Against the backdrop of power-elite primacy in current Indonesian scholarship, counter-hegemonic politics becomes pressing topic as it has historical roots in Indonesian decolonization struggle in the midst of great World War II among superpowers, organized labor-peasant movement led by Communist Party (PKI) in early years of Cold War (Bertrand, 1995; Rachman, 2011; White 2015), 1951-1965 and student-led uprising that overthrew Suharto’s ruling in post-Cold War period of late 1990s (McRae, Dave. 2001). Civil society regression into conflicting proxies of the contending elites has been recent trend as its two main forces, notably pro-democracy and pro-development, prove unable to be transformative as interface between popular struggles and electoral politics. Instead, it has become the interface between global neoliberal penetration and national elite consolidation. It is within this structural-institutional constraints that counter-hegemonic politics retains its historical significance and sociological imagination.
During two terms of Jokowi ruling, with its stronger power holding in grand coalition, student movements remain the spearheading force in challenging regime policy deemed unpopular and deteriorating living conditions of most vulnerable segments among urban working class, small trading communities, informal service groups and landless peasants in the countryside (see for instance, Sastramidjaja, 2019; Aspinall, 2012).Beside protesting against sectorial policy of the government, series of big protest against legislation Cipta Kerja since 2019 has had crystalizing effects on uniting diverse social movements but the pandemic Covid-19 interrupted the process all along. Nonetheless, this is understandable due to the fact that Indonesian student movement has not strongly allied with labor politics and even worse remains affiliated with ‘nationalist’ and ‘Islamist’ political parties of New Order legacies that significantly hamper its realignment with broad based social movements across the country. Two years policy on social distancing and learning from home also weakens its role as prospective uniting force as proven twice effectively taking place in 1965 and 1998.
While labor movement has often undertaken large-scale protests and inciting insignificant support from broad segments of working class, antinationalist uprisings of Papuan students in Java and in two Papuan provinces, occasionally spark nationwide discussion on the success and failure of Jakarta’s developmentalist approach to Papuan problems. But it should be carefully noted that such uprising has little effect on realigning its cause to other popular struggles in other regions as the uprising framed by its proponents as exclusively Papuan and regularly contained by the central government into security and mere human rights issue. This is equally worth noticing, how complicated and intrigued inter-sectionalism could be crafted as labor activism and other popular struggles differ in their class experience and social-cultural consciousness. Papuan struggle, with its antinationalist leaning, lies in-between secessionism of geopolitical significance (see notably, Rowan Day, 2015; Singh, 2008) and unique localism of decentralized governance as coping with centralized extractive regime in hinterland and food-estate in southern region of Merauke and the neighboring districts (see for instance, McKenna, 2015; Anderson, 2015).
Placing in broader globalization debate, our assessment on current characteristics of social movement in Indonesia indicates that despite the dynamics of diverse popular struggle, in most part it does not go beyond false dilemma between being locally-rooted or being transnationally attached. As false dilemma, it affects social movement into in-depth depoliticization, as already evident in many other postcolonial regions. Drawing on various studies across the country, politicization of social movement as organized popular politics suffers from not only deeply depoliticized subject of developmentalism but also from the formation of Indonesian social movements in last decade which has since the outset been embedded in the narrative of globalization from below while civic movement in urban space operates in line with the narrative of globalization from above. The first category of social movement, commonly labeled as grass root movement destined to sectorialism and local power structure, while the second category confined into civil society subscribed to primacy of elite power as we already discussed at length.
Again, this seemingly contradictory trend in social movement activism poses recurring question of how to locate counter-hegemonic politics. In Activists in Transition: Progressive Politics in Democratic Indonesia (2019), Dibley and Ford, for instance, by showcasing a number of study on social movement, argue that despite faced with stagnation since 2004 social movement remains active in their sectorial activism without laying out possible united blocks. It also applies to Politics of Citizenship in Indonesia (Hiariej & Stokke eds, 2017) in which variety of social movement showcases the primacy of organized citizenship while leaves untouched the question of how such organized citizenship could be extensively recalibrated and intensively restructured as counter hegemonic politics of united social movement nation-wide. However, these two advocacy based studies have provided greater space for further possible projection of more organized politics of popular resistance and negotiation in nation-wide governmental space.
