegawai Pelikan Hindia (Indies Oil Workers Association), and was on the executive of the Revolutionaire Vakcentrale (Revolutionary Trade Union Federation). In the latter half of 1921, after PKI president Semaun left Indonesia, Tan Malaka played an increasing role in party affairs, devoting most of his attention to trying to save the rapidly fading coalition with Sarekat Islam. At the December Congress he was elected Chairman of the PKI (Volume I, chapter 7).

Not for long was Tan Malaka able to experience open work as a communist leader. In February, after involvement in the pawnshop workers’ strike and the establishment of further Sekolah Rakyat, he was arrested and exiled under the governor-general’s Extraordinary Powers (Volume I, chapter 8). For the next twenty years, Tan Malaka’s contribution to the Indonesian revolution was made from afar.

Tan Malaka arrived in the Netherlands just in time for the May Day celebrations of 1922, at which he spoke. Shortly afterwards he became the first Indonesian candidate in the Tweede Kamer (Lower House) elections in Holland, running as the number-three candidate on the Dutch Communist party ticket. He received a higher vote than the number-two candidate, but not enough to be elected. Following the election he travelled to Berlin and spent several months with the Indonesian veteran communist, Darsono, attached to the West European Bureau of the Comintern.

By October 1922 Tan Malaka had arrived in Moscow, where he was to spend the next year participating in activities of the Comintern: the Fourth Congress in November 1922, the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), the Commission on the Eastern Question, and the Profintern’s Second Congress. He wrote a book on Indonesia for distribution in Russian translation.

Tan Malaka’s participation in the debate on communist strategy in the colonies at the Fourth Congress centered on the issue of communist support for nationalist and pan-Islamic movements, which he saw as having progressive and anticapitalist aspects. In this debate he took the opposite position to M. N. Roy, who was concerned with the dangers such movements posed to the communist objective. Tan Malaka’s intervention at the Fourth Congress, and in meetings of the Eastern Commission, have been regarded as leading to some modification of the previously more negative line of the Comintern. They are discussed in some detail in Volume I, chapter 9, both text and annotation.

At the end of 1923 Tan Malaka was sent to Canton, from where he was to operate as Comintern agent for Southeast Asia. The trials and tribulations of such an endeavor, during which time Tan Malaka was plagued with illness and poverty as well as isolation, are described in detail in the autobiography (Volume I, chapters 10 to 14). The brightest part of this period was his time in Manila (in several periods between 1925 and 1927) on which the text breathes a new life as Tan Malaka writes with great passion on the Philippine revolution of 1896, emphasizing the importance of unity and militancy in the struggle for national liberation. During this period in Canton and Manila he wrote four major works on the Indonesian revolution: These bagi keada’an social dan ekonomi serta tjara bagi mengadakan organisatie dan taktiek di Indonesia (1924), Naar de ‘Republiek Indonesia’ (1925), Semangat moeda (1926), and Massa actie (1926).

The first of these works, read to the PKI’s June 1924 congress by Soekindar, gave a detailed outline of the actual economic and political conjuncture in Indonesia; the nature of the imperialist domination it then endured; the failure of the solely nationalist parties; the need for the PKI to rely principally on a proletarian base, while organizing nonproletarian progressive elements into allied organizations, such as the Sarekat Rakyat (which had grown out of the left wing of the Sarekat Islam), and promoting general anti-imperialist and nationalist movements. During 1924, however, the government became increasingly repressive, limiting the PKI’s opportunities for agitation. The executive responded by turning inward, abandoning the Sarekat Rakyat and, at a special congress called in December 1924, embarked upon a course designed for an illegal existence, with a perspective of revolution in the short term. It was in response to this course, which he regarded as misguided, that Tan Malaka wrote Naar de ‘Republiek Indonesia’ containing severe criticism of the party’s weaknesses and presenting a program and list of demands to be struggled for in the immediate period as well as charting the likely development of the Indonesian revolution. It was in this document that Tan Malaka laid out for the first time the major tenets of his views on the nature of Indonesian society and the tasks of the party.

The title of the work indicates Tan Malaka’s conviction that an independent Indonesia would also be a republican Indonesia. He regarded this as one of his most important contributions to the theoretical arsenal of the independence movement⁷⁷ particularly since it was well before Hatta’s Kearah Indonesia merdeka (1932) or Sukarno’s Mentjapai Indonesia merdeka (1933).⁷⁸ As discussed above, Yamin chose to emphasize this contribution by Tan Malaka in entitling his 1945 newspaper series “Tan Malaka: Father of the Republic of Indonesia.”

The PKI’s course was set, however, and in December 1925 (following disastrous strikes, more exiled leaders, and increasing restriction on party activities) a clandestine meeting of the leadership decided to launch the rebellion within six months. Tan Malaka continued to voice objections to this strategy, to outline an alternative course, spelled out in Massa actie, and to try to contact as many party members as he could to dissuade them from carrying out a premature rebellion. The uprising, which did take place at the end of 1926 in West Java and in early 1927 in West Sumatra, was quickly put down, and the PKI was brutally crushed.

