Towards a New Republic of Indonesia

Why Write?

Why am I writing? For Fun? No, I have genuine complaints about the global system and its functions.

It baffles me how much people don't actually know what they are talking about, the only honest people today are usually the most chastised. It seems as though anyone who opposes the status quo but dares to question the existing anti-establishment movements, especially ones that look back at the enemies that we defeated or even just ask basic questions is always chastised. Where freedom is sacrificed for Abstract ideas and goals.

We always say we are advocates for freedom, but I say that's bullshit. If freedom is what you want then why do you still cling to some of the bits and bobs of the existing system?

This can be interpreted as either a manifesto or just as a complaint about politics and my life.

The Alienation of the Youth.

The Family is this one institution praised by many a conservative as an important cornerstone of society, the building block of society.

Well, I'm here to tell you all that it's bullshit.

The Family as an institution, especially the Nuclear Family is a fabrication of modern capitalism. It atomises and isolates the individual from the rest of society by creating a barrier via the holy mother and father relation. Oedipus desires his mother, but his father does not let him. I desire, but my parents do not let me.

"It is for your own good!" bullshit. You want me to be your trophy, you want me to be shaped the way you want me, how can you say that you are doing this for my sake? How dare you take away what I desire to do!

The psychology of the East is to be "perfect", for who? Tell me, for who? FOR WHO AM I TRYING TO BE PERFECT FOR?!

This kind of collectivism, this... totalitarianism makes me sick. Why must you dictate every single bit of my actions? Why can't I develop on my own? The fact that you are controlling my strings instead of me doing it myself is precisely why I am not independent. The development from childhood to adulthood is a fucking involuntary boot camp, during puberty all the demands get harder and harder whilst we become more and more rebellious. Why? Why must we suffer just for having our desires?

Now, of course, families often don't have time anymore to teach their kids... how to be obedient. This is where Schools come.

The Schools of the Ancients (Agora) were free and open, it was more so like an open club where people could hang out and learn in a mutual manner where "teacher" and "student" are flexible roles and we can choose what we want to learn and focus on and switch at any time.

The Schools of the Moderns follow a set curriculum, a strict timetable from 7 am to somewhere from 12 am to 3 pm. You cannot choose what you want to learn, what you wanna specialise in, or even cancel it altogether, you just have to hitch a ride from home, put on a smile, shake hands, sit, listen to the teacher's yap, hoping you don't bore yourself to sleep, do your homework, and go home. Fun, right?

From age 6 to 18 (excluding kindergarten), we are sent to fucking boot camps. Anybody who cannot be good and subservient is a "misfit" and must be sent to special facilities. Ah yes, the people who can't follow along with these artificial institutions made to instill social conformity in children and especially teenagers, the most active and yearning demographic and to make them into obedient workers.

The stuff they teach you is merely a facade, the point isn't to make you learn otherwise you'd have a choice in what you do want to learn, no the point is so that you listen carefully and follow what your future bosses will say to you. If the stuff they teach you in school were beneficial (like algebra) then we would've put it into action immediately (yes I am arguing for Child Labour). If Algebra is useful, then let us put it into practice in the real world, not just try to memorise equations in a boring classroom, let us use it in the real world so that we can get the hang of it.

The age of the internet allows us to take a step back into those ancient schools in a digital form, from people of different nationalities no less, to anonymously socialise and learning from others whilst treating each other as mostly equals.

The conspiracy of the seniles see this and realise that this could lead to a breakdown of social conformity and the desire for exploration of what is "out there". Thus they start preaching against technology and trying to moderate it in order to keep the status quo. The Elders knows best... how to crush the spirit of the desiring Youth, to regulate the media we consume and to ban certain kinds of media from being published because dear God that we have anything more riveting than Adit, Sopo, Jarwo with messages that makes you think more than basic morality (which is necessarily conformist), and to crack down on being a punk and defying authority in any meaningful way.