As we reflect on current dynamics of various movements, optimism regarding popular struggle needs to take into account depoliticized effects of globalization from below narrative (see notably Mouffe, 2005). Political-economy of sectorial activism seems to be rested on risk exposure logic wherein popular subject reactivates its agency insofar as it treats subject as risk container and risk solver at once. While in contrast, political economy of intersectional activism situates the counter-hegemonic politics within the nexus between transnationalism of neoliberal governmentality as it is evident in an increasingly multiculturalist-liberalist civil society and the primacy of post-2004 consolidation of national power-elite under the guise of electoral competition and political pluralism. Both approaches share radically different pathways to counter root cause of anti-politics machine behind current euphoria of multicultural civil society and nostalgic resistance of organized labor in New Order (1965-1998) and its class-supremacist precedent in Communist Party (PKI) led labor and peasant movement in (1951-1965).
Political-economy of inter-sectionalism as perquisite for counter hegemonic politics provides lessons learnt from broad based popular activism of post authoritarian Latin America (see notably, Petras & Veltmeyer, 2011, 2005) . Drawn upon this approach, it suggests that counter hegemonic politics as strategic advocacy is only possible to flourish insofar as we are able to highlight the working of discourse and structural constraints or drivers that characterize the absence of counter-hegemonic politics and the transformation of social movements within discursive matrix of neoliberal developmentalism and multiculturalism. As already delineated in preceding sessions, primacy of power elite in post-authoritarian Indonesia stands out as strategic catharsis in technocratic and authoritarian turn in current mode of governing citizen as developmental subject and ensuing risks resulting from its own policy miscalculation. The following are three key interconnected factors as to briefly explain why and how social movements are conditioned to be increasingly disunited and prone to be depoliticized within current primacy of power-elite politics.
Political Party-Driven Democracy
There has been fairly ample study on how power elite deals with democracy in post-New Order Indonesia. In most predominant studies with strong institutionalist and instrumentalist approach, concludes that oligarchic control of the parties has been firmly structured in relation to internal dynamics, inter-level coordination, governmental coalition-opposition and electoral governance. Big ‘nationalist’ parties such as Partai Demokrasi Indonesia-Perjuangan (PDIP), Partai Nasional Demokrat (NasDem), Partai Golongan Karya (Golkar), Partai Gerakan Indonesia Raya (Gerindra) and Partai Demokrat share similar feature of being oligarchic elite-ruled with ‘Islamic’ parties like Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa (PKB), Partai Amanat Nasional (PAN), Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS) (see for instance, Machmudi, 2008; Woodward, 2008; Mietzner 2012 Liddle & Mujani, 2005). Despite substantive change in ideology, strategic priority and interaction between them in the last two decades, the parties, emerged out of political liberalization, have been degenerated into means and vehicle for elite-power competition, survival and expansion (Tan, 2012; Aspinall & Berenschot, 2019; Mietzner, 2013). These parties then have aligned more deeply to the state institutions, or projected their existence to governmental affairs, than being a constant site of popular demand aggregation and articulation.
Internal coup within the parties and even external meddling as evident in the recent case of Democrat Party and PDIP, illustrate the contentious nature of political party. Supported by public debate that keeps normalizing this elitist discussion on political party, the coups disclose politician-party encounter, resembling property-ownership relation. This contentious rivalry characterizes internal dynamics of the parties from national, provincial to district branches, while national leadership in charge keeps all the three branches in check with its all-embracing power. Such contentious internal-external dynamics reveals the fragility and instability of power-holding and simultaneously the strategic centrality of political party as the only vehicle to attain and exercise executive-legislative authority. In that way, what matters is not their relation to, or representation for popular constituence, but their constant attachment to party as organization of profession—political survival and projection.