Tan Malaka’s verbal and active opposition to the uprising has provided the focus for much of the discussion of the rebellion and its failure. His reasons for opposing the rebellion in part parallel those given by the executive committee of the Comintern to Alimin and Muso in mid-1926 when they visited Moscow seeking endorsement for the plan. Indeed, the Comintern may have based its criticism on Tan Malaka’s own report. By the time the rebellions broke out, however, the Comintern’s policy was shifting in an ultra-left direction, and the Java uprisings were hailed by the ECCI in a manifesto dated 20 November 1926. The uprisings occurred at the time of the ECCI’s seventh plenum, and were used by the Stalin faction as justification against the strong Trotskyist criticism of the Comintern China policy.

After the failure of the uprisings had become incontrovertibly evident, the Comintern once again criticized the PKI, this time for being ill-prepared. This was the line taken in the ECCI through 1927 and up to the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928. It was the principal grounds on which the PKI attacked Tan Malaka in the revolutionary period and as late as 1961. This important issue is discussed in the autobiography in Volume I, chapter 12.

Following the smashing of the PKI, in mid 1927 in Bangkok Tan Malaka founded a new party—PARI (Partai Republik Indonesia). Whether PARI was intended to be a continuation of the PKI, or whether it was conceived as a break from communism, is a matter of great controversy. The fact that he established a new party with a different name has been used as evidence of his “Trotskyism.” Tan Malaka scarcely touched on PARI in his autobiography, and his references in this and his other writings are contradictory and elusive. Scarcely any documentation remains, and of the two principal sources, both in the Dutch archives, one is a full transcription of the PARI statutes and the other a summary of a May 1929 revision of the original 1927 Manifesto. The statutes state PARI’s aim as “full and complete independence for Indonesia as soon as possible, and thereafter to establish a Federal Republic of Indonesia.” No specific mention is made of socialism, communism, or the international communist movement, although reference to PARI’s being independent of “leadership or influence from any other party or force, either within or outside Indonesia” could be seen as a rebuttal of domination from Moscow. The Manifesto, on the other hand, was devoted to an analysis of the PKI errors of 1926-1927 and the failure of the Comintern to provide leadership, stating that “it is of the greatest importance for the whole of the Indonesian people that the fighters for Indonesian national and social freedom have clarity regarding the inglorious collapse of the PKI.”

The Manifesto concludes that a new party must be established in the wake of the destruction of the PKI. It alluded to “serious drawbacks” to reestablishing the PKI, and states the PARI should be regarded as its replacement, describing the party as “proletarian-revolutionary” and founded “solely in the Indonesian interest.”

The analysis of the Comintern is of particular significance, given the scanty attention given to this matter in Tan Malaka’s autobiography. The Chinese experience was evidently expected to follow in Indonesia if a break with the Comintern were not made. He reached severe conclusions: “It would be in the interests of imperialism and not the Indies if Stalin made himself master of an eventual revolutionary movement in the Netherlands Indies.” He also said that “the people of the Indies have enough to do without sitting around waiting for the conclusion of the fight between Stalin and Trotsky.” The Manifesto shows PARI policy as indistinct and with internal contradictions as in the following: “PARI is a proletarian-revolutionary party that cannot ally with the actions of Moscow and the Third International, in that they were aiming to organise world revolution in the years 1918-23.” Whether this confusion was in the original document, or whether it has arisen from translation and summarization we are not to know. The tone as a whole, however, suggests that PARI broke with the Comintern because it betrayed the narrow interests of the Soviet Union and the bureaucracy itself.

PARI did not develop into the mass party envisaged by its founders. Operating with its leaders in exile, and under immediate and constant threat of prosecution not only by the Dutch authorities, but also by the other imperialist powers, PARI remained a small propaganda group. So fearful of detection were its members and agents that they devised clandestine methods of operation that placed almost insurmountable barriers between themselves and the people they were trying to reach. PARI did survive over a ten-year period, however, keeping cells alive in the main cities and in relatively small towns in Java (Cepu, Wonogiri, and Kediri) and in the Outer Islands (Palembang, Medan, Padang Panjang, Banjarmasin, Riau). Its publication Obor was circulated widely, although no copies appear to have survived the PARI security policy of destroying it after reading. Dutch intelligence agents kept uncovering PARI cells, arresting and exiling many activists, but the structure was continually reestablished, in contrast to the purely nationalist parties, which were short-lived in comparison. A case can be made for seeing PARI as a “connecting link” (to use Isnomo’s phrase) between the pre-1926 PKI and the physical struggle for independence twenty years later, keeping alive elements of the PKI program and perspective, and developing a layer of militants who were to play a role in the later struggle.⁷⁹

From 1927 to 1945 Tan Malaka all but disappeared from view. After being deported from the Philippines in August 1927, he spent the next few years in hiding in Amoy and the village of Sionching, although he did continue to write journalistic articles and PARI documents. At some stage over the next few years, possibly in late 1929, Tan Malaka moved to Shanghai. In August 1931 he met Alimin there and apparently agreed to work again for the Comintern. Documentation supporting this appears in Pan Pacific Trade Union Secretariat files and elsewhere.⁸⁰ In his autobiography Tan Malaka does not mention this development; possibly a section of the text is missing. Neither does Alimin mention it. With both participants now dead, and such scant documentation, the precise nature of this rapproachment seems destined to remain unclear.

