The Indonesian “Suara Sosialis” project
On 27 July 2003 I sent off the final edition of an Indonesian-language e-mail magazine called Suara Sosialis, or Socialist Voice.
This concluded a six-year project to produce Marxist material in that language. I started sending it to 20 addresses initially, with mostly English language material but one item in Indonesian each month. As my language skills got better, I moved to exclusively Indonesian language content. The substantial articles went on a website, step by step. The site promoted the newsletter -- classic e-commerce principles at work!
It was the first-ever Marxist website in the Indonesian language.
I could never have done this without help from an Indonesian comrade, Setiabudi, who lives in Melbourne and who cleaned up the texts in the way only a native speaker can do.
The first articles were a popular “what is socialism” series. After that we moved to more substantial material, most importantly John Molyneux’s What is the Real Marxist Tradition? The plan was to work through all the key theoretical issues. Eventually there were all sorts of topics covered on the site, from “Marxism and Religion” to “Discussion of Homosexuality”.
Subscribers multiplied, till the list reached about 250. We also participated in putting the first Indonesian language versions of key documents onto the web, including the Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s April Theses.
Each year, I went off to Indonesia with a new set of material, tightly laid out and laser-printed so that activists there could photocopy the texts as much as possible from the copies I handed out. Thinking the Suharto regime might take an undesired interest in me, I used the pseudonym “Julian”. The name stuck, and that Julian guy developed a certain profile around the Indonesian left. His less obscure real-life double spoke at a number of public forums and debates around Java.
In between visits, Julian became a fixture on the “Indo-Marxist” e-mail discussion list. One furious debate with Ma’ruf, a leader of the People’s Democratic Party (PRD), got wide attention. We canvassed the virtues and sins of Ma’ruf’s organisation and mine without kid gloves. As it happened, Ma’ruf soon left the PRD and I later left the ISO, and we have had many friendly discussions since that debate.
There are now perhaps 100,000 words of Indonesian-language Marxist materials on the Suara Sosialis site, and much of it has been published in that country, in the form of three books. How many pages of photocopied material have got around, we can only speculate.
It was sad to end the project, but by 2003 it had clearly run its course. The participants had developed new priorties and circumstances had changed. The reality is that I had buried myself in Indonesia work partly because I was dissatisfied with my organisation. I figured they wouldn’t take much interest in the details of what I did in a foreign country and a foreign language. But this only worked so long. After Suharto fell, the British SWP leaders did take an interest and generated what I thought was a mistaken line on the “Indonesian Revolution” -- which however rapidly became orthodoxy in my own group. I was discontented again. There was no escape! Except of course to leave the ISO, which I eventually did, without rancour.
Anyway, better not to get in a rut: the key material we set out to produce was basically complete. If you want to take a quick look at it, click here
.So it’s selamat jalan (farewell) to the project. But the perjuangan (struggle) continues.