Taking political party as democracy institution and site of struggle, it has been evident that encounter between social movements and the parties are mutually negating and unproductive. Though studies on their encounter are relatively absent, there are ample cases to illustrate their mutual distrust as they share different mode of demand aggregation and popular representation (see for instance, Caraway et al., 2019, 2015; Wilson, 2019). Institutionally structured within electoral governance with principal matrix of ‘electoral districting’ and ‘numerical electorate’, political party, either as competing organization or as group of politicians, takes pragmatic approach, bypassing programmatic-long term stance in establishing, conserving and expanding its popular constituence. In contrast, social movements articulate diverse demands, each with its own rallying issue, network, and often beyond class, ethnic-religious and territorial divide. These two differing practical scenarios, though rather easily distinguishable, have not so far been addressed by competing parties and the movements.
However, brief explanation above is fairly insufficient for the simple fact that bargaining position of the movement in its affiliation and redirection of the party’s pragmatic agenda proves far weaker as the movements come into negotiation in sporadic and often overtly assertive fashions. As evident in the last ten years, social-movement activists are relatively absent in big parties and have sought to initiate failed new parties, or detaching themselves from this engagement and kept pursue their cause as public watchdogs and pressure groups in policy-making. While equally interesting, nation-wide civil society activists, spokespersons of political liberalization, are mostly integrated into big ‘nationalist’ and ‘Islamic’ parties, with less connection to urban labor unions, suburban peasantry, gender activism, environmental groups and indigeneity movement.
Venturing beyond instrumentalist-institutionalist understanding of the deadlock, counter-hegemony approach takes seriously the primacy of power-elite as current democracy epicenter to be dealt with critical assessment of both political parties and social movement at once. Political party becomes centralized and strategically central simultaneously, due in greater part to the changing nature of the state, from its role as political space for contentious articulation of diverse popular demands into closed arena of political elite-pluralism. In this elite-controlled state, by which political party and election are the founding instrument and mechanism, popular demands mostly articulated by diverse social movements have been replaced with ‘public policy’ regime, collection of scientifically justified need-response in neoliberal developmentalism. This substantive change of state conduct into old fashion of New Order’s bureaucratic developmentalism is another price to pay resulting partly from relatively absence of social movements in national political space through their active inclusion into political parties.
New Corporatism of Citizenship
Indonesia is no exception when we locates politics of social movement in the interplay between global neoliberal norms and national governmental conducts as the interplay shapes and transforms organized popular struggles across the archipelagic country. Following the footsteps of one decade of SBY-promoted ‘good governance’, Jokowi presidency has incorporated disaster-responsive developmentalism as the government applies planetarism as one of its central concept in policy making. Nonetheless, in post pandemic policy framework, there is balanced policy approach undertaken that de-carbonized-green economy transition should not disrupt pro-growth industrial projection. This policy stance is worth noticing particularly because it signals the persistence of extractive-economy regime that has caused environmental disruption affecting agriculture-food security and social-cultural cohesion (see for instance, Gellert, 2019). As various studies show (see for instance, Brad & Hein, 2022; Li Murray & Semedi, 2021; Li Murray, 2014; Afiff & Lowe, 2007), extractive industry has been one of the source in the rise of social movements such as agrarian reform movement, indigenity politics and environment advocacy.
Mass uprisings against UU Cipta Kerja, led by students since 2019, are actually a fierce response to neoliberalization of policy framework opening broader space for foreign direct investment and mobility of transnational labor. The crucial message of the uprisings lies in the demand for more inclusive policy making into which broad based popular articulations should have fair chance to contest and negotiate between themselves and between united movements and the state planning boards of related ministries. However, the uprisings stalled with the coming of pandemic with which the government unexpectedly finds political justification to strengthen disaster-responsive policy framework and to reintegrate the framework to World Economic Forum-formulated global policy together with other supranational institutions, notably IMF, World Bank and European Union. Instead of inviting organized movements to debating the new economic globalism, the technocratic ruling elite, spearheaded by three ministries of finance, economy and investment, behave in antidemocratic ways as they get themselves accountable to the unelected globalist leadership.