In 1932 Tan Malaka and Djaos were arrested and briefly detained in Hong Kong, evidently en route to India. Tan Malaka was deported back to Amoy and hid in the village of Iwe, losing contact with Indonesia until 1935 when he moved back to Amoy and established a foreign languages school in early 1936 (Volume II, chapter 3). As the Japanese army moved south through China, Tan Malaka fled through Burma and Malaya to Singapore, where he lived from 1937 to 1942 disguised as a Chinese schoolteacher.

In 1942 he was able to travel across to Sumatra, make his way to Jakarta and then, from 1943 to 1945, he worked at the Bayah Kozan coal mine on the southern coast of West Java. His opportunities for political work were severely circumscribed both by the objective situation and by his own twenty-year absence from Indonesia, but in Volume II, chapter 6, Tan Malaka does describe his limited activities in promoting national pride and self-defense among the romusha at the mine, and his earlier efforts in Jakarta writing what he believed to be his major work, the philosophical treatise advocating rational and materialist thinking, Madilog.

Following the proclamation of independence, Tan Malaka could resume a public role in Indonesian history. The hesitant manner in which he did so is discussed above (p. lxii) insofar as it relates to his personality. It is important here to note that his major emphasis in the further three and a half years until his death was the best strategy to achieve 100 percent merdeka, clearly the dominant theme of the whole of Volume III. Once again, national emancipation from colonial oppression was his overriding preoccupation, as it had been in the 1920s, and he took the view that communists should be the strongest wing of that movement, with an understanding of the relationship between the national and socialist tasks of the revolution. He wrote as follows:

It [the Indonesian revolution] will not be merely a political revolution such as have occurred in India, Egypt, and the Philippines, where the native bourgeoisie gains only political (parliamentary) power, for their national bourgeoisie and intellectuals far outnumber ours.

The Indonesian revolution in small part opposes feudal remnants, but in large part opposes cruel and rapacious Western imperialism, urged on by the hatred of Eastern people to Westerners who oppress and insult them. (Massa actie, pp. 44-45)

The Indonesian revolution is not solely a national revolution, as envisaged by some Indonesians. Whether it wishes to or not, the Indonesian revolution will be forced to take economic and social measures at the same time as it seizes and defends 100 percent independence.

But the Indonesian independence war will not be worth a penny to the Murba groups if it merely results in changing the form of government: if it simply changes the white man’s (Dutch) government for a brown man’s (Indonesian). For then the brown man will be, directly or indirectly, quickly or slowly, turned into a puppet government [sic]. (Gerpolek, p. 24; English translation in NARS Record Group 59, File 856.00B/2-2549, Box 6306)

The interrelationships among the various aspects of the revolution, and the determining factors (both national and international) as to the relative weight of these aspects, or stages, as the revolution unfolded, was a continuing subject of Tan Malaka’s attention:

The speed of the transition to a genuine Soviet state, and further towards communism, depends on the international situation, and furthermore on the development of industry within Indonesia itself. (Menudju ‘Republik Indonesia, ’ p. 24)

Whether eventually the entire Maximum Program, or even a part of it, is implemented, and by what means it is implemented, depend to a large extent on the outcome of the Indonesian murba, the murba of Asia and Africa, and the proletariat of Europe and America. Naturally, we cannot now predict the outcome of their struggles, and so we must also put off any prediction of the timing and even the possibility of implementing the Maximum Program.

For example, if tomorrow or the next day the world revolution is completed, then the Maximum Program will no longer be maximum. Every article of this Maximum Program, or at least some of them, will be reformulated and extended. Matters relating to politics, ownership and economics will no longer be limited by the existence of capitalist and imperialist states. In such a case, the Maximum Program would become the Minimum Program of a higher historical stage. If, however, capitalism-imperialism continues to surround Indonesia as it does today, then perhaps this Maximum Program will remain Maximum in its real sense. In such a case we would be forced to move towards the socialist era with whatever instruments and forces we had ourselves. (“Keterangan Ringkas,” p. 3)

In applying Marxism to Indonesian society, Tan Malaka was well aware of the need to take local conditions into account. He polemicized against the view that revolutionary theory could be simply learned by heart and then put into operation.

Since the social factors in Indonesia or India are going to be different in character and history from those in Russia, for example, the conclusions reached by Indonesian or Indian revolutionaries will certainly differ from those reached by Russians. The only similarities will be in the method of thinking (dialectical materialism, the spirit of inquiry), in the revolutionary element; the one requirement for a leader of the masses, to know the psychology of the masses; and, finally, in the basic principles which we share as communists—proletarianism, mechanization, collectivism and so on.

