Marhaenism

Marhaenism was the ideology of the Indonesian national liberation movement before independence. Sukarno argued for combining national liberation with the Marxist conception of history as a permanent struggle between the oppressed class and the oppressor, and the struggle therefore took the form of a revolution to overthrow the colonial order and establish a socialist republic.

Etymology and the dispute over the name

The name is said to come from a peasant whom Sukarno claimed to have met near Bandung around 1926-1927. The peasant owned his own means of production, such as land and a hoe, and worked them himself, yet his harvest only sufficed for his family's modest needs. Sukarno took this exploited but self-provisioning small producer as a revolutionary subject distinct from the proletariat, and first used the term 'Marhaen' publicly in his 1930 defence speech Indonesia Accuses (Indonesia Menggugat), replacing 'proletariat,' which he considered largely irrelevant to Indonesia.

That origin story is disputed in the sources. English Wikipedia states flatly that Sukarno's claim was a hoax, noting that 'Marhaen' had been used by Sarekat Islam to describe ordinary people long before Sukarno went to Bandung. Indonesian Wikipedia preserves a different account, that the peasant Sukarno met was named Aen and that the name became Marhaen as a matter of linguistic adjustment, and records that Soegiarso Soerojo, an intelligence officer under the New Order, doubted that a peasant named Marhaen existed and offered the alternative that the name abbreviates Marx-Hegel-Engels. Neither the existence of the namesake peasant nor the source of the name is settled.

Ideological content

Marhaenism is a variant of Marxism adapted to Indonesian conditions and culture, established as an anticapitalist and anti-imperialist ideology combining social nationalism, social democracy and cultural divinity. It emphasises national unity, culture, collectivist economics and democratic rights while condemning liberalism and individualism.

In its economic conception Marhaenism rejected the capitalist model of the state as contrary to equality and democracy, but its collectivism differed markedly from Marx's socialization of the means of production. Each person or household is to own small means of production such as land, machines or tools and so achieve independence, and capital is to be processed to meet the necessities of life and produce a surplus rather than hoarded or multiplied. Producers meet their own needs first and sell only the surplus; a worker who produces goods he does not himself consume acts merely as a factor of production for others and becomes vulnerable to being dictated by the market or exploited.

Organisation

Marhaenism was the guiding ideology of Sukarno's Indonesian National Party. Its influence reached beyond Indonesia into left-wing nationalism in neighbouring Malaya, prominent in Parti Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya and later Parti Rakyat, both founded by Ahmad Boestamam. The Communist Party of Indonesia also operated under this banner while building its mass organizations during the Sukarno era.

The mass movement and Nasakom

Under Guided Democracy from 1959, Nasakom (nationalism, religion and communism) sought to unite the three largest political forces into a single governing bloc; observers of the period, including the communist movement, contested whether it was a genuine sharing of power or an accommodation that left the PKI exposed. In that setting the ideology served as a language of mass mobilisation, promising the fusion of national and class emancipation, even as it mediated Sukarno's personal leadership and the provisional bargains among the blocs.

In a speech before the United Nations General Assembly on 30 September 1960, Sukarno stated that Pancasila was essentially a sublimation of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Communist Manifesto, making it the third alternative to the Western and Eastern blocs of the Cold War.

After 1965

The events of 30 September 1965, their suppression and the establishment of Suharto's New Order in 1966 brought the ideology's radical phase to an end. The New Order stripped Marhaenism of its anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist content and recast it as a de-radicalised state ideology under Pancasila Democracy.

After the end of the Cold War and Suharto's fall in 1998, small parties tried to revive the ideology's left-wing content. The Indonesian National Union founded in 1995 by former PNI member Supeni Pudjobuntoro was renamed the Indonesian National Party on 20 May 1998, merged with PNI-Massa Marhaen in December 1998, and changed its name to the Indonesian National Party of Marhaenism (PNIM). The party won 0.8 percent of the vote and one seat in 2004, then 0.31 percent in 2009, losing its seat below the electoral threshold. It was chaired by Sukarno's daughter Sukmawati Sukarnoputri.

Significance

Marhaenism is a representative case of Marxism reworked for the peasant and small-producer conditions of a non-European colony, confronting directly the question of how to define the revolutionary subject in a society with a thin industrial proletariat, which is why it is discussed in the lineage of left-wing nationalism and Third World socialism rather than as an Indonesian curiosity alone.

At the same time, by placing the self-provisioning small producer at the centre of the revolution it stands apart from Marxist orthodoxy, which locates the revolutionary subject in the proletariat. Its theoretical radicalism aside, the fact that after independence it functioned as an integrative ideology of state power is a defining feature of its historical character.