This boot camp that stripped us from our childhood innocence and teenage adventurism, both in the outside world and the digital spectacle. From Birth to 18 years old should be the times that we explore ourselves, that we play and be free, that we express what we think but we are not allowed to do so because on the front they say it's to "instill good morals" but in reality this is a mask behind the real purpose: to serve Capitalism.

Capitalism: The One who shook the Earth and its Kingdoms.

“How you are fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How you are cut down to the ground, you who weakened the nations! For you have said in your heart: ‘I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will also sit on the mount of the congregation on the farthest sides of the north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will be like the Most High.’ yet you shall be brought down to Sheol, to the lowest depths of the Pit.

Those who see you will gaze at you, and consider you, saying: ‘Is this the man who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms, who made the world as a wilderness and destroyed its cities, who did not open the house of his prisoners?’

All the kings of the nations, all of them, sleep in glory, everyone in his own house; But you are cast out of your grave like an abominable branch, like the garment of those who are slain, thrust through with a sword, who go down to the stones of the pit, like a corpse trodden underfoot. You will not be joined with them in burial, because you have destroyed your land and slain your people. The brood of evildoers shall never be named. Prepare slaughter for his children because of the iniquity of their fathers, lest they rise up and possess the land, and fill the face of the world with cities.”

Is what we will say when we look down on Capitalism and its Systems of Control and Obedience. The Tyrants of Babylon, the Patricians of Old, the Ningrats, the Caesars, the Lords, and the Bourgeoisie have taken form and created the systems that control us today. The Law of Private Property ought to be respected, that this factory, this farm, and so on is his possession. This is all well and good but if only he did not need workers to work it, if he did not need a disciplined and eager workforce to plough his farmland, to work heavy machinery, to make buildings and so on. These tyrants know well that they need to control the population, to instill obedience and discipline towards their masters.

For this, they make Modern Schools, the myth of the Nuclear Family, institutionalise religion not as a belief of the volksgeist to explain the world but as an authority one must obey, and turned the nation from a collective of similar cultures to a puppet that the people must serve rather than create. Culture is no longer a phenomena of the people but a phenomena of capital.

Capitalism has transformed, shifted, and modified the cultures of all the nations, all the peoples, and the period of postmodernity has dissolved any semblance of "truth" in this world, replaced by a spectacular mess of immitations and simulacras of real life. Real life then immitates the spectacle and the spectacle records that and the cycle continues.

There is no longer a "National Logos" in much of the nations of the world, in the era after the Cold War, only Liberal Democracy exists. Originally, there were only ethnic faiths: Roman, Chinese, Slavic, Indian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Judaism, and so on. Then came Universalism in the form of Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam of whom then broke apart into different sects which transcended old ethnic boundaries, the creation of the Feudal State and Kings who all justified their existence by God's name at the same time despite going to war with each other a lot. The King was also the centerpiece of the National Logos at the time as his will is considered the nation's will.

Cut to the American and French Revolutions and the National Logos is embedded in the population themselves again, a return to what we can deem as the "volksprinzip" ("People's Principle" in German) with the introduction of the system of Liberal Democracy. Old Liberalism also coincided with Nationalism; the overthrow of the principle of "Vox Regi, Vox Patriae" and replaced with "Vox Populi, Vox Patriae".

Liberalism here is pretty revolutionary as it shows that the people needs no Master, but themselves and their faith in the volksprinzip. Soon, the Nation will be transcended again with the development of Capitalism, Industrialisation and the World Market which brought us the International Proletariat.

The Proletariat is 100% Nationless, his will is no longer the nation's will, it is the elite's will. This then requires a reaction to this development and thus birthed Socialism. Socialism aims to create an International Proletarian State as an exercise of the nationless proletariat's will over his own life.

The Proletariat owns nothing, and he has nothing. All he has is his labour and his body to which he sells his labour-power to earn a wage, the price of his labour-power to which labour-power is transformed into a commodity to be sold in the market. The Proletariat is alienated from the exercise of his will, and the ownership of what he uses to make things, the labour he used to make the commodity.

