When the Ruling-Class Parties Harden: Indonesia and Great Power Politics in the Indo-Pacific

Imperialism in Today’s World

A Marxist analysis of global capitalism and imperialism remains indispensable to understand the latest phase of geopolitical tensions in the Indo-Pacific. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels showed, most famously in The Communist Manifesto, the global nature of the capitalist mode of production and social relations since their inception. They wrote that

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known.… Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way.³

The transformation in the mode of production and the opening up of the world market (and its expansion) were the key characteristics of emerging capitalism in the West, as well as other regions.

Marx’s understanding of non-Western societies evolved over time, but, at its core, his thinking regarding these societies acknowledged the harsh realities of subjugation and plunder under Western colonialism and the multiple pathways of capitalist development and revolution.⁴ In his journalistic writings, Marx expressed enthusiasm for the Taiping Rebellion in China, which suffered from the impacts of the Opium War and unequal treaties with the British Empire, and criticized British rule in India, which destroyed the colony’s productive forces.⁵ Further, he identified multiple forms of Western political and economic control, as well as its military domination in the age of colonialism.

Later, in the first volume of Capital, Marx elaborated on the dynamics of capital accumulation and its global dimensions. The accumulation of capital depends on the cycle of commodity exchange for surplus value, which in turn necessitates the reproduction of labor power. As Marx said, “From the standpoint of society, then, the working class, even when it stands outside the direct labour process, is just as much an appendage of capital as the lifeless instruments of labour are.”⁶ Moreover, in his discussion on “so-called primitive accumulation” as a starting point of the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, Marx made several references to multiple countries and regions, including colonies, though England remained his primary reference point.⁷ The international framework and scope of analysis of Marx’s theoretical exposition in Capital, and in his studies on non-Western societies, are confirmed in the latest research.⁸ When Marx theorized about the genesis of capitalism and capital accumulation processes, he analyzed political economy in a global sense, rather than in the confines of a closed national economy.

It was later Marxists who developed theories of imperialism and its connection with global capitalism further. To understand their contributions to this body of scholarship, we need to situate them in their broader historical and material contexts. The early historical discussion of imperialism was between 1900 and the end of the First World War, when the race for colonial expansion led to heated conflicts among advanced capitalist countries in the metropole.⁹ Politically, these theorists were concerned with the possibility of socialist transition amidst intensifying capitalist crises. Similar situations re-emerged in different forms during the period between the end of the Second World War and the consolidation of neoliberalism, when underdevelopment of the Global South and its dependent relations on former colonial powers continued, and there were multiple attempts, with varying degrees of success and failure, to promote socialist construction on the ruins of colonial capitalism.

The classical Marxist theorists of imperialism—Rudolf Hilferding, Nikolai Bukharin, and V. I. Lenin—made important interventions in the debate on the subject. As Anthony Brewer points out, imperialism for these theorists “meant, primarily, rivalry between major capitalist countries, rivalry expressed in conflict over territory, taking political and military as well as economic forms, and tending, ultimately, to inter-imperialist war.”¹⁰ While there are some limitations to this theoretical focus, their works provide crucial insights for further development of Marxist theories of imperialism. This includes, for example, Hilferding’s discussion on the role of modern corporations—joint stock companies—in capital accumulation and concentration, the role of finance capital in uniting different fractions of capital, and the potentially expansionist implications of this dynamic.¹¹

Extending the arguments raised by Hilferding and the liberal theorist J. A. Hobson, Lenin noticed the rise of monopolies due to the concentration of production activities by large-scale companies in his famous text, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Of particular interest is Lenin’s observation of the export of capital for profit accumulation from rich countries to underdeveloped regions. Lenin saw the expansion of the capitalist circuit in peripheral countries for the benefit of the capitalists at the expense of the working masses.¹² He summed up this process as follows: “As long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will be utilized not for the purpose of raising the standard living of the masses…but for the purpose of increasing profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries.”¹³ While Lenin was primarily concerned with the possible outbreak of war among imperialist powers, he was also cognizant of the negative impacts of monopoly-driven imperialism in the colonies and other dependent countries.¹⁴ He noted that “The interests pursued in exporting capital also give an impetus to the conquest of colonies.… The non-economic superstructure which grows up on the basis of finance capital, its politics and its ideology, stimulates the striving for colonial conquest.”¹⁵ Equally important, he also highlighted conditions of financial and diplomatic dependence under formal political independence and the exploitation of weaker nations by rich capitalist countries. Toward the end of his text, Lenin concluded: “Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination instead of striving for liberty, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism.”¹⁶

More recent Marxist writers apply these insights in analyses of contemporary times. Early Monthly Review authors such as Paul M. Sweezy, Paul Baran, and Harry Magdoff pointed out key features of post-1945 U.S.-led imperialism, such as increasing militarism in the service of capital expansion in the Global South, the U.S. strategy of alliance-building with old imperialist powers, anti-Communist foreign policies in defense of a monopolistic hold on the world market, and imperial dependence without formal colonialism.¹⁷ With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, declining U.S. hegemony, and China’s strategic engagement with global capitalism, we now enter the period of what John Bellamy Foster described as “late imperialism,” that is, “the present period of monopoly-finance capital and stagnation, declining U.S. hegemony and rising world conflict, accompanied by growing threats to the ecological bases of civilization and life itself.”¹⁸

Recent developments in global political economy, such as the seeming decline of U.S. influence and the growth of Global South economies obscure the realities of late imperialism to many on the left, especially those living in advanced capitalist countries. But recent studies have shown the continuing relevance of imperialism as an analytical framework in studying the current phase of the capitalist world system. Samir Amin, for example, highlighted the continuing geopolitical tensions between the collective imperialism of the historically imperialist nation-states (namely the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and nations in Europe, among others) and new geopolitical groupings involving countries in the Global South, such as the BRICS+ group, that embraced neoliberalism in varying degrees but rejected neo-imperialism.¹⁹