As the most recent example, the case of Cipta Kerja Legislation draws our attention back to the question of social movement as organized citizenship in the context of neoliberalized policy making and the centrality of technocracy in the primacy of power-elite. Quite different from New Order’s governmentality, current nationalized neoliberalism incorporates citizenship in two ways, from top-down exclusion and bottom-up inclusion. Top-down exclusion is the technocratic way of engaging citizen as targeted segments of the population, from which government-formulated sectorialism comes to existence and operate in three administration levels, including village development with its special policy framework. Though this is one of the defining factor behind the institutional failure of New Order Developmentalism, and surely the unfinished project of post-authoritarian reform, politicians of all parties and branches, have accepted this technocratic sectorialism as principal mode of governing population and their immediate interests. As unquestionably true, the politicians then perceive it as more urgent to be in constant negotiation with the government officials than practicing aggregative-representative function as they have to bring demands of their constituence into policy-making.
In contrast to the exclusion of targeted population as organized citizens, bottom-up inclusion operates as anti-politics by which citizens as legal subjects integrate into policy making insofar as they are treated or perceived themselves in a state of risk-prone. It might work through loosely patronage or more binding clientelism, but the whole point is to ensure the ‘human security’, relating to absolute poverty, malnutrition, forced migration, and ecological disaster. Their inclusion into policy making is carried out by village officials, district government and local politicians of their electoral constituence. It has also been commonplace that local NGOs activists as professionals are the most actively responsive to this risk-prone approach, either by way of directly addressing the risks or asking the officials to take immediate response. The bottom-up inclusion revives sub-politics of ‘risk-society’ in which citizens is retroactively found in risk-prone situation, and in extreme fashion, their agency lies in their vulnerability as the citizens under this typology are also risk-containing and risk-producing at once.
Neoliberal NGOs, notably in pro-poor and development advocacy, are the key players in mainstreaming this sub-politics, which is anti-democratic in nature and perpetuate depoliticizing of the most vulnerable population. Instead of endorsing the vulnerable to proactively engaging the state in organized movement, most of the professional activists have been complicit with the state officials and local politicians in prolonging their dependence on crafted external response. There are relatively very few cases indicating the advocacy has succeeded in empowering them to independently organize, mobilize and negotiate with the state and other non-state forces. Perpetual dependence is the desired outcome for the state and NGOs to present themselves in rather ‘philanthropic’ manner in certain society of targeted population already considered as risk- exposure. Instead of questioning and addressing root causes of the risk-prone, such complicity serves to fulfill ‘best practice’ or ‘success story’ which is one of the requirement in profiling the effectiveness and responsiveness of the government, politician, and NGOs.
The merging of top-down exclusion and bottom-up inclusion has put in place macro-micro economy of emergency. In this new policy framework, politics of citizenship is turning upside-down as it institutionalizes primacy of power-elite, erodes citizen’s capability of organized movement and (re)produces risks while naturalizing them and normalizing technocratic mode of governing. The existing social movements should cope with this patrimonial technocracy and realize the extent to which this trend is not local but national as it is integral to global phenomenon as evident in other countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Learning from Latin American experience, the first task required is to decolonize organized politics of the movements from dependence mindset, and then enlarging engagement with other organized groups of citizens and formulating common issue as common ground to launch joint agenda of collective action. In doing so, patronage and clientelism upon which the power-elite evades constitutional-democratic accountability could be broken as to reopen political space where policy making in all levels is guided by democratic politics. This is not an easy task but abound to take, in part because state legitimacy in democracy rests on popular support particularly through electoral politics.
Local-National Movement Disjuncture
Another pressing challenge that situates the erosion of counter-hegemonic politics nation-wide should be seen in the growing disconnection between local and national movement. Political liberalization in the opening years of millennium leaves the task of connecting relatively unaddressed and now stands out as unfinished agenda of substantive democracy. To better understand the disconnection, we need to start looking at two different directions the nation took in a context of reforming the state and reactivating citizenship. State reform has been the rallying points of political liberalization, and undertaken at the core of New Order power structure, notably presidential authority, reenactment of check & balance in trias-politica and civilian control over military beside its jurisdictive separation from national police (see for instance, Kingsbury, 2003; Crouch, 2010). While reactivating citizenship took the forms of realizing civic liberty, social-economic rights and popular participation in electoral politics (see for instance, Hadiwinata, 2003; Freedman & Tiburzi, 2012).