Naturally, the worker would be pretty pissed about this which is not what the bourgeoisie wants and thus he created institutions to regulate the development of the proletarian will. The soon-to-be proletariat must be obedient to authority, to follow certain guidelines and to restrict his access into the outside world. If he could not do this then too bad, he is left to be on the streets as a reserved army of labour. Thus he is left as a dilemma: be obedient or be a bum.

Naturally, most prefer to be good little boys and girls and sell their souls to the devil in exchange for money.

Now, this all comes back to bite us in the ass. As Indonesians, we affirm Pancasila as our volksprinzip. Alright, fair, but what is Pancasila?

1. Ketuha- No, I don't mean what each Sila says, I mean what they mean. PPKN, taught in schools tells us exactly what we need to do, "be obedient!", "don't cheat!", "respect each other!", "be loyal!", "respect those higher up!" and so on. Meanwhile, the elites do the exact opposite whilst selling our country off to foreign merchants like China and America.

Pancasila not only has been bribed to look the other way, but also doesn't even know what exactly it is.

During Liberal Democracy, Pancasila was nominally the volksprinzip. Inside there was a multitude of factions fighting for power; the PKI, PNI, Masyumi, Nahdlatul Ulama, Murba, and so on. In 1959, Guided Democracy was established under the authoritarian rule of President Soekarno. From this, he has created his own version of the furherprinzip and Pancasila is what he says it is. And Pancasila is Nasakom (Nationalism, Religionism, Communism) in order to unify the interests of the Military, the Religious Fundamentalists, and the Proletariat. Then came the 30th September Movement and the Supersemar which put Soeharto as the next Fuhrer of Indonesia.

He massacred all communists in the country and created a right wing version og Nasakom by reducing the number of parties to 3: PDI, PPP and Golkar. Now, I am not here to detest his legacy, he certainly helped built this country from scratch and I respect him for giving Pancasila guidance still.

But after his fall, it is Liberal Democracy 2.0.

The descent of Soeharto and the legalisation of multi-party democracy in Indonesia recreated the ideological confusion and indecisiveness which turned Pancasila into a vague Paternalism.

Once a Tiger of the people has now turned into a Paper Tiger held up by the Elites to keep the people subordinate. Pancasila, in order to appear as though it still had real principles has stopped being a tree and turned into a dome in which all development of thought could not go further beyond the dome. Any seed planted in the pot known as "Indonesia" could not grow into a large tree with juicy fruits ready to be harvested and used however one wants.

This however requires that we even have a basis and clear ideas that we can draw the 5 Sila of Pancasila from. However, we cannot do that as Capitalism, yet again, is afraid of Tigers. Why exactly do you think they feared the Soviet Union for and desperately tried to sabotage and dissolve all socialist revolutions?

The Unradicalism of the Revolutionaries.

As a socialist, I must understand that the revolutions from the Parisian Commune to the revolutionaries of the 21st century and the roleplayers of the internet are not radical enough.

Why? Because they're still dragged down by bourgeois and petit bourgeois mentality that still sees control over life as a necessity for revolution. They still hold on to the conception that if we give the state total control over our lives and guide our development towards "proletarian culture" it will be all well and good.

Many justified this as necessary citing the striving for the future utopia as necessary, or that we need a hyper-centralised bureaucracy to guide the relations of socialist society rather than a decentralisation of it. Our fight is against exploitation and the alienation of the worker from his life, why must we desire to do so even further by centralising all economic, cultural, and political processes? Why is the socialist movement still riddled with paternalism?

Felix Guattari, a French Psychoanalyst and Philosopher wrote an excellent article titled "Everybody Wants to be a Fascist" where he discusses why such developments occur. The development of the fascist mindset, the totalitarian mindset occurs when revolutions develop towards the delegation of "will" to someone else; that being the Party. The Party is made as the sole representative of your will, as we've discussed earlier, the capitalist alienates you of your will, and so why would you do the same with the party?

Most often, the explanation is that the revolution necessitates a party of the most advanced sections of the proletariat

TBC