Besides continuing geopolitical tensions, late imperialism can also be traced in the global economic realm, where multinational corporations, backed by the capitalist states in the imperial center, have become leading actors in “the exploitation of the global South” and the expansion of “the global reserve army of labor required by global capital accumulation.”²⁰ Intan Suwandi’s in-depth analysis of supplier companies in Indonesia, a major emerging economy, shows the continuing operation of economic imperialism through global exploitation of labor in capitalist production, wherein multinationals profit from global labor arbitrage from production activities in emerging economies.²¹ In this respect, Indonesia follows the broader economic trend in the Global South, where Northern capitalists continue to profit from the transfer of production activities to low(er)-wage countries, global wage differentials, and liberalized market and labor regimes.²²

The expansion and continuation of the Western economic and security presence in the Indo-Pacific should be seen through the lens of these imperialist dynamics. However, some new developments need to be taken into account. Building upon and expanding beyond the above mentioned works, I look not only at geopolitical and economic aspects of imperialism in the Indo-Pacific, but also at local/national political struggles and the role of China in this regional landscape. In doing so, my analysis complements and goes beyond a recent account by Faris Al-Fadhat of the internationalization of capital in Southeast Asia, which emphasizes the regional and global expansion of internationally oriented fractions of capital in the region facilitated by national governments but overlooks its interaction with imperialist dynamics.²³

Western Imperial Offensive and China’s Rise in the Indo-Pacific

The Indo-Pacific has always been a major hotbed of imperialism, neoliberal globalization, and people’s resistance. Prior to the consolidation of the postwar U.S.-led imperial structure, it was the Western European powers that colonized countries in the region—the British on the Indian subcontinent and in Malaya and Burma; the French in Indochina; the Spaniards in the Philippine archipelago; and the Dutch in the East Indies. China too suffered from Western imperial encroachment and internal turmoil; meanwhile, Japan decided to resist Western imperialism by launching its own brand of Asianist imperialism.²⁴

The integration of this region into the world’s capitalist circuit led to the deepening of colonial capitalism. This process involved various modalities of primitive accumulation among peasants across Southeast Asia and the destruction of the local Indian economy.²⁵ Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik estimate that the drain from India to the United Kingdom “from 1765 to 1900, cumulated to 1947, gives us £397.8 billion, nearly thirty-eight times the 1947 GDP of the United Kingdom.… Cumulated up to 2020, the drain amounts to £3.39 trillion, over four times the United Kingdom’s estimated GDP for that year.” Most of this came from heavy taxation on the Indian peasantry.²⁶ Unsurprisingly, this led to resistance from the mass of working people, ranging from local protests and rebellions to fights for national liberation and more class-conscious struggles.

The rearrangement of the global political and economic order after the Second World War unleashed two conflicting historical forces in response to the contradictions of colonial capitalism. On the one hand, the decaying colonial capitalist economy and political order led to a vacuum of authority in many colonized nations. This provided ample opportunities for national liberation movements to gain formal independence. Under extreme duress, these situations led to the outbreak of national liberation wars against former colonizers. This includes the Indonesian National Revolution against the returning Dutch and Allied forces and the anti-Japanese Hukbalahap Rebellion in the Philippines.²⁷ On the other hand, consistent with the Leninist perspective, the United States as the emerging dominant hegemon needed to ensure its imperialist interests. The refashioning of Japan, a former imperialist fascist power, into an East Asian outpost of the so-called free world, complete with liberal democratic accessories, including lavish funding from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon for the future ruling party of Japan—the conservative, anti-Communist Liberal Democratic Party—was a major example of the creation of a regional political pillar for U.S. imperialism.²⁸ In the economic realm, the policy of limited appeasement, such as land reform, was enacted in U.S.-allied countries such as Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Vietnam as a bulwark against communism.²⁹

As extensively elaborated by Sweezy, Baran, and Magdoff, there was a strong incentive for the United States from an economic standpoint, now acting as the guarantor of Western imperialist interests, to ensure the stable operation of Western capitalist firms and emerging multinational corporations. This was also in line with domestic elite interests in U.S. allies. On the national level, this alignment could manifest in divergent postwar economic trajectories—the high growth, technology-oriented economy in Japan and the high rent, sweatshop labor-based capitalism in Thailand.³⁰ These national varieties of capitalism and state forms are two sides of the same coin, serving as mediators of imperialist interests with local realities. These regional imperialist dynamics are sometimes overlooked in mainstream political-economy accounts, which see the Indo-Pacific’s interaction with the world capitalist system through security-oriented categories such as “external threats” or “systemic vulnerability.”³¹

The victory of the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Laotian revolutionaries and the Indonesian leftists’ “long march” through institutional power posed a great challenge to U.S. imperialism. Around the same time, India cultivated close diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union to counterbalance Pakistan’s alliance with the United States. The first wave of post-1945 geopolitical tensions in the Indo-Pacific should be seen from this perspective.