Even though these two directions sought to result in circular impacts that democratizing the state means strengthening citizenship and vice versa, the introduction of decentralization proves across time to facilitate the localization of popular struggle in one side, and centralization of cosmopolitan struggle in the other side.Civic movements, often labeled as prodemocracy advocacy led by NGOs with national outreach, has persistent focus on civic liberty and controlling the central state. This trend continues to the present as the defining issues of their advocacy have shifted in line with changing national discourse, that is, national integration and electoral governance in Habibie, Gus Dur and Megawati administrations (1999-2004), good governance and its coronary ‘best practice’ of local autonomy and anti-corruption campaign in two terms of SBY administration (2004-2014), and effective governance and multiculturalism in two terms of Jokowi ruling. Their persistent attention to predominant issues in the capital Jakarta drags them into political proxies in recent presidency-centered electoral politics, but simultaneously has gradually created disjuncture between dispersedly localized popular politics across the country and their elitist projection in the center of power.
As central and local power structure are deeply connected through governmental bureaucracy and political party chain of command, cosmopolitan advocacy and social movements share similar experience of cooptation with differing degree of integration. While in the capital cosmopolitans turning proxies has shown disengagement from urban labor activism, urban poor advocacy and advocacy of informal service sector and gender issue, diverse social movements in regions, particularly outside Java Island, remain rooted in popular struggle such as agrarian-peasantry, urban working class politics environmental and local gender movement. But this democratic roots of the local movements have rapidly eroded as elite capture of local development deepens into social-economic fabrics of local communities (see for instance, Nordholt & Klinken, 2007; Buehler, 2010). The options are limited, either integrating into local government-centered patronage and party-based clientelism or completely excluded from policy-making arena. In most cases, social movements, instead of organizing united blocks among themselves, favor neoliberal governing as their respective leaders accept new promising role as brokers of local developmentalist regime with prospective future of being politicians from parties they have insignificant leverage and influence.
Elite capture, through patronage and clientelism, gets normalized in local politics in part due to organizational pressure from national leaders of political parties for broadening and securing electoral constituence (See for instance, Howard & Mulholland, 2011; Aspinall, 2014; Aspinall & Sukmajati. 2016). Besides securing their own political career, incumbent heads of province and district, together with leaders of district level parties, such pressure is perceived of strengthening party’s stronghold in the local administration and broader community. But it should be noted that current national policy via strategic regional programs often places the local elites into dilemma of streamlining the programs or taking side with the impacted segments of the population. In most cases where local communities are fiercely protesting, they prefer to be non-responsive and invest more public spending on patronage-clientelistic based projects in targeted villages. Equally interesting, current resurgence of social movements is also triggered by the destructive impacts of the programs, especially on Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Maluku, North Maluku, and East Nusa Tenggara. Nonetheless, it is far from certain to what extent this risk-provoked resurgence is capable of sustaining and expanding the movements to capture other popular demands in the regions.
Relocating the disjuncture between cosmopolitan civil society and organist movement, it is imperative to comprehend circular impacts of political liberalization in post-authoritarian Indonesia. The absence of counter-hegemonic politics on the part of united social movements notably in the last ten years has been the consequence of the absence in national and local realignment. Both popular politics pursue democracy objectives and values, but mutually entrapped in double space of elite capture of democracy as their respective directions parted too far away, that requires fundamental reappraisal of the failure and taps on recurrent problems produced by technocratic developmentalism to launch new organized politics of popular struggles. Elaborating more systematically on the disjuncture will help clarify local challenges of different structural hindrance and political modality as one among other crucial starting points in taking the organized movements into regional space and then recalibrating the regions into national landscape. This approach, with radicalizing bottom-up politics, needs to be in parallel with the organized move of its popular counterpart in the center or around the core of national power-elite structure. With historical remainder in mind, the longer the disjuncture has become the primacy of power elite will stretch its hegemony as the nation enters period of its disillusion leading to national disunion.
