Tan Malaka and Indonesia's freedom
struggle
In January 1946, over 140 Indonesian nationalist and workers’
organizations came together to form the Struggle Front
(Persatuan Perjuangan). The goal was to fight for complete
independence from Dutch colonialism.
The formation of the Struggle Front was in many ways the
crowning achievement in the life of Indonesian revolutionary Tan
Malaka. Thanks to political persecution by a number of
imperialist governments, forcing him to work underground and in
exile for much of his political life, Tan Malaka’s role in the
world working-class movement is not well known. Even in
Indonesia, his place in the independence struggle is marked only
by a small street sign in Padang. His three-volume autobiography,
“From Jail to Jail,” was only translated into English in 1991 and
received little attention in the English-speaking working-class
movement.
When Tan Malaka was born—conflicting records claim either in
1896 or 1897—Indonesia did not exist as a separate country.
Known as the Dutch East Indies, the island archipelago was
really a system of plantations under the rule of the Netherlands.
The Dutch first colonized the East Indies in 1602. However, for
the first nearly three centuries the islands were really integrated
not as a colony in the sense that the other European powers had
made infamous. Rather, they were administered by the Dutch
East India Corporation as an economic unit.
Under the Dutch East India Corporation, a monoculture system of
agriculture was imposed on individual islands. The Banda islands
produced mace and nutmeg, for example, while Java produced
tobacco and teak. In all cases, local agriculture was suppressed in
the interests of cash crops for export.
By the 1890s, the primary employment for the native masses in
the East Indies was as contract laborers on the plantations—known
by the racist label “coolies.” “The natural wealth of Deli [in
Sumatra] gave rise to [a] most wealthy, cruel, arrogant and
conservative colonizing capitalist class as well as that most
oppressed, exploited and humiliated class, the Indonesian
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contract coolie,” Tan Malaka wrote.
A former plantation boss described the conditions of the contract
workers: “They are doing forced labor, or if you like they are
slaves. The coolie slogs from morning till night, toiling and
stooping; he has to stand up to the neck in stinking marshland,
while greedy leeches suck his thin blood and malaria mosquitoes
poison his sickly body. But he cannot run away, for the contract
binds him.
“The tjententgs, the watchmen and constables of the firm, who
have the strength of giants and are bestially cruel, track down the
fugitive. When they catch him they give him a terrible hiding and
lock him up, for the contract binds him.”
Combined with the brutal exploitation that formed the basis for
the riches of the Dutch empire, Indonesians were subject to the
day-to-day racism of colonial rule. “The conflict between the
white, stupid, arrogant, cruel colonizers and the colored nation of
driven, cheated, oppressed and exploited slaves—a conflict which
found a few Indonesians as skilled labor caught in the
middle—fouled the atmosphere … and gave rise to constant attacks
by the coolies on the plantation Dutch,” Tan Malaka described in
his autobiography.
The young Tan Malaka was relatively fortunate in that he was
born to a prominent local family. A good student, he was sent to
study in the Netherlands in 1913, where he trained to be a
teacher. This was somewhat remarkable, since just 14 years
earlier there were only 13 Indonesian high school students in all
of the Dutch East Indies.
In Europe, he was exposed to the prevailing political currents of
the time amid the dominating backdrop of European imperialist
war and revolution in Russia. He worked with socialists and
student organizations in his earliest political development.
Anti-colonial ferment
Tan Malaka arrived back in Indonesia in late 1919. It was a time
of great political upsurge. For the first time, millions of
Indonesians were organizing into anti-colonial organizations.
Unions struck to improve conditions for the oppressed
Indonesians.
“What the Dutch had called ‘the gentlest people on earth’
changed its character after suffering so much torment and cruelty,
and, to take an analogy from the world around Deli, became ‘like
a buffalo charging and trampling its enemies,’” Malaka
described in his autobiography. “When I was there, between 100
and 200 Dutch people were killed or wounded in attacks by
coolies every year.”
By far the largest organization of Indonesians was the Islamic
Union (Sarekat Islam), which had been founded in 1911 to
protect the interests of native batik merchants. By 1919, however,
the Islamic Union had become a truly mass organization with
over 2 million members, mostly among the poor peasantry.
Historian Ruth McVey described the Union’s rural offices as
effectively functioning as “complaint bureaus” for the native
population against the colonial authorities.
One of the tasks that won the Islamic Union wide support was the
unofficial “people’s schools” that it set up. Tan Malaka had
originally taken a position teaching children of contract workers
on a Dutch plantation in East Sumatra. That experience gave him
first-hand experience with the racism and exploitation that
characterized Dutch colonialism.