On the other side of the equation, China entered a tumultuous period of socialist construction after the victory of the Communist revolution in 1949. One of the major foreign policies of socialist China was supporting people’s movements in other parts of the world. This translated into military, political, and financial support for local communist movements pursuing armed struggle in Thailand and Vietnam up to the 1970s and cordial diplomatic and fraternal relations with Sukarno’s leftist government and the Indonesian communists in the 1960s.³² This approach, however, did not always lead to favorable results for socialist or emancipatory politics. China became complicit in the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (1975–1979), where it sent thousands of technical advisors but had little influence on Khmer Rouge policies due to prior internal political upheavals and bureaucratic disorganization during the Cultural Revolution.³³

After a protracted period of proxy wars and imperialist political meddling, the hot “Cold” War in the Indo-Pacific entered a period of cooling down. The Sino-Soviet split facilitated China’s rapprochement with the West (1972–1979), Vietnam reunified after the end of the war (1975), and U.S.-backed capitalist dictatorships emerged across East and Southeast Asia from the 1960s onward. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), an Asian collective defense organization modeled after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), was dissolved in 1977.³⁴ This ushered in a period of high capitalist growth in the region, marked by the rise of the Asian tiger and tiger cub economies (1950s through the ’90s) and neoliberal India (starting in 1991).³⁵

Alongside this development, China underwent a transformation in the post-Mao period.³⁶ Among the left, there are significant disagreements regarding the characteristics of Chinese socialism after Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening-up” policy. But a general principle of noninterference in domestic affairs was implemented in Chinese foreign policy, to the point where China stopped its support for overseas leftist guerrillas in exchange for broad diplomatic and trade relations with the rest of the world. Domestically, China has experienced both the excesses of its integration into the world’s capitalist market and competing attempts to formulate its own brand of post-Mao socialism. This includes intensifying workers’ struggles against the repressive party-state and the Chongqing Model propagated by the ousted politburo member Bo Xilai. China has also pursued non-imperialistic forms of trade and aid, including economic cooperation with Latin America’s left-wing governments.³⁷

In the post-Cold War era, the majority of countries in the Indo-Pacific region enjoy cordial relations with both the United States and China. This relative nonalignment is the preferred foreign policy strategy of these countries, even those with close ties to the United States.³⁸ Even the initially anti-Communist Association of Southeast Asian Nations now has close economic relations with China, now its biggest trading partner since 2009.³⁹ At the same time, Western and Chinese companies have been competing for the thriving regional market in the Indo-Pacific. But to see this merely as an economic competition neglects the West’s anxiety regarding its role in the world. The U.S. misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan post-9/11 proved to be disasters for its international reputation—and even more disastrous for Iraqis and Afghans. The U.S. “Global War on Terror” left a bitter aftertaste for countries in Asia and intensified antidemocratic politics in these countries in the name of battling terrorism.⁴⁰ Meanwhile, the United States needs access to Global South markets to sustain its debt-driven economic growth after the 2008 financial crisis.⁴¹ These new geopolitical and economic realities of a declining pax Americana, coupled with the growing Chinese influence on the Indo-Pacific and the world, especially with the launch of its state-sponsored Belt and Road Initiative, brought the United States to a tipping point in its foreign policy.

This led us to a new Cold War with China. In December 2017, the Donald Trump administration released its National Security Strategy, which framed China as a major challenger to U.S. hegemony, a threat to the stability of the global order, and an unfair economic competitor.⁴² Joe Biden’s presidency repeated this line and made its first step by instituting a strict export restriction of some types of semiconductor chip technology, especially for supercomputing and artificial intelligence, to China.⁴³ But Washington went several steps further. In early August 2022, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, which was seen as a provocation against China.⁴⁴ In October 2023, the United States held its first joint aerial drill with Japan and South Korea, the latest step in the stealth remilitarization of Japan.⁴⁵ Lastly, the summit meeting between Biden, Kishida, and Philippine President Bongbong Marcos last April, which discussed the possibility of trilateral military exercises among other discussion points, was held in the aftermath of a U.S. Navy “freedom of navigation” exercise in the South China Sea.⁴⁶

This is not to absolve China from its own mistakes in foreign policy and trade, or domestic repression of dissent and minorities, for that matter, but one must take into account the contradictions of China’s global rise proportionally. Vietnam and the Philippines, for example, have valid concerns regarding increasing Chinese activities in the South China Sea. But the overall picture of China’s growing presence in the Indo-Pacific seems to be more complex than the fearmongering narratives fueled by the United States. I note a major example: In the global land market, China’s rapid land acquisition and hunger for land-based investment in Southeast Asia in recent years is best seen not as a neocolonial enterprise or a project of economic solidarity, but rather as a process of developmental outsourcing driven by the state and involving diverse state, semi-state, and private actors.⁴⁷

Additionally, as Walden Bello observes, “China’s defensive posture remains strategic defensive, as the Pentagon admits.… Beijing is not engaged in an arms race with the U.S.… China’s strategic nuclear arsenal remains puny in comparison to that of the U.S.… China has only one overseas base, in Djibouti, compared to the scores of U.S. military bases and installations,” and, lastly, “China’s offensive capabilities are limited.”⁴⁸

Indonesian Capitalist Development and Regional Dynamics in the Indo-Pacific

How should we situate Indonesia in this geopolitical and economic constellation? To answer this question, we need to analyze domestic capitalist development and class struggle in connection with broader imperialist dynamics.

After a series of unequal trade relations and violent conquest in precolonial Indonesia, Dutch colonialism facilitated the growth and deepening of capitalist social relations, especially in Java. In 1830, the Dutch colonial government introduced the Cultivation System in Java, an economic policy that required local peasants to relinquish a portion of their land or work, sometimes as corvée laborers, at export-oriented plantations, in place of a land tax, in order to increase colonial revenues.⁴⁹ The structural impacts of this policy on Javanese peasants were devastating.⁵⁰ Later, this system was dismantled due to the rise of liberal politics in the Netherlands. However, in general, this agrarian transformation “in the mid-19th century prior to and during the era of the Cultivation System” in Java “revealed a pervasive growth of capitalist relations and purposes.”⁵¹ Colonial capitalism also expanded to urban areas with the growth of the public sector, factories, and transportation system. This spurred the proliferation of people’s movements, including peasant movements, labor unions, and anticolonial activism of various stripes.