To adopt holus bolus such terms as feudal, bourgeois, or proletarian and apply them with all their corresponding characteristics, motivations, and history to the feudal, bourgeois, or proletarian classes in Indonesia or India would be uncritical and undialectical. (Volume I, pp. 89-90)

In following his own advice, Tan Malaka found it necessary to introduce two new terms—murba and Aslia—to the Indonesian political lexicon.

Murba. Tan Malaka used the term murba (common, plain, ordinary, or lowly) in his postindependence writings and agitation, and finally as the name for the party founded in 1948 to advance his policies. His fullest explanation of the term was made in an article in the newspaper Moerba on 20 October 1948 as follows:

What we mean by the term murba is the greatest/most numerous group (golongan) of all within Indonesian society, those who no longer own anything but their brains and their own labour power.

The term murba more or less approximates proletariat. However, the historical development and the characteristics of the Indonesian murba differ from those of the Western proletariat in Europe and America. The Indonesian murba is not yet completely free from the ties of family spirit, as is the Western proletariat in Europe and America. Furthermore, the nature of struggle and of its enemies differ from those of the Western proletariat particularly in details.

In general, the murba can be divided into several categories, including industrial murba (in the factories, workshops, and mines); agricultural murba (in estates and rice fields); transport murba (in railways, ships, cars, etc.); commercial murba (in companies, shops, banks, etc.); city murba (all the poor and wretched—djembelan) the intellectual murba (impoverished-djembel).

The murba group lives on wage, which they earn by using their brains and labour power. They do not exploit the labour of others. The murba group is the product of the oppression and exploitation by Dutch (and other foreign) capitalism and imperialism of the peasants and artisans and even the landowners and employers in existence when the Dutch landed here. The murba group represents the transformation of the majority of Indonesian people, from those possessing something to those possessing nothing, over 350 years. This transformation took place through the oppression and exploitation of the monopoly system, the culture system, the Dutch capitalist system, and the Japanese kenpeitai (secret police) system.

The murba group is the most oppressed and exploited of all in Indonesian society. Due to their situation, according to the theory of dialectical materialism, the murba group is the one that must be the firmest and strongest of all antiimperialist groups in Indonesia in the fight for genuine independence and common prosperity.

In the struggle against fascism, imperialism, and capitalism, it is fitting that the murba group should be the motive force, since it is indeed the largest and the most oppressed and exploited. This theory becomes reality only when it is implemented successfully.

In forming an organisation of Indonesian murba, disciplined as steel in carrying out the tactics and strategy appropriate to the struggle and the nature of the Indonesian murba, it is hoped that the Indonesian murba will succeed in playing out the historical role assigned them; that is, to organise and mobilise all the revolutionary energy of the Indonesian people with the aim of destroying and obliterating capitalist-imperialist aggression of all kinds, and to lay the foundation stone of socialist society on the soil of Indonesia.

Only if all this is accomplished can the Indonesian murba be called the leaders of the struggle for (political and economic) independence of the Indonesian people. And only then will the Republic of Indonesia have the right to lead the struggle for (political and economic) independence of all the colonial and semi-colonial countries.

With the development of the murba concept, Tan Malaka has defined the “motive force” as including not only the true proletariat but also the “potential” proletariat, or what Marx called the lumpen-proletariat, Lumpen (meaning “rags,” “shabby”) is clearly the source for the distinguishing feature djembel of the final two categories of murba: the city murba and intellectual murba. In this development, Tan Malaka has retained the essential element of the Marxist category of the proletariat “owning nothing but its brains and labour power” but he has bypassed consideration of its present relationship to the means of production.⁸¹

In all likelihood it was Sukarno’s popularization of the term marhaen that led Tan Malaka to use murba. Sukarno, from at least as early as 1930, had started to use the term marhaen for the common people of Indonesia, consciously rejecting the Marxist category of proletariat, along with the whole concept of class struggle.

Sukarno himself explained the origin of the term marhaen as follows:

on a certain day I was walking in the rice fields to the south of Tjigereleng, and I came across a man hoeing the field, and I asked him: “Brother, who owns this field?” “Gaduh abdi” (I own it) he said. And so he participated in ownership of the means of production, owning that rice field. “And the hoe, who owns that?” “Gaduh abdi.” “These tools, who owns these?” “Gaduh abdi.” “But, brother, you live in poverty?” “That’s right, I live poorly.” And I thought to myself then, this man clearly and certainly is not a member of the proletariat, he is a pauper, he is poor, he suffers much, he has not a lot to live on, but he is not a member of the proletariat, for he does not sell his own labor power to another without participating in ownership of the means of production. His rice field is his own property, his hoe is his own, his sickle is his own, his rake is his own. Everything is his own property; the crop of his rice field is for his own use. But he is still a pauper, he is poor. Nevertheless he is not one of the proletariat, he is a small farmer, a very poor farmer, barely making a living. . . . He said that his name was Marhaen. I had an inspiration: Now, this name I will hold to; I will use this name to describe the destitute people of Indonesia. (Marhaen and Proletarian, p. 7)