He gradually became involved in workers struggles, helping to
organize a railway workers’ strike in 1920. In 1921, Malaka
moved to Java and immersed himself with the task of organizing
a “people’s school” in Semarang—what Malaka called “the Red
City.” The school was set up under the auspices of the Islamic
Union, and soon became the model for other schools around the
country.
The growth of communism
Parallel to the growth of the Islamic Union was the emergence of
the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). The PKI had been
formed in 1920, the first communist party in Asia outside Russia.
It was based on the organizational work of Dutch socialists like
Henry Sneevliet, a militant leader who had organized soldiers’
unions in Indonesia against World War I. But by 1920, the party
had attracted Indonesian leaders who were able to speak to and
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organize Indonesian workers and peasants in their own language.
Tan Malaka, influenced by his experiences with Indonesian
workers as well as by the 1917 Russian Revolution, immediately
gravitated toward the PKI. The PKI chairman, Semaun, worked
closely with this talented activist, recruiting him into the party
and giving him significant leadership roles from the outset.
In addition to his role in organizing the “people’s schools,” Tan
Malaka took a position on the executive council of the PKI-led
Revolutionary Federation of Trade Unions (RVC). By 1921,
Malaka was elected chairman of the PKI after Semaun left the
country. The 25-year old leader immediately put his stamp on the
party.
He based his program on bold mass action—a position he felt that
his predecessors had been too cautious with. “Certainly we need
to have a program in the Indies,” he told the December 1921 PKI
Congress, “but that program must be very brief. The program
must not have chapters or paragraphs: it must contain only one
word, and that is action. Action by the Indies proletariat for a
clear and consistent goal, the withdrawal of the powers which so
greatly impede and injure the popular movement.”
Another characteristic of his leadership was his struggle for unity
with the Islamic Union. The party’s whole influence had until
that time been won by working within the Union, viewing it as a
mass organization with a heavily working class and peasant
composition. However, as a primarily nationalist organization,
the leadership of the Islamic Union was wary of communist
influence.
In the growing competition between communist-led branches of
the Union and more conservative branches, different views arose
within the PKI over what orientation to take toward the
leadership of the Islamic Union. These differences reflected an
international issue: what is the attitude of communists toward
national liberation struggles not led by the working classes? It
was a subject that had been discussed at the 1920 meeting of the
Communist International in Moscow.
Tan Malaka was a proponent of struggling against a split with the
Islamic Union. He repeatedly emphasized the joint interest that
the organizations had against Dutch colonialism, despite
secondary differences. Because of his arguments, the 1921 PKI
congress resolved to petition the Communist International to
review the issue of communist work with Islamic movements.

Tan Malaka’s program of action was put to the test within weeks.
Pawnbrokers—essentially at the time a kind of low-level civil
service employees—launched a national strike in January 1922
against racist government orders and firings. Tan Malaka urged
the party to support the strike vigorously, and organized with the
RVC to launch sympathy strikes. In February, he was arrested by
colonial police and exiled. His exile ended his only formal
leadership role within the Indonesian communist movement.
Revolutionary in exile
He did continue to represent the PKI internationally. He attended
the meetings of the Executive Committee of the Communist
International in Moscow in November and December 1922,
where he argued forcefully for recognizing the revolutionary
potential of the pan-Islamic movements.
In late 1923, Malaka traveled to China representing the
Comintern. There he met with communists from China and
Indonesia as well as other political figures like Chinese
nationalist Sun Yat-sen. He took responsibility for setting up a
communist magazine—an extremely difficult task, since Malaka
did not know Cantonese.
After pursuing his political work in Canton, he traveled to the
Philippines in 1925—at that time a U.S. colony. Malaka met with
many of the Philippine revolutionaries who would in 1930 set up
the Philippine Communist Party—in fact, some credit him with
having helped initiate the party.
As Tan Malaka was doing political work in exile, the situation in
Indonesia was sharpening. In late 1925, the PKI began organizing
for a revolutionary insurrection.
Malaka received word of these plans while in the Philippines and
tried to intervene in the discussions. He considered the planned
uprising to be premature and adventuristic. During this period he
wrote “Mass Action,” an influential book arguing for the
Indonesian national liberation struggle and socialist revolution to
base itself on organizing the working masses.
Despite his efforts, the uprisings did take place in late 1926 and
early 1927—and were crushed. Thousands of communists and
their supporters were arrested and sent into exile. The
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anti-communist repression foreshadowed the massacre of over 1
million Indonesian communists in 1965.