The first two decades of the independence struggle and nation- and state-building (1945–1965) represented the apex of anti-imperialist politics and development. In key sectors, such as the plantation economy in Sumatra, Dutch and other Western corporate interests continued to reign supreme.⁵² In response to this and the continuing colonialist attitude of the foreign capitalists and managerial strata, workers across different sectors—such as those working on plantations, factories, shipping, and the urban transportation industry, along with peasants and agricultural laborers, fought for better wages, workplace democracy, labor control over management, and land rights.⁵³ In collaboration with these working-class movements, the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) was at the forefront of this class struggle through both parliamentary politics and extra-parliamentary mass mobilization.⁵⁴ Since its beginning, this class politics posed a threat not only to foreign capital, but also to the local bourgeoisie and sections of the state elites who opposed formal colonialism but adopted a more conciliatory position with capitalism.

This anti-imperialist politics was violently cut short by the New Order regime (1966–1998), an anti-Communist coalition of anti-Sukarno student activists, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intellectuals, and the army, which led to the decimation of the PKI. The New Order state effectively oversaw Indonesia’s reintegration into global capitalism and served as a strategic partner for U.S. imperialist interests. In particular, the state courted the most mobile types of capital, whether domestic or foreign, as a way to maintain investment levels and appease the general population.⁵⁵ It also facilitated the growth of the Indonesian domestic bourgeoisie.⁵⁶ The stability of this capitalist dictatorship was also propped up by its foreign policy reorientation, which maintained nominal nonalignment, but in reality moved Indonesia much closer to the West to attract investment and maintain “regional stability.”⁵⁷ Occasionally, this foreign policy shift led to disastrous consequences, such as the Indonesian invasion and subsequent colonization of Timor-Leste in the name of “containing communism.”

This authoritarian capitalist development, however, reached an impasse. The high-level of capitalist growth was countered by increasingly blatant, corrupt, and violent exploitation of the overall working population. Mainstream and liberal commentaries viewed this as a problem of state corruption and moral hazard in the business community, with President Suharto as the chief corrupter and his family members and cronies as additional villains. These naïve assessments neglected the intertwining processes of corporate-led imperialist expansion and domestic capital accumulation. A good case in point is the massive growth of corporate-driven investments in Indonesia’s natural resource and forest sectors in frontier areas and the construction of white elephant developmental projects funded by state, local, and foreign investors, as well as international financial institutions such as the World Bank. These projects benefited the capitalist class, imperialist interests, and a mélange of corrupt officials and intermediaries, but antagonized an embittered population.⁵⁸

This continuing legitimacy crisis coupled with the Asian financial crisis led to the collapse of the New Order regime. The reintroduction of bourgeois democracy in Indonesia, however, does not mean the end of economic imperialism. Imperialist economic relations remain prevalent in the agrarian sector, export-dependent supplier companies, and mining.⁵⁹ Further, while the Armed Forces formally retreated from politics and competitive elections became the major political game, societal oversight over investment activities in far-flung areas remains difficult, and repression of dissent by affected communities is still rampant. Geopolitically, post-1998 Indonesian governments have been following a strategy of maintaining good relations with the United States and the economically rising China. The “War on Terror” once put Indonesia in an uncomfortable position, as the country had to signal a commitment to illiberal “antiterrorism” to the United States without alienating Muslim political groups.⁶⁰ But by and large, the Indonesian state after the New Order has followed the policy of navigating between great powers.

Recent Developments in Indonesian Political Economy, 2004–2024

To understand Indonesia’s response to recent imperialist dynamics in the Indo-Pacific, we need to look deeper into recent developments in the Indonesian state in relation to national political economy and global capitalism. The year 2004 can be used as the starting point of our analysis, since it marked the end of the transition from the New Order to bourgeois democracy.

In general, Indonesia has maintained close political, economic, and military relations with the United States, and at the same time built friendly relations with China, mostly in economic terms.⁶¹ Eager to improve Indonesia’s international image and wield soft power, the presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (2004–2014), a former U.S.-trained general turned politician, brought Indonesia closer to the United States through joint agendas such as counterterrorism initiatives, democracy promotion, and the resumption in 2005 of the International Military Education and Training program, which provides education on U.S. military doctrines and strategies for members of the Indonesian Armed Forces.⁶² This period coincided with the presidency of Barack Obama (2009–2017), who had a positive reputation among the Indonesian public—especially after George W. Bush’s brinkmanship and Islamophobic image.

Under the tenure of the outgoing president Joko Widodo (Jokowi) (2014–2024), Indonesia’s warm relations with the United States were punctuated by Trump’s presidency, which adopted a more aggressive stance toward China. This created a rather uneasy situation for Jokowi, who wanted to use economic opportunities from U.S.-Indonesia relations for increasing Indonesia’s palm oil exports and nickel production and attracting foreign investments. But under the Biden administration, economic-oriented cooperation for trade and investment has resumed.⁶³ Throughout Biden’s tenure, Jakarta has continued its military cooperation with Washington—despite the former’s criticism of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad) and the AUKUS security pact between the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom—with a plan for the purchase of twenty-four F-15 jet fighters and a joint military exercise with the U.S. Army in 2022.⁶⁴

Meanwhile, Indonesia’s relationship with China continues to be economic-centric. In 2004, Yudhoyono signed a strategic partnership with China, and by 2014 “China replaced Japan as Indonesia’s top trading partner” with a total bilateral trade of $48.2 billion.⁶⁵ During Jokowi’s presidency, Indonesia joined Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, supported the Global Development Initiative (a Chinese alternative funding platform for Global South countries), increased bilateral trade to $133.6 billion by 2022, and embraced Chinese investment for its high-speed railway project.⁶⁶