The marhaenist is a person with small means; a little man with little ownership, little tools, sufficient to himself. Our tens of millions of impoverished souls work for no person and no person works for them. There is no exploitation of one man by another. Marhaenism is Indonesian socialism in operation. (Sukarno: An Autobiography as Told to Cindy Adams, p. 63)

The difference between the two concepts is obvious, both in content of the categories and in the intent of their advocates: Tan Malaka developed his term to adapt and explain the Marxist category in the Indonesian environment; Sukarno’s aim was precisely to cut across and paste over class categories.⁸²

Tan Malaka did not use the term murba in his prewar writings, nor even in his philosophical treatise Madilog, written in 1942. The first use of the term I have come across is a statement issued by the Komite Nasional Indonesia Pusat on 29 August 1945:

as soon as possible after the international situation (which influences our fate) is stable and favourable, the Komite Nasional will prove our appreciation in concrete terms to the murba people, by improving and looking after the wellbeing of the whole people, particularly as regards daily needs. (Nasution, Sekitar, vol. 1, p. 238)

The date of this statement coincides with the time that Tan Malaka identified himself to Subardjo, the foreign minister and member of the KNIP. It is possible that Subardjo took the term from his discussions with Tan Malaka, and it was through him that it was included in the KNIP statement. On the other hand, perhaps Tan Malaka himself picked up the term from this statement or from others made by members of the KNIP and incorporated it into his own writings.

From Manifesto PARI Djakarta, written on 7 September 1945, Tan Malaka uses the term frequently, and it was brought forward publicly in connection with his name in the article written by Muhammad Yamin in Merdeka, 26 December 1945, which was the first announcement for many people that Tan Malaka was back in the fray. He and his followers used the term constantly, from this time, to refer to the group in society they were counting on to lead the revolution and also as the name for their newspaper, their publishing house, and, ultimately, their party. Tan Malaka was given the epithet “father of the Indonesian murba.”⁸³

The murba, broadened somewhat though it was from the true proletariat, still was, in Tan Malaka’s view, too small to make the revolution on its own. Crucial to success was the forging of alliances with sections of the nonproletariat.

The core of the revolution (at least in Java) must be formed by the industrial and agricultural workers. The principal political fortresses of Dutch economic imperialism can be assailed only by the workers. Around the workers stand the petty bourgeois, who lack direction and decisiveness. (As to the bourgeoisie—they will follow the revolution only when they know it will succeed, only at the last minute, and even then only if they wish to do so. More than that cannot and should not be hoped from them). (Massa actie, p. 45)

In a colonial country such as Indonesia, the peasantry was the section of the petty bourgeoisie with which the proletariat had to ally if there was any chance of carrying out a revolution. The question of how to form such an alliance, and its changing nature during the unfolding of a revolution, has been a continuing concern-for the Russian Bolsheviks in 1917 and for the Nicaraguan Sandinistas today. It is in this context that Tan Malaka’s murba must be seen—to differentiate within the mass of the petty bourgeoisie those elements likely to be the closest allies of the tiny genuine proletariat.

In Tan Malaka’s analysis, the distinguishing feature of Indonesian society compared to many other colonized nations was the virtual absence of a national bourgeoisie.⁸⁴ Tan Malaka maintained that this feature severely hindered the possibility of imperialism reaching a moderate solution or a compromise in Indonesia. Unlike India, Egypt, or the Philippines, in Indonesia there was no real indigenous bourgeoisie to whom political power could be handed over. The insignificant size and strength of the Indonesian bourgeoisie also had implications for the nationalist movement. In Tan Malaka’s view, there was little likelihood of a “revolutionary” bourgeois movement like the Indian Congress emerging, and the truly revolutionary elements were more likely to assume the leadership of the fight for independence (From Jail to Jail, Volume III, pp. 183-85; Menudju ‘Republik Indonesia,’ pp. 7-8; Massa actie, pp. I-IV).

Tan Malaka devoted special attention to describing the role of intellectuals in class terms. It was precisely the lack of a real national bourgeoisie, he maintained, that closed off a nonaligned option for Indonesian intellectuals. Any intellectual who chose to support independence would be forced to become revolutionary, since revolution is the only road that can win independence. Tan Malaka anticipated that the privileged, protected position of the few Indonesian intellectuals in the 1920s would be eroded as capitalism experienced economic crises. He saw intellectuals becoming an “educated proletariat,” thrown away like a “squeezed lemon” by the imperialists (Menudju ‘Republik Indonesia,’ p. 60).