Still in exile, Malaka traveled to Bangkok to meet with surviving
PKI members Subakat, a leading theoretician, and Djamaluddin
Tamim. Reviewing the experience of the party, the three formed
the Republic of Indonesia Party (PARI) in June 1927. Its
manifesto declares the party to be “proletarian-revolutionist.”
The attempt to regroup revolutionary elements of the PKI had
little success. Tan Malaka was arrested again in the Philippines
by U.S. colonial police in August 1927, days after returning.
Subakat was arrested in exile in Bangkok in 1929 and died in
prison in 1930, probably tortured. Tamim was arrested in 1932 in
Singapore.
The PARI did maintain a clandestine presence in Indonesia at
least through the mid-1930s. Dutch police records contain
summaries of issues of the party’s newspaper Obor (the Torch).
Australian scholar Helen Jarvis cites one of the police
intelligence reports of the June 1935 issue as “typical
hate-sowing writings one would expect from a PARI mentality”
attacking “Dutch imperialism’s ruling methods in Indonesia.”
(“Partai Republik Indonesia: Was it the ‘sole golden bridge to the
Republic of Indonesia’?,” 1980)
After Tan Malaka’s arrest in the Philippines, a mass campaign in
the Philippines developed in support of asylum for the Indonesian
communist. Despite mass meetings by students and unions and a
collection of donations from the Philippine senate, he was
deported again.
For the next 15 years, Malaka lived a lonely and difficult life. He
assumed false identities in exile in China, Hong Kong, Burma
and Singapore. He constantly battled with poor health. He was
constantly hunted by colonial police forces—U.S., British and
Dutch.
Japanese occupation
In 1942, in the midst of World War II, Japanese imperialists
invaded Indonesia, quickly driving out the Dutch colonial regime.
Tan Malaka took the opportunity to make his way back to
Indonesia.
The imperialist war opened up a series of new questions for the
Indonesian national liberation movement. After the liquidation of
the PKI in 1926 and 1927, leadership of the national movement
fell to nationalist leaders like Sukarno and Muhammed Hatta.
These leaders blended elements of Marxism with anti-colonial
nationalism, but did not favor class struggle as the means to
achieve independence.
Japanese imperialism was able to employ elements of nationalism
in its war against its European rivals. It promoted the ideal of the
Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, an alliance of Asian
nations against Western domination—with Japan at the center. It
promoted slogans of “Nippon [Japan] and Indonesia are equals,”
even promising self-rule within the context of the Co-prosperity
Sphere.
Sukarno and Hatta followed a strategy of working within the
Japanese war administration with the hopes of achieving
independence afterwards. Sukarno formed the Putera
organization, designed to mobilize Indonesian society for the war
effort. This and later similar organizations did result in organized
Indonesian militias for the first time in history. But they also
legitimized the forced-labor camps involving hundreds of
thousands of laborers.
Tan Malaka was closest to this latter group. On returning to
Indonesia, he worked under a false name as an administrator of a
coalmine. He witnessed first-hand the brutal treatment of the
forced laborers. He organized the forced laborers into a number
of groups to lessen the terrible working conditions.
Based on this experience and his consistent political perspective,
Tan Malaka advocated a strategy of fighting for “100 percent
independence” based on the strength of the mass struggle. He
criticized Sukarno’s collaboration with the Japanese forces as
weakening the potential strength of the working class.
By mid-1945, Japanese imperialism was clearly headed for defeat
in the war. Japanese military authorities speeded up preparations
for an independent Indonesia as a final political blow at the
soon-to-be-victorious British and U.S. imperialists. On Aug. 17,
1945, Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed Indonesia’s independence.
Negotiations vs. struggle
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With the defeat of Japan, however, Australian and British troops
landed across the archipelago in order to oversee the surrender of
Japanese troops—and to turn the newly independent nation back
over to Dutch colonialism. The biggest obstacle they faced,
though, was not the Japanese but the Indonesian pemuda—youth
militants.
In October 1945, British demands for the disarmament of
Indonesian troops and pemuda led to an outpouring of
anti-colonial violence. On Oct. 28, 20,000 Indonesian troops and
120,000 pemuda launched an attack on 6,000 British troops in
Surabaya. The British would have been completely exterminated
except for the fact that the British flew Sukarno and Hatta to the
scene to calm the Indonesian militants.
It became increasingly clear that the former colonialists would
now face a mobilized Indonesian country ready to fight for
independence.
Again, though, two strategies emerged. Sukarno, Hatta and
Sjahrir—who unlike Sukarno and Hatta had placed his hopes on a
British and Allied victory in World War II—favored negotiations
with the Dutch for a gradual transfer of power to the independent
Indonesia.
