Jafar Suryomenggolo. Organising under the Revolution: Unions and the State in Java, 1945-48. Singapore and Kyoto: NUS Press in association with Kyoto University Press, 2013, xiii+215p.

Abstract

Organising under the Revolution: Unions and the State in Java, 1945-48 Jafar Suryomenggolo Singapore and Kyoto: NUS Press in association with Kyoto University Press, 2013, xiii+215p.Visitors to Lawang Sewu might be confused as to the building's significance. Situated in the heart of Semarang on the north coast of Central Java, the building is Indonesia's most famous haunted house; hence the crowds of domestic tourists. In addition to ghosts, the massive colonial era build- ing is also home to conflicting and competing historical narratives. Once the center of the Dutch East Indies Railway Company, Lawang Sewu was an important site in the history of imperialism and the struggle for independence. Today, as in most of post-colonial Indonesia, the public history monuments in Semarang speak to the role of the military and other state institutions in the revo- lution. For over three decades, Suharto's New Order promoted this army-centric narrative as the only acceptable story of the revolution. The Suharto regime explicitly rejected the contribution of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), unions, and other workers' organization to the fight for merdeka, freedom and independence. In Semarang, the Diponegoro Division army museum and a generic phallic nationalist obelisk dwarf Lawang Sewu's small brick memorial to the railway workers who died fighting in 1945. Nowhere is there a mention of history of Semarang as center for union and PKI organization. Indeed, one has to be extremely attentive to find mention of Indonesian workers in the national revolution. Jafar Suryomenggolo's Organising under the Revo- lution: Unions and the State in Java, 1945-48 is an important effort to reframe the narrative and write the worker in the revolution.Organising under the Revolution is ostensibly a work of labor history. However, the implica- tion of Suryomenggolo's well-researched and carefully argued book go far beyond the specifics of these four years of union activism. This work calls for a reconsideration of the Suharto era paradigm of the army and the state being the primary actors in the Indonesian revolution. He persuasively demonstrates that workers, organized more often as local syndicalist groups rather than in a nation- ally controlled movement, made independent and significant contributions to both the struggle for merdeka and to the creation of a new socio-economic order. Reminiscent of E. P. Thompson's argument that the English working class was at its own making and actually played a role in creat- ing its own identity, Suryomenggolo offers a strategic intervention that situates the Indonesian workers as active players in their own history.While based upon primary research into the details of labor activism in Central and East Java, Organising under the Revolution is also theoretically sophisticated. From the opening sentence the author acknowledges his inspiration came from a reading of Benedict Anderson's Java in a Time of Revolution (1972). The influence of Anderson's critical, politically engaged, and intellectually rigorous approach to Indonesian history can be seen throughout Suryomenggolo's work. Both authors recognize the crucial impact of the revolutionary events on the construction of post- colonial Indonesia. Their concern with the details of the revolution is to reinsert the Indonesian workers into a narrative dominated by the state-centric approach. As both the introduction and chapter one, Organised Labour and the Postcolonial State, make clear, what is at stake is not simply getting the details of history right but rather putting the people's agency back into history. Doing so would return labor's political credibility, something Suharto successfully destroyed. The implications of the book's opening argument are that rescuing the lost history of Indonesian labor would help to revitalize contemporary Indonesian labor activism and organizations. Suryomenggolo's de-centering of the state and de-militarizing of the historical narrative, thus has direct implications for issues of social justice in Indonesia's post-colonial socio-economic order. …