Aslia. Sadly, his work explaining the concept in detail, written in 1946, was lost during the revolution, and we have only scattered comments from which to assess his understanding of it. Already in Massa actie (1926), he envisaged a federation of the Republic of Indonesia, encompassing peninsular Malaya, the Philippines, Madagascar, and Oceania, as well as the Indonesian archipelago:

Let us begin this very minute seriously and enthusiastically to work to establish as our final goal the construction of the “Federation of the Republic of Indonesia.” F.R.I. means the unity of 100,000,000 squeezed into the strategic and communications centre for the whole of Asia and Oceania. It also means the centralisation of all the natural products of the tropical countries, and at the same time the construction of a new culture, a new nation and a new power in the East. For this reason it will become the core of a new unquenchable spirit of 1,000,000,000 Asians, who thirst for independence, and whose losses cannot be repaired by white colonialism. (Massa actie, p. 68)

According to an article in the Philippines Free Press of 10 September, in 1927 Tan Malaka was advocating a pan-Malayan confederation with Davao in Mindanao as the capital. By the time he wrote Madilog (1942-1943), his concept had a new name, “Aslia,” which was described thus: “a part of Asia and Australia, would be a federation of all the countries on the bridge between Asia and Australia . . .” (Madilog, p. 11).

The introduction to the second edition of Manifesto PARI Djakarta mentions that some people doubted the authenticity of the first edition because the new term, “Aslia,” was not recognized from Tan Malaka’s earlier writings. The publishers reassured readers that it was indeed his term and would be explained fully in a forthcoming publication, “Gabungan Aslia.”

In Thesis (1946) Tan Malaka outlined the concept in more detail as follows:

Make a circle [from Singapore] with a radius of 1500 miles. Inside this circle lie Burma, Siam, Annam, the Philippines, the whole of the Republic of Indonesia, and Australia. This is what we call Aslia (Asia-Australia). According to Western experts, the peoples of Asia are all one race. A quick glance will tell us that this region is influenced by the same climate and weather (monsoon). So the economic character of the countries is similar, requiring economic cooperation. But what we wish to project mainly here is the importance of this region from the strategic standpoint. . . . It is clear that the British regard Aslia as a single unit in terms of strategy. And Japan was not left behind in this. . . . They called the whole of Aslia “the South.” And Srivijaya and Majapahit certainly understood the unity of Aslia in all things. The political, economic and strategic movements of these states were consciously directed towards unity of the Aslia area. The Chinese (Hokkien) also had a single name: Huana. The revolutionary people of Indonesia wish to have a practical plan, for the welfare and above all for the security of the Republic of Indonesia today and in the future. We must not be left behind by attitudes developed 500 years ago (Majapahit) or 1500 years ago (Srivijaya). It would endanger the political and economic situation of the Republic of Indonesia if we were not aware of the meaning of Raffles’ and Yamashita’s strategy. (Thesis, pp. 24-25)

In From Jail to Jail Tan Malaka discusses the foreshadowed relationship of Aslia to the rest of the world:

Aslia [is] a unit that from the economic angle more or less meets the requirements for an independent socialist state, existing alongside a socialist America, a socialist China, a socialist India, Soviet Russia, and so on. We will organize these giant socialist states into a world federation on the basis of equality among nations. It must be stressed here that this world government will not consist of those appointed by one or even several of the large states but will be elected by the people of each member state in a democratic fashion—chosen from below and not appointed from the center. Our concept of the future Comintern is similar. (Volume II, p. 122)

The idea of the future geographic boundaries of Indonesia extending beyond those of the Netherlands Indies was not held exclusively by Tan Malaka. Clearly, very close ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious ties were held with the inhabitants of the Malayan peninsula and to a lesser extent with the Philippines and further up into mainland Southeast Asia. The most elaborate argument for what became known as “Indonesia Raya” (Greater Indonesia) was developed by Muhammad Yamin, who drew on the Javanese history of 1365, the Nagarakrtagama by Prapança, to defend the concept. According to Prapança, the country was made up of eight areas: Sumatra, Peninsular Malaya, Kalimantan, Java, Sulawesi, Nusa Tenggara (the Lesser Sundas), Maluku, and West Irian. Excluding Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei, this area coincides with present-day Indonesia.⁸⁵

Political union between the Malay people under British rule and those under Dutch rule was advanced among those of both groups studying together in Cairo’s Al-Azhar University in the early 1920s.⁸⁶ On the Malayan Peninsula, the notion gained support among the early Malay nationalists at the Sultan Idris Training College in Perak. In 1925 a series of books prepared for the college “discussed and championed the concept of ‘Nusantara’ (Malay-Indonesian archipelago) unity,” and the Malay nationalists also sought inspiration from and identified with the ideas advocated by the PNI “one people, one language, one nation.” One of those who graduated from the training college in 1931 was Ibrahim Yaacob, who continued to advance these ideas in the pages of the newspapers Majlis (in Kuala Lumpur) and Utusan Melayu (in Singapore). In 1938 Ibrahim founded the Kesatuan Melayu Muda (KMM), which looked to the Malays as a whole, including Indonesians.⁸⁷ It is outside the scope of this work to look in greater detail at the KMM and its leaders, their cooperation with the Japanese and resistance against the British, and the Malay Nationalist party which some of them later formed. Some tenuous links between Tan Malaka and this most forthright among Malay nationalist groups have been alluded to, but no direct contact has been established.⁸⁸ The main parallel in terms of political focus is this concept of Indonesia (or Melayu) Raya. In 1945, as Japanese plans for Indonesia’s independence moved closer to reality, Ibrahim pressed for inclusion of Malaya in the future state and apparently sent representatives to discuss the question with Sukarno prior to the meeting in July of the Investigating Committee for Indonesian Independence.⁸⁹ In the event, however, the swift surrender of Japan cut short such plans. Indonesia’s independence was declared without any specifications of its boundaries, and no Malay representatives were present at the hurried ceremonies.

