What revolutionary theory do we have?
By Bosman Batubara (Postdoctoral researcher at Forest City Project)

I am grateful to Janwillem Liebrand, Femke van Noorloos, and Marit Meijer for giving me this chance to discuss Christian Lund’s article: An Air of Legality – legalization under conditions of rightlessness in Indonesia, which was published last year in the Journal of Peasant Studies.  I also thank my colleagues, Lubabun Ni’am and Noer Fauzi Rachman, with whom I discussed Christian’s article and my comment on that article (this work).

Christian Lund’s paper identifies a paradox in the relationship between state, law, property/land, and people in Indonesia. That paradox is: even though the law is most often against them, people see the law as vital for them. The article combines the law’s attraction, rightlessness, and improvised legalization to open up the paradox. Law’s attraction means the state has the utmost legitimation of law, and the law gets its highest legitimation/idealization through the state. The rightlessness emphasizes that law is not similar to justice. The law limits access. It operates through colonization, class, gender, and race. Improvised legalization explains how people manoeuvre by taking advantage and using the tension between the ideal and the actual state.

In Indonesia, the colonial state established itself as the primary authority on land, including through two laws: (1) Forest Laws 1865 declared three-quarters of the colony as forest; (2) Agrarian Law 1870 claimed agricultural land without ownership as state-owned. Forest and Agrarian Laws therefore were and are instrumental in land dispossession. With that, the colonial government established itself as the owner and regulator of land rights. This colonial arrangement infuses the post-colonial context.

Christian vividly captured what is going on and brought it to us/readers in a very well-telling article of how the state hegemonically controls the political imagination of Indonesian, with no exception of its activists. My short comment on this: perhaps Christian is right in his article that the state hegemonically controls land politics through law. Beyond land politics, I think – or I feel like – there are many people in Indonesia, including myself, who are avoiding something that has relationships with the court, police, and hospital – the state.

Nevertheless, I admire Christian’s article. For me this article is a massive contribution to Indonesian land/agrarian studies. Congratulations! I congratulate Christian not for the sake of academic politeness but I mean it. Below I elaborate my argument through conversation/discussion on more-than Marx’s primitive accumulation and more-than Lenin’s capitalist development.

In terms of theoretical conversation, Christian’s An Air of Legality helps me to understand that the land dispossession from the colonial up to the post-colonial Indonesia is more-than Marx’s primitive accumulation. Marx’s primitive accumulation, by my reading, basically has two sides: land grabbing and the conversion of the dispossessed into wage-labour. The question of land and the question of labour. What Christian’s An Air of Legality tells us, yes, that was/is a land grabbing through colonialization, and it keeps moving in the post-colonial era. The dispossessed are converted into landless, ready to sell their labour power. However, not only those but the dispossessed somehow were also insulted. I can add that if the dispossessed become the rural-to-urban migrants, as I encountered many in my research in Jakarta, they are not absorbed as wage-labour by the formal sector of industries and have to find their ways. By reading Christian’s article, I can see the Indonesian version of more-than Marx’s primitive accumulation: the combined interaction of land grabbing + proletarianization + insulting + the production of relative surplus population.

Second, by my reading, the widely appreciated discourse/perspective in Indonesian agrarian studies is class analysis or class differentiation in the countryside. Lenin’s explanation of Russian capitalist development somehow influenced the analysis of Indonesian agrarian scholars. According to Lenin, there are two types of capitalist development in Russia. The first is the Russian path, in which the feudal landlord developed themselves into agrarian capitalists. The second is the American path in which the rural smallholders became the agrarian capitalists after outcompeting their fellow smallholders.

In Indonesia, that is only sometimes the case. The rural landowners did not expand into agrarian capitalists. Their surpluses are invested in other sectors, such as sending their kids to advance education in the cities to later become state apparatuses or pegawai negeri sipil in Bahasa Indonesia. (This is another example of how strong the state is.) Rather than developing their own business, people included themselves in the state. Of course, there are exceptions. However, it is safe to say that this is not uncommon. The inclusion of agrarian elites into the state goes hand in hand with the fact that the state is the biggest landlord in Indonesia, as Christian’s article tells us.

Because of this point, I admire Christian’s work even more. Building on Christian’s work, I can now ask a question as my attempt to open up different topics of conversation. If the state is the most prominent land owner, and the trend is that rural landowners do not invest their surpluses in expanding their agricultural business, why is the Lenin-influenced capitalist development analysis of class dynamics in Indonesia so widely appreciated?

If the existing theories, such as Marx’s primitive accumulation and Lenin’s capitalist development, do not fit the Indonesian context, what theory can explain Indonesia’s capitalist development? What kind of capitalism exists in Indonesia? I am not throwing these questions for the sake of questioning. For me, they are theoretical questions as well as practical ones. Politics needs good theory. If we do not know what to revolt on, how can we have a revolution? Lenin himself said that without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.

On this point, I do not share a similar view with Christian. I see the paradox identified by Christian as a contradiction; this is to appreciate that the seemingly contrasting conditions have a dialectical relationship. The notion of paradox does not push you to identify the next move. It does not bring the revolutionary element of the so what question – at least, that is how I see Christian’s article. The notion of contradiction, or dialectical relationship, always comes with the so what question; it pushes you to think through the possible synthesis of the existing contradiction.

For the sake of the next move, therefore, before asking “What revolution do we need,” like the question posed by the 2022 LANDAC Annual Conference last year, please allow me to take a step back to ask a question: What revolutionary theory do we have?