In Search for Counter-Hegemony Movement
Counter-hegemonic politics today, as we applies to contemporary Indonesia, is now possible in a broader context of emerging multipolar forces in Global South. As we witness in the last five years increasing number of united social movements has won national election in in most Latin America states, while Africans begin their joint efforts on remaking union of postcolonial countries. It is also the recent case in Asia, where Arab countries of post-GWOT Middle East and countries of Central Asia are realigning among themselves, as India and Southeast Asian countries are pursuing more balancing stance in geopolitical rift between China-Russia and USA-EU/NATO countries. In this multiform clashes, the question is no longer so much about ‘democracy versus autocracy’ as mainstream western democracy scholarship wants us to believe, but about globalist-led capitalism versus nationalist-governed economy that bring to the center recurring debate on the decline of neocolonial hegemony and the rise of decolonial resistance.
In such prospective light of counter-hegemonic politics, our assessment on Indonesian democracy seeks to reorient academic attention to the relation between state and society by strongly arguing that the primacy of power elite has intertwined with the disarticulation of popular struggle in post-authoritarian Indonesia. Our assessment does not entertain the widely held pessimism among neoliberal-institutionalist scholars that democracy in Indonesia stagnates or even regresses. The way our study grasps the stagnation fundamentally differ to the extent that the elite capture of democracy has been the unavoidable consequence of relative absence of united political blocks as counter-hegemonic politics. Democracy study, as political exercise of organized citizenship beyond institutionalism and instrumentalism, brings popular struggle back to the core of what is politics and what is demos, within which Indonesia as a nation of popular sovereignty was established in anticolonial struggle and in constant projection to emancipatory nationalism and global decolonialism.
The exposition of three key discursive factors as drivers of stagnation aims at exploring the genesis and the process out of which power of the elite becomes surplus and popular sovereignty suffers from chronic deficiency. In this stagnation lens, political parties and electoral governance are existential vehicle and regulatory framework for elite-formation, survival and consolidation, while popular politics is increasingly fragmented and disoriented as it falls into patronage and clientelism. Locating in two disconnected spaces of struggle, social movements prove unable to get united, marked by enduring lack in understanding the ways neoliberal governmentality operates within discourses of national integration, good governance and multiculturalism. This persistent lack of discursive understanding is also made worse by scholarship advocacy which in most part has paid too much attention to elite power as liberalist debacle while ignoring popular politics as democratic practice of decolonialism. The ultimate danger is lurking behind such scholarly enterprise, that power elite is root cause, source and actor of democracy progress and stagnation simultaneously.
To conclude, our assessment is the opening endeavor to advance counter-hegemonic politics as response to democracy stagnation in Indonesia. As variety of advocacy based studies have shown, social movement is not in decline, but as we argue, the central problem lies precisely in its counter-hegemonic deficiency. With this deficit in mind, our analysis is rather optimistic that the political currency of power elite is always contingent and unstable, and the fact that technocratic developmentalism of its policy framework marked with multiple crisis of its own making. Recurring conflict among power elite, together with their lack of professional competence and institutional accountability has helped raise popular consciousness on rampant abuse of authority and illegality of governmental conducts. Multiple crisis escalates, either at national or local level, and we are witnessing rapid increase in public criticism via social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram (see notably, (Molaei, 2015; Castell, 2015). Digital democracy is another crucial defense of active citizenship in time of disorganized social movement, and the democratic battle in this landscape should be reckoned with due to its virality of public oversight and disruption of establishment narratives.
In light of counter-hegemonic analysis, it is instructive for organized citizenship to take further steps on contesting multiple crises of hegemony in technocratic developmentalism. The degree to which such resistance is effective belongs to the advancement of united social movements in their local-national realignment and political projection. Strategic thinking and tactical mindset are premium of soft power, while popular sovereignty of organized citizenship stands out as ideological pillar as the power elite seeks to monopolize the production of national interests and developmentalist subjects. Equally instructive is the lessons learned from our history of organized movements, notably anticolonial struggle in World War II context and decolonial geopolitics of Non-Alignment Movement in Cold War context of 1950s and 1960s. While at the same time, counter-hegemonic politics in Indonesia must take lessons learned from the successful rise of united movements in anti-neoliberal Latin America and other parts of the changing world.
(August 2023)