Supporters of the union of the Malay peoples in Malaya, particularly the Malay Nationalist party, continued to hope and press for inclusion, but as the state was established its aspirations were limited to control of the former Netherlands Indies and, as described below (Volume III), even this progress was whittled away as negotiations continued with the colonial power. The decision to include only the former colonial state was part and parcel of the move toward juridical argumentation to support independence and represented a turn away from a movement that perhaps could have been built on the basis of solidarity of the Malay peoples.

The Revolutionary Party. Tan Malaka experienced a very swift rise within the PKI, becoming chairman in December 1921, less than year after he had come into direct contact with the party. During the period of his activity in and around the PKI through 1921 until his arrest in 1922, he concerned himself first and foremost with the party’s educational efforts and concentrated on the international situation and historical developments rather than on questions relating to the PKI’s strategy and day-to-day tactics, or its internal life.

His period in Moscow (1922-1923), however, evidently gave him a different orientation. By 1925 he had developed quite a critique of the PKI and was of the opinion that it was not yet a democratic-centralist party but simply an association of like-minded people, like the other political parties. In 1925 he criticized the PKI for not yet developing a program to fight around and for its weakness outside Java (Menudju ‘Republik Indonesia,’ pp. 28-29). By 1926 his criticism had become even sharper. He strongly attacked the party’s apparent inability to oppose the recently introduced ban on public meetings, and went on to discuss the party’s composition and relationship to mass organizations under its leadership. He concluded that the party should be largely proletarian in composition and that nonproletarian sympathizers and allies of the party should be organized under party direction in separate mass organizations. The basis for membership and for party activity should be the trade unions and the industrial proletariat (Massa actie, pp. 55-56).

The smashing of the PKI on the heels of the 1926-1927 uprisings led Tan Malaka to establish a new party—PARI. In drawing up the party statutes, he had a free hand to determine party structure, and the statutes present a copybook democratic-centralist party. This structure was, however, never implemented, and an emergency cell structure was all that PARI managed to attain.⁹⁰

On his emergence in 1945 from over twenty years in exile, Tan Malaka’s ideas on the nature and even existence of the revolutionary party were highly contradictory. In Manifesto PARI Djakarta he discussed PARI as a continuing organization, drawing attention to its aims, objectives, history, and composition and advancing the following schema:

PARI membership must be increased on the basis of 30% workers in crucial industries, 20% impoverished peasants, and 20% intellectuals, city inhabitants, small traders, office workers etc. (Manifesto PARI Djakarta, typescript; [Djakarta]: Lectura, [1945], p. 17)

His work Thesis, written in early June 1946, also contained numerous references to PARI, for example,

for twenty years PARI has held to Marxist philosophy and Leninist strategy, working towards the national revolution, the socialist revolution, socialist society . . . and further towards a communist society on a worldwide basis. (Thesis, p. 36)

Perhaps PARI did exist in the 1945-1946 period as an underground organization. Reference is made in Manifesto PARI Djakarta (p. 15) to how a party should function during an “underground period.” It must maintain direct contact with the masses through an open but more moderate party or a trade union, which would function as “the kaleidoscope [sic] of a submarine.” However, the pamphlet makes no mention of how the assessment of whether or not to work underground should be made, and so we have no guide as to whether Tan Malaka thought such a period existed in 1945, or whether he is merely looking back to the prewar experiences of PARI. From Jail to Jail makes no mention of PARI in the postwar period and discusses in considerable detail Tan Malaka’s expressed opposition to the founding of parties in 1945 as being damaging to the unity necessary for the struggle for independence. Publicly there was no PARI: no PARI organization, no PARI newspaper, no PARI statements. And in January 1946 Tan Malaka established the Persatuan Perjuangan united front without including his own party within it.

In April 1946, Djamaluddin Tamim returned to Indonesia after his long years of exile in Boven Digul and in Australia during the war. He immediately went to Central Java to see Tan Malaka, then under house detention in Tawang Mangu. The advice he received was to enter the PKI, which was then being re-formed by old PKI exiles from Digul like Sardjono. However, they wanted no part of Tan Malaka’s followers and rejected Djamaluddin out of hand.⁹¹ Meanwhile, other Tan Malaka followers were in the process of constructing the Partai Rakyat Jelata, later to be one of the constituents of Partai Murba. Others were active in Partai Buruh, Partai Wanita Rakyat, and Partai Rakyat, while still others concentrated their energies on guerrilla movements and on the Konsentrasi Nasional, in which the old Persatuan Perjuangan people tried to establish a revolutionary faction. In short, Tan Malaka’s line on a party to carry out his ideas is elusive not only in retrospect; at the time it was interpreted in many different ways by people claiming to be putting it into practice.