Clearly, post-New Order Indonesian governments have more latitude in defining their foreign policy and trade orientation. Similarly, Indonesian capital controllers now have more options for their investment partners. This relative flexibility of the Indonesian state and capitalist class is supported by its domestic consumption-driven growth and the continuing profitability of prized commodities such as land and forest resources, palm oil, and coal and nickel mining.⁶⁷ In turn, this extractive political-economy model, including its mechanism of surplus value extraction, is facilitated by the oligarchic nature of Indonesia’s bourgeois democracy and collusive business-politics relations.⁶⁸

In other words, there is a clear domestic political-economy driver of Indonesia’s maneuvers in international relations and global capitalism since 2004. Therefore, it is in the interest of the Indonesian state and capitalist class to hedge between the United States and China. This was different from the period between 1998–2004, when Indonesia and the world both underwent transitional phases—a political transition for the former and a transition to post-9/11 U.S.-centered geopolitics for the latter. Moreover, this post-2004 development is more than just a story of internationalization of domestic capital, as there is a clear economic imperialism variable at play.

There is a two-way interaction between this new imperialism and Indonesia’s domestic political economy. The global, Western-dominated demand for rural and mineral commodities, from land to nickel, means more opportunities for surplus value extraction and profit accumulation for the imperialist center. The fact that these commodity sectors have been financialized and attract international investors and advanced capitalist states suggests that the Leninist argument of finance capital as the driver of imperialism is once again vindicated.⁶⁹ Domestically, both the Indonesian state and capitalist class see this commodity boom as a golden opportunity. This means following the strategy of capitalist and ecologically destructive extractivism and “moving up the value chain,” without endogenous industrialization and workers’ control in lucrative commodity sectors.⁷⁰ Concretely, this happy embrace of global imperialism is manifested in different iterations of Indonesian government policy since 2011. This includes the neoliberal Masterplan for Acceleration and Expansion of Indonesia’s Economic Development 2011–2025 (MP3EI), which pushed for large-scale capitalist investments in agricultural, plantation, fishery, mineral, and energy sectors through the creation of special economic corridors and tax exemption incentives; the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate, which is a state-sponsored, large-scale corporate investment in food crops and biofuels that has led to land grabbing and socio-ecological impacts; and the controversial Omnibus Bill on Job Creation that scrapped labor and environmental protections in the name of promoting investment.⁷¹

Accompanying this imperialist extraction of surplus value is the increasingly repressive political control over the working people in Indonesia. Recall Lenin’s warning about imperialism’s coercive political superstructures. Sweezy, Baran, and Magdoff echoed this message in their analysis of increasing militarism as a consequence of U.S. imperial expansion. In Indonesia, there has been no U.S. military base to tame people’s movements because there is no need to build one. The Armed Forces have been more than happy to do the required dirty work, as proven by the implementation of repressive military tactics during the New Order. Nonetheless, the end of such blatant militarism in the current bourgeois democratic era (with the exception of the occupied West Papuan territories) does not mean the end of repressive disciplining of the working people, as episodic repression by local police and military forces or hired thugs targeting affected communities and agrarian activists is a frequent, yet underreported, occurrence.⁷²

A special note should be made regarding the role of Chinese investment in Indonesia. There is a danger—and a form of intellectual laziness—in describing U.S.-China geopolitical and economic competition as a form of inter-imperial rivalry, for reasons that I have described previously. However, we should not deny the fact that there is a process of value capture in cases of Chinese investment, especially in the contemporary nickel-extraction industry, which has engendered opposition from local communities and activists.⁷³

How should we make sense of this? First, it is important to remember that major actors in such Chinese investment are companies that operate as capitalist firms, rather than socialist or cooperative firms. This includes a significant proportion of private companies. Therefore, there is a tension between increasing the productive forces under the aegis of the Chinese state but involving diverse state and semi/nonstate actors—a process that agrarian studies scholars Irna Hofman and Peter Ho describe as “developmental outsourcing”—and ensuring workers’ control over company activities.⁷⁴ Secondly, part of the numerous problems with increasing Chinese investment are caused by the existing local political-economic conditions and elites, including opportunistic elite actions and elite-sponsored anti-Chinese sentiment in Indonesian society. Last but not least, the relative absence of a viable left-wing political force with control over state institutions, at least locally, means that people’s movements in Indonesia currently miss the opportunity to harness the productive forces resulting from Chinese investment for socialist development and political goals.

Concluding Remarks: Possibilities of Anti-Imperialist Resistance

Recent U.S., Western, and East Asian military buildups in the Indo-Pacific, the trade war with China, and the West’s ongoing support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza are indicative signs that imperialism is alive and resurgent. It is, then, imperative for Indonesian leftist and progressive social movements to formulate a clear stance against this coming catastrophe, especially when the anticolonial, anti-imperialist reflex of these movements has been in decline in recent years. But to do so, we need to revisit different articulations of anti-imperialist politics since 1998.