But the masses were in motion. Tan Malaka, for the first time in
decades operating openly in his own name, began to establish
contacts with the most militant pemuda groups and other political
forces.
That set the stage for the Jan. 4 and Jan. 5, 1946, founding
conference of the Struggle Front (PP). By the second meeting on
Jan. 15, 141 organizations were represented in the
Front—including significant sectors of the republican army.
The PP adopted a seven-point program: negotiations on the basis
of recognition of 100 percent independence, a people’s
government, a people’s army, disarmament of the Japanese
forces, taking charge of European internees, confiscation and
management of enemy-owned agriculture, and confiscation and
management of enemy-owned industry.
But despite Tan Malaka’s new and growing influence, he was
unable to forge a united-action program that corresponded to the
immediate political tasks. Amid maneuvers among the many
political forces involved, Sjahrir engineered the arrest of Malaka
 and other leaders of the PP, accusing him of trying to stage a
coup, even though formal charges were never filed.
Malaka was in jail again. But mass pressure continued to mount
against negotiations with the Dutch. In September 1948, he was
released.
Armed rebellion
As in any revolutionary situation, the pace of events was
quickening. Two developments shaped the political climate upon
Tan Malaka’s release.
One was the shifting policies of the PKI, which had emerged
again after the return of long-time PKI leader Muso from
Moscow. The PKI had supported the line of negotiations with the
Dutch; one of their members, Amir Sjarifuddin, signed the
humiliating Renville Agreement with the Dutch in January 1948
in his short-lived capacity as prime minister.
Muso’s return marked a shift away from the negotiations policy
toward mass struggle. Relations between Sukarno and Hatta on
the one hand and the PKI on the other grew increasingly tense. In
September 1948, clashes broke out at Madiun between forces
loyal to the government and those loyal to the PKI. Sukarno
accused the PKI of attempting a coup, and a new military
campaign opened up against the PKI—crippling them for the
second time in their slightly over 25 years in existence.
The second development was the growing Dutch military
operations against the government troops. Tan Malaka himself
warned as soon as he was released that the Dutch would be
launching a new invasion.
These two developments set the stage for Tan Malaka’s final
effort. On Nov. 7, 1948—the anniversary of the Russian
Revolution—Malaka and his allies among the pemuda formed the
Proletarian Party (Partai Murba). The founding meeting counted
groups and parties representing 80,000 members. The party’s
political program was based on a minimum program that was
essentially the PP’s program, and a maximum program of a
socialist state in Indonesia. (Helen Jarvis, “Tan Malaka:
Revolutionary or renegade?” Bulletin of Concerned Asian
Scholars, 1987)
Key to his conception of the Proletarian Party was the potential
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for developing guerrilla warfare against the Dutch based on the
strength of the pemuda. He set out to organize that effort in East
Java with 35 comrades.
The Dutch did invade on Dec. 19, 1948. On Dec. 21, Tan Malaka
addressed the nation on radio, calling for increased struggle.
The independent Indonesian troops retreated into the mountains
to wage a guerrilla struggle. But Hatta and Sukarno were aiming
to use the guerrilla war as a bargaining chip for a new agreement
with the Dutch. Malaka’s call for uncompromising struggle did
not fit into that political maneuver. The republican government,
then in exile, accused Tan Malaka of treason.
This time, though, he did not end up in jail. Indonesian republican
troops loyal to Sukarno and Hatta seized Tan Malaka in East Java
on Feb. 19, 1949. They executed him in the jungle.
Tan Malaka’s life consisted of looking for every opportunity to
build the struggle against the ruling classes and colonial powers.
He maintained an independent political view guided by
Marxism-Leninism throughout his life. According to Jarvis,
“[H]is place in history is secure as a result of his role from 1945
until his death in 1949 as the most determined and
uncompromising advocate of resistance and struggle for total
independence.”
In Indonesia, Tan Malaka had been almost a legendary figure,
with sightings of new “Tan Malakas” and new reports of “Tan
Malaka’s death” every few years. His legendary stature was
enhanced by the fact that in September 1945, Sukarno had written
a testament designating Tan Malaka as the leader of the
revolution if he and Hatta were to be incapacitated.
His writings, like “Mass Action,” “Madilog” (on dialectical
materialism), “Toward the Republic of Indonesia,” and “The
Partisan” (on guerrilla warfare) are not readily available in the
West. But they remain as testaments to the creative and
revolutionary thinking of Tan Malaka, communist and militant
anti-colonialist. M
This article is based on extensive research by John Black
(19212006), lifelong communist and trade union leader. Prior to
an extensive illness, Black collected most of the works available
in English and German relating to Tan Malaka’s life.