Muso’s return in August 1948 and his proclamation of the need for the PKI to abandon the pro-negotiation line it had been following in support of the Linggajati and Renville agreements raised Tan Malaka’s hopes for a reunion between the PKI wings that had split in 1926.⁹² Once again, however, his overtures were rebuffed, and the division between the two deepened with the Madiun uprising.

On his release from prison in September 1948, it seems as though Tan Malaka wished to take a different course. Almost immediately, discussions began with the aim of fusing the various parties supporting him into a single democratic-centralist party. The first steps were taken during October, and on 7 November 1948, the anniversary of the Russian revolution, the Partai Murba was established. The party’s basis was “anti-fascism, anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, basing its struggle on the organised mass action of the murba.” It had a minimum program (see Volume III, p. 113) with seven points like that of the Persatuan Perjuangan, but with some changes: the old demands that were no longer appropriate (“disarmament of Japanese forces” and “taking charge of European internees”) were replaced by “general mobilization and arming of the people” and “implementation of a fighting economic plan.” It also had a maximum program, quite a departure from the Persatuan Perjuangan:

1. Government of, by, and for the people (murba);

2. Army of, by, and for the people (murba);

3. Recognition in the Constitution of the place of the murba in political, economic, social, and other areas;

4. Nationalization, mechanization, rationalization, and collectivization of vital enterprises (estates, industry, and transport);

5. Nationalization of export and import trade;

6. Nationalization of banks;

7. Establishment of heavy industry;

8. Education, learning, and culture to be based on mechanization and collectivization;

9. Establishment of overseas trade relations and sociopolitical relations with overseas murba on the basis of equal status;

10. 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 of the Trotskyist label to attack Tan Malaka is in Alimin’s 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 safely be assumed that there was no contact at all. One can scarcely imagine that they would have communicated on lesser issues while leaving aside this matter of the party’s life and death.

From the establishment of PARI in June 1927 up until 1932, evidently Tan Malaka was able to establish some sporadic contact with PKI members who escaped the onslaught of the Dutch secret police, and it was from this milieu that members of the initial PARI cadre were recruited. But there appear to have been no contacts with Moscow. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Tan Malaka met Alimin in Shanghai in 1931 and that he agreed to work again for the Comintern. Evidently at that time Alimin, or at least the Comintern, had no knowledge of PARI’s existence, indicating a somewhat less than perfect intelligence system and less than perfect candor on Tan Malaka’s side.

Throughout the 1930s until his move to Singapore in 1937, Tan Malaka’s life in China was spent in seclusion, except for a brief period when Djaos visited him in Shanghai and during their imprisonment in Hong Kong in 1932. On his arrival in Singapore Tan Malaka was, as ever, anxious to avoid detection and managed to pass himself off as a Chinese schoolteacher until the Japanese arrived in early 1942. He did manage to make some contact with former comrades in Singapore during this period and to do some reading in the Raffles Museum. It is dubious, however, that any real knowledge of the world communist movement would have reached him through these channels, and certainly the atmosphere during the occupation was such as to preclude developing any such knowledge.

To conclude the picture, one must look at the state of political awareness of international developments at the close of the Japanese occupation in Indonesia, and even up until the time of Tan Malaka’s death in early 1949. In the early months there was virtually no knowledge of developments in the international communist movement. Even the first TASS correspondent to visit Indonesia did not arrive until early 1948.¹¹⁰ Until the exiles from Digul and some who had spent the war in Holland began to return in early 1946, there was probably no contact at all with communists from abroad, and those considered “dangerous” by the Dutch (PKI leaders like Sardjono) were temporarily detained in Timor to delay them from reaching the republic.

Considering the extent and duration of his isolation, it is hardly surprising that Tan Malaka did not fit neatly into one of the Marxist currents of the day. To me what is striking is that he managed to retain his revolutionary zeal and commitment to the task of creating a socialist society. That he maintained this commitment through the intense personal and political demoralization that must surely have accompanied his illness, poverty, and isolation in the thirties; that within a few months of his return to Indonesian political life he emerged as an alternative leader to Sukarno, with a coherent political strategy for the Indonesian revolution winning mass support, is surely remarkable.

The author of this text, Tan Malaka, was a Marxist, whose contributions to the Indonesian revolution were both as a theoretician and an activist. In particular he was an educator, both in a mass sense, breaking the debilitating and suffocating role of the Dutch colonial education system, and in a narrower sense, in being the first Indonesian to articulate the Marxist analysis and to develop and popularize it in mass appeal during the independence struggle.

He projected the unfolding of the Indonesian revolution, in particular the fundamental place of the nationalist struggle in that revolution, and developed a strategy for the PKI in the 1920s and a fighting program for the Persatuan Perjuangan in the 1940s. He provided a link between the ideas and objectives of the pre-1926 PKI and the physical struggle for independence some twenty years later. Above all Tan Malaka was one of the most determined and uncompromising advocates of resistance and struggle for 100 percent merdeka.