In the early 2000s, when the memories of economic hardships due to the Asian financial crisis and the corrupt rule of the New Order were still fresh in the mind of the public, there was strong enthusiasm for a thorough criticism of free trade policies emanating from anti-imperialist/anti-globalization movements. Organizations such as the Institute for Global Justice (then renamed as Indonesia for Global Justice, IGJ) were active in addressing issues with trade liberalization. Other anti/alter-globalization movements and discourses also gained visibility among their constituencies and the broader activist audience.⁷⁵ However, as the Indonesian economy gradually improved and social movements shifted their focus on more pressing domestic issues, anti-imperialism took a backseat. As of now, anti-imperialist politics is a significantly missing component for many Indonesian social movements.⁷⁶

A constant, yet unstable basis for anti-imperialist politics is the enduring Islamic—and sometimes Islamist—sentiment among mainstream Muslim organizations, political Islam activists, and the general public. This proved to be effective for mass mobilization against U.S. imperialist foreign policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, to name a few examples. But the absence of a coherent historical-materialist perspective in this politics and its occasional religious sectarianism and reactionary politics significantly limits its ability to garner support from the more “secular” social movements and general public, not to mention its tendency to be easily manipulated by major oligarchic politicians and donors.⁷⁷

Two major reservoirs of anti-imperialist politics remain in the workers’ and farmers’ movements, as these classes have borne the brunt of imperialism and neoliberal globalization. Nonetheless, making a shift from everyday bread-and-butter issues and immediate local concerns to a broader anti-imperialist sensibility is not easy, and requires intensive political education and an active advanced layer of cadres. But two possible actors can break this impasse. First is the new cohort of student activists, who experience neoliberal precariousness as a reserve army of labor with bleak futures and have greater exposure to leftist literature and world affairs.⁷⁸ Second is a new generation of workers, who have been experimenting with different forms of democratic political culture, including pro-labor electoral politics.⁷⁹

Even if anti-imperialist politics is successfully rejuvenated, Indonesian social movements still have to tackle two major questions. First, how should the working people respond to the possibility of an open geopolitical conflict and regional military skirmishes in the context of a new Cold War? Second, reflecting on the experience of the democratically elected left-wing governments in Latin America under the Pink Tide, can Indonesian social movements, especially left-wing ones, contextually replicate the Latin American experience of using Chinese investments to fund social programs and buffer Indonesia’s defense vis-à-vis the pressure of economic imperialism? These questions, which are rarely asked and discussed in these movements, should be pondered deeply.

The task of analyzing the realities of imperialism in the Indo-Pacific and formulating a workable socialist response to this challenge is herculean, but it is something we must do in order to avoid regional and global catastrophes.

Notes

1. ↩ On economic growth and emerging regionalism in the Indo-Pacific, especially Southeast Asia, see International Monetary Fund (IMF), Regional Economic Outlook Asia and Pacific: Challenges to Sustaining Growth and Disinflation (Washington DC: IMF, October 2023); Amitav Acharya, The Making of Southeast Asia: International Relations of a Region (Ithaca and Singapore: Cornell University Press and ISEAS Publishing, 2013).
2. ↩ Fumio Kishida, “Full Text of Japanese Prime Minister Kishida’s Speech to U.S. Congress,” April 12, 2024, asia.nikkei.com.
3. ↩ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marxists Internet Archive, marxists.org, 15.
4. ↩ Kevin B. Anderson, “No, Karl Marx Was Not Eurocentric,” Jacobin, July 19, 2022.
5. ↩ Karl Marx, Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx, James Ledbetter, ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 3–10, 212–58.
6. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1982), 719.
7. ↩ Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 873–95, 905–26.
8. ↩ Lucia Pradella, Globalization and the Critique of Political Economy: New Insights from Marx’s Writings (New York: Routledge, 2015).
9. ↩ Gavin Kitching, “The Theory of Imperialism and Its Consequences,” Middle East Report 100 (October–December 1981).
10. ↩ Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey, Second Edition (London: Routledge, 1990), 88–89.
11. ↩ Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism, 88–108.
12. ↩ V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1970), 63–68. In many ways, Lenin anticipated David Harvey’s arguments of accumulation by dispossession and spatio-temporal fix. On Harvey’s arguments, see David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
13. ↩ Lenin, Imperialism, 64.
14. ↩ Lenin, Imperialism, 69–131.
15. ↩ Lenin, Imperialism, 87.
16. ↩ Lenin, Imperialism, 123–26, 128.
17. ↩ Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1962 [1942]), 308–9; Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 181–217; Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969); Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 117–47, 165–212.
18. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Late Imperialism: Fifty Years after Harry Magdoff’s The Age of Imperialism,” Monthly Review 71, no. 3 (July–August 2019): 1–19.
19. ↩ Samir Amin, “Contemporary Imperialism,” Monthly Review 67, no. 3 (July–August 2015): 23–36.
20. ↩ Intan Suwandi and John Bellamy Foster, “Multinational Corporations and the Globalization of Monopoly Capital,” Monthly Review 68, no. 3 (July–August 2016): 114–31.
21. ↩ Intan Suwandi, Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019).
22. ↩ John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).
23. ↩ Faris Al-Fadhat, “The Internationalisation of Capital and the Transformation of Statehood in Southeast Asia,” in Political Economy of Southeast Asia: Politics and Uneven Development under Hyperglobalisation, Toby Caroll, Shahar Hameiri, and Lee Jones, eds. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 177–98.
24. ↩ For detailed discussions on the specificity of Japanese imperialism and fascism, see Ethan Mark, “Japan’s 1930s: Crisis, Fascism, and Social Imperialism,” in Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History, Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman, eds. (London: Routledge, 2018), 237–50; Germaine A. Hoston, “Marxism and Japanese Expansionism: Takahashi Kamekichi and the Theory of ‘Petty Imperialism,’” Journal of Japanese Studies 10, no. 1 (1984): 1–30.
25. ↩ On so-called primitive accumulation in the early phase of colonial capitalism in Southeast Asia, see John T. Sidel, “Primitive Accumulation and ‘Progress’ in Southeast Asia: The Diverse Legacies of a Common(s) Tragedy,” Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia 3, no. 1 (2015): 5–23. On the destruction of the Indian economy under British colonialism, see Jason Hickel, “How Britain Stole $45 Trillion from India,” Al-Jazeera, December 19, 2018.
26. ↩ Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, “The Drain of Wealth: Colonialism Before the First World War,” Monthly Review 72, no. 9 (February 2021): 15; Utsa Patnaik, “Revisiting the ‘Drain,’ or Transfers from India to Britain,” in Agrarian and Other Histories: Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik, eds. (New Delhi: Tulika Books), 278–317.
27. ↩ David Van Reybrouck, Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World (London: Bodley Head, 2024); Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
28. ↩ Koichiro Osaka, “The Imperial Ghost in the Neoliberal Machine (Figuring the CIA),” e-Flux Journal 100 (June 8, 2019), e-flux.com.
29. ↩ Al McCoy, “Land Reform as Counter-revolution: US Foreign Policy and the Tenant Farmers of Asia,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 3, no. 1 (2019): 14–49.
30. ↩ Brad Williams, “US Covert Action in Cold War Japan: The Politics of Cultivating Conservative Elites and its Consequences,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 50, no. 4 (2020): 16–19; Jim Glassman, “Lineages of the Authoritarian State in Thailand: Military Dictatorship, Lazy Capitalism and the Cold War Past as Post-Cold War Prologue,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 50, no. 4 (2020): 579–84.
31. ↩ For instance, see Richard F. Doner, Bryan K. Ritchie, and Dan Slater, “Systemic Vulnerability and the Origins of Developmental States: Northeast and Southeast Asia in Comparative Perspective,” International Organization 59, no. 2 (2005): 327–61.
32. ↩ Ian Baird, “The Hmong and the Communist Party of Thailand: A Transnational, Transcultural and Gender-Relations-Transforming Experience,” Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia 9, no. 2 (2021): 167–84; John T. Sidel, Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), 203–87; Taomo Zhou, “Ambivalent Alliance: Chinese Policy towards Indonesia, 1960–1965,” The China Quarterly 221 (2015): 208–28.
33. ↩ Andrew Mertha, Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).
34. ↩ The SEATO members were Australia, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. On SEATO, see John K. Franklin, “The Hollow Pact: Pacific Security and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization,” PhD diss., Texas Christian University, 2006.
35. ↩ The initial four “Asian Tiger” countries were Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. The followers of their economic models, the “Tiger Cub” economies, are Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
36. ↩ For a nuanced assessment of mass violence, political struggles, and competing factions during the Cultural Revolution from a leftist perspective, see Mobo Gao, “Debating the Cultural Revolution: Do We Only Know What We Believe?,” Critical Asian Studies 34, no. 3 (2002): 419–34; Mobo Gao, The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2008).
37. ↩ On workers’ struggles vis-à-vis the party-state, see Chris King-Chi Chan, “The World’s Factory in Transition: Diversifying Industrial Relations and Intensifying Workers’ Struggles in China,” China Review 20, no. 1 (2020): 1–17. On the Chongqing Model, see Yuezhi Zhao, “The Struggle for Socialism in China: The Bo Xilai Saga and Beyond,” Monthly Review 64, no. 5 (October 2012): 1–17. On China’s nonimperialistic trade and aid model, see Harry Clynch, “Why China Does Not Have ‘Imperialistic Intentions’ in Africa,” Disruption Banking, February 14, 2024. Lastly, on China’s economic relations with Latin America’s leftist governments, see Ivo Ganchev, “China Pushed the Pink Tide and the Pink Tide Pulled China: Intertwining Economic Interests and Ideology of Ecuador and Bolivia (2005–2014),” World Affairs 183, no. 4 (2020): 359–88.
38. ↩ Patrick Wintour, “US v. China: Is This the Start of a New Cold War?,” Guardian, June 22, 2020; Terence Lee, “The Domestic Determinants of Hedging in Singapore’s Foreign Policy,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 46, no. 1 (2024): 77–102.
39. ↩ Association of Southeast Asian Nations, “ASEAN-China Economic Relation,” asean.org.
40. ↩ Vedi R. Hadiz, introduction to Empire and Neoliberalism in Asia, Vedi R. Hadiz, ed. (London: Taylor and Francis, 2006), 1–20.
41. ↩ Hizkia Yosie Polimpung, “Paradigma Baru Penataan Ekonomi Global: Transformasi Kapitalisme Global sebagai Dampak Sistemik Krisis Finansial Amerika Serikat 2008,” Jurnal IndoProgress 2, no. 1 (2015): 1–26.
42. ↩ White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, December 2017, archives.gov.
43. ↩ Branko Marcetic, “Biden Has Fired the First Shot in a New Kind of Anti-China Cold War,” Jacobin, October 23, 2022.
44. ↩ Paul Haenle and Nathaniel Sher, “How Pelosi’s Taiwan Visit Has Set a New Status Quo,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, August 17, 2022.
45. ↩ “The US and NATO Militarise Northeast Asia,” No Cold War, November 6, 2023, nocoldwar.org.
46. ↩ “The US Intensifies Its Attempt to Destabilise the Pacific Region,” No Cold War, April 24, 2024.
47. ↩ Irna Hofman and Peter Ho, “China’s ‘Developmental Outsourcing’: A Critical Examination of Chinese Global ‘Land Grabs’ Discourse,” Journal of Peasant Studies 39, no. 1 (2012): 1–48.
48. ↩ Walden Bello, “From Partnership to Rivalry: China and the USA in the Early Twenty-First Century,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 53, no. 5 (2023): 847.
49. ↩ Robert van Niel, “The Effect of Export Cultivations in Nineteenth-Century Java,” Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 1 (1981): 25–58.
50. ↩ Robert E. Elson, Javanese Peasants and the Colonial Sugar Industry: Impact and Change in an East Java Residency, 1830–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Robert E. Elson, Village Java under the Cultivation System (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994).
51. ↩ G.R. Knight, “Capitalism and Commodity Production in Java,” in Capitalism and Colonial Production, ed. Alavi (London: Croom Helm), 147.
52. ↩ Ann Laura Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995, 2nd ed.).
53. ↩ John Ingleson, Workers and Democracy: The Indonesian Labour Movement, 1949–1957 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2022); Ben White, “Remembering the Indonesian Peasants’ Front and Plantation Workers’ Union (1945–1966),” Journal of Peasant Studies 43, no. 1 (2016): 1–16.
54. ↩ John Roosa, “Indonesian Communism: The Perils of the Parliamentary Path,” in Cambridge History of Communism: Volume 2, The Socialist Camp and World Power 1941–1960s, Norman Nairmark, Silvio Pons, and Sophie Quinn-Judge, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 467–90.
55. ↩ Jeffrey A. Winters, Power in Motion: Capital Mobility and the Indonesian State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
56. ↩ Richard Robison, Indonesia: The Rise of Capital (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986).
57. ↩ Ali Moertopo, Indonesia in Regional and International Cooperation (Jakarta: Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 1973).
58. ↩ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Anton Lucas, “Land Disputes in Indonesia: Some Current Perspectives,” Indonesia 53 (1992): 79–92.
59. ↩ On mining capital and imperialism in Indonesia, see Arianto Sangadji, “Mining Capital and the Indonesian State,” Monthly Review 74, no. 7 (2022): 46–63.
60. ↩ Hadiz, “Indonesia: Order and Terror in a Time of Empire,” in Empire and Neoliberalism in Asia,132–38.
61. ↩ Adhi Priamarizki, “Understanding the Domestic Determinants of Indonesia’s Hedging Policy towards the United States and China,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 46, no. 1 (2024): 19–42.
62. ↩ Priamarizki, “Understanding the Domestic Determinants of Indonesia’s Hedging Policy,” 27.
63. ↩ Priamarizki, “Understanding the Domestic Determinants of Indonesia’s Hedging Policy,” 27–29.
64. ↩ Priamarizki, “Understanding the Domestic Determinants of Indonesia’s Hedging Policy,” 29–30.
65. ↩ Priamarizki, “Understanding the Domestic Determinants of Indonesia’s Hedging Policy,” 32.
66. ↩ Priamarizki, “Understanding the Domestic Determinants of Indonesia’s Hedging Policy,” 32–34.
67. ↩ On domestic consumption as a driver of economic growth in Indonesia, see Steven R. Tabor, “Constraints to Indonesia’s Economic Growth,” ADB Papers on Indonesia, no. 10 (December 2015): 5.
68. ↩ Iqra Anugrah, “Land Control, Coal Resource Exploitation, and Democratic Decline in Indonesia,” Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia 11, no. 2 (2023): 195–213; Ward Berenschot and Ahmad Dhiaulhaq, “The Production of Rightlessness: Palm Oil Companies and Land Dispossession in Indonesia,” Globalizations (September 2023): 1–19.
69. ↩ On financialization of rural and mineral commodities, see, for example, Madeleine Fairbairn, “‘Like Gold with Yield’: Evolving Intersections between Farmland and Finance,” Journal of Peasant Studies 41, no. 5 (2014): 777–95.
70. ↩ Needless to say, not all forms of appropriation of nature are extractivist in colonialist or imperialist sense. For a historical-materialist take on extractivism, see John Bellamy Foster, “Extractivism in the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review 75, no. 11 (April 2024): 1–12.
71. ↩ On the Masterplan, see Hilma Safitri, Debottlenecking dalam Masterplan Percepatan dan Perluasan Pembangunan Ekonomi Indonesia (MP3EI) (Bandung: ARC Books, 2014). On the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate, see Takeshi Ito, Noer Fauzi Rachman, and Laksmi A. Savitri, “Power to Make Land Dispossession Acceptable: A Policy Discourse Analysis of the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE), Papua, Indonesia,” Journal of Peasant Studies 41, no. 1 (2014): 29–50. On the omnibus Bill, see Rafiqa Qurrata A’yun and Abdil Mughis Mudhoffir, “Omnibus Law Shows How Democratic Process Has Been Corrupted,” Indonesia at Melbourne (University of Melbourne), October 12, 2020, unimelb.edu.au.
72. ↩ Iqra Anugrah, “Land Control,” 199–203.
73. ↩ Trissia Wijaya and Lian Sinclair, “An EV-Fix for Indonesia: The Green Development-Resource Nationalist Nexus,” Environmental Politics (April 2024): 1–23.
74. ↩ On developmental outsourcing, see Hofman and Ho, “China’s ‘Developmental Outsourcing.’”
75. ↩ For a brief survey of antiglobalization movements in Indonesia, see Agus R. Rahman, ed., Globalisasi dan Gerakan Anti Globalisasi di Indonesia (Jakarta: Pusat Penelitian Politik LIPI, 2007). For an early reference book for anti-imperialist activists in Indonesia, see Coen Husain Pontoh, Gerakan Massa Menghadang Imperialisme Global (Yogyakarta: Resist Book, 2005).
76. ↩ Rachmi Hertanti, personal communication, December 22, 2023. Hertanti is a longtime alter-globalization and labor activist.
77. ↩ On oligarchic hijacking of Islamist politics in Indonesia, see Vedi R. Hadiz, “The Indonesian Oligarchy’s Islamic Turn?,” Australian Institute of International Affairs, May 23, 2017, internationalaffairs.org.au.
78. ↩ Muhammad Ridha, “What Is New in the Old Pattern of Indonesia’s Student Movement?,” New Mandala, November 13, 2020, newmandala.org.
79. ↩ Azhar Irfansyah, “Apakah Kaudengar Nyanyian Kaum Buruh?,” Islam Bergerak, June 2, 2023, islambergerak.com.