World View: Australia - in defence of profits (2001)

From the February 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Australian government is to boost its “defence” spending by an estimated $500 to $600 million. Prime Minister, John Howard told a Liberal Party dinner in Sydney on 4 November last year that Australia “needed more resources to fulfil its role at home and in the Asia-Pacific region”, as well as in East Timor (West Australian, 6 November).

Continued Howard: 

“The Government does set a very high priority on maintaining a strong defence capability. We do need as a nation to spend more money on defence.”

Howard said he wanted to make the Collins-class submarine project work, despite “its litany of cost blowouts and delays”. The reasons for Howard’s concerns are not difficult to find.

Brian Toohey says (West Australian, 6 November) that “Indonesia is playing an ugly and dangerous game”. It has apparently upset both Australia and the United States recently, its patrol boats challenged a US destroyer delivering aid to East Timor, claiming that it believed that the American destroyer was, in fact, delivering arms to separatists on the trouble-torn Indonesian island of Ambon.

Toohey claims that the Indonesian government has failed to disarm the militia in West Timor. It, he says, harassed not only East Timor, but also Papua New Guinea, and even Australia. It cancelled the visit of a top-level ministerial delegation to Canberra at the last minute; at the same time, it expected Australia to stop a South Pacific Forum meeting in Kiribati from mentioning the Indonesian army’s brutal activities in West Papua. Tourist and investment dollars are at risk. And, horror of horrors, the governor of Bali has made it plain that Australian tourists are no longer welcome. Brian Toohey, echoing the views of others in Australia, argues that “Australia has little to gain from trying to curry favour in Djakarta by insisting that the Javanese empire should last for ever.” An Indonesia, even more weakened by the loss of former Dutch colonies, and various islands such as Ambon and Bali, could be welcome news in Canberra.

Christmas Island, an Australian possession 250 miles south of the Indonesian capital of Djakarta, is also in the news. Australia bought it from Britain in 1958, because it feared that the newly-independent state of Singapore, the island’s former administrators on Britain’s behalf, would nationalise the phosphate reserves run by the Australian and New Zealand governments, who needed its cheap fertiliser for their farmers.

Because it is so close to Indonesia, Christmas Island serves as a useful base for Australia’s northernmost radar over-the-horizon beacon, which is linked to the United States/Australian Joint Defense Research facility at Pine Gap, south-west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.

Moreover, Australia’s “Asia Pacific Centre” plan to build a satellite launching facility, with roll-on-roll-off port facilities to deliver large rocket components, as well as hazardous materials, such as satellite and rocket fuels. Says Vanessa Gould (West Australian, 17 June): “At 10 degrees south of the equator, Christmas Island was ideal to place satellites into geostationary or polar orbits.” As well as being yet another small, but important, part of Australia’s “defence” of its capitalist class and their increasing investments in the area.

Peter E. Newell

Indonesia: all change for no change (2001)

From the October 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The chain of over 13,000 islands stretching 3,600 miles from Malaya to Northern Australia have a long and chequered history. Evidence suggests humans resided on some of these islands over 50,000 years ago. From 3000 BC to 500 BC immigrants from South China mixed with, or displaced, the original Melanesians. Indian influence from AD 700 created a Buddhist and two Hindu empires co-existing among those islands. The introduction of Islam by Arab traders in the 13th century eventually destroyed these empires. Brunei became a powerful Islamic Sultanate, dominating the whole of Borneo and parts of the Philippines. The whole chain of islands were divided into many kingdoms but Arabs came to dominate trade and religion throughout.

The first Europeans to open a sea-route to Asia were the Catholic Christians of Portugal. Their ruthless hatred of Islam was welcomed by the island kingdoms who assisted in breaking the trade monopoly of the Arabs. The first half of the 16th century saw the demise of Arab trading as the Portuguese built fortified trading posts, not only among these islands but, throughout the whole of Asia in an attempt to monopolise commerce in that part of the world.

In the latter part of the 16th century serious European rivals appeared on the scene. The Protestant Christians from Holland hated the Catholic Portuguese and they proceeded to evict them entirely from the island chain. The Dutch set up their trading centre at Batavia on the island Java and they would eventually colonise the entire archipelago under the name of Dutch East Indies. In the meantime the British were eliminating Portugal from India and Malaya. It was the lust for the lucrative trade in eastern silks, porcelain, precious stones, perfumes, spices etc that drove these commercial ventures and caused so much bloodshed.

France squabbled with the British over India but later settled for claiming Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam). Borneo was partitioned and claimed by the Dutch and Britain while the Philippines were claimed by Spain. Way down in the south, Australia would become British and the large island to the north, New Guinea, would be partitioned and claimed by the Dutch (west), Germany (north-east) and Britain (south-east). After losing World War I, Germany would lose this colony to Britain and the whole eastern half of this island would be handed to Australia to look after. The sole remnant of Portuguese activity was the eastern portion of Timor, the Dutch claiming the western half.

The Japanese overran all these colonies, except India, during World War II and this prompted European colonies throughout the world to seek independence after Japan was defeated. The armed conflicts between foreign ruling classes and local ruling classes have done nothing to improve the lives of workers in any of these countries. 1945 saw the end of World War II, and Holland challenge the claim for independence by their East India colonies. The military expeditions and attrition of guerrilla warfare became economically unsustainable and independence was granted in 1949 when the Republic of Indonesia was formed. Centralised rule from Java was been opposed by several other islands and the Republic quickly became a seething mass of discontent. Ongoing revolts and dissent in Sumatra and in the original “Spice Islands” (the Moluccas) and other territories have been met with by excessive military brutality.

This authoritarian dictatorship embarked upon policies of expansion to extract wealth from surrounding resources, enabling the ruling elite to live on obscene opulence amongst the grinding poverty of the masses. West New Guinea (Irian Jaya) was invaded and forcibly annexed in 1963, adding another festering sore of discontent to the Indonesian collection.

In this same year, 1963, an aggressive Indonesia was lured by the lucrative oil in Northern Borneo. A secret war was fought when British and Australian interests in oil-soaked Brunei insisted that this area of land be incorporated into Malaysia. SAS units from Britain and Australia, and the 3rd Australian Regiment, made damaging and deadly incursions into Indonesian territory (Kalimantan) during this undeclared and clandestine war. Plans were made in 1964 to bomb Jakarta. This information was made available only recently, under the 30-year secret-file rule.

This conflict ended abruptly about 1965, as though an undercover political deal had been struck between the parties involved. Indonesian army officers were suddenly being trained in Australia for jungle warfare, and in the same year up to 700,000 Indonesians were massacred by their army for dissent. It was alter revealed that US Intelligence was also implicated in this slaughter.

The solitary Portuguese colony of East Timor, surrounded by a sea containing suspected riches in oil and natural gas, waited apprehensively for the outcome of independence wars being fought by Portugal against their African colonies of Angola and Mozambique. Indonesia also waited.

When both Portuguese colonies eventually won their independence in 1975, East Timor also announced their own freedom., they were immediately invaded by Indonesia and officially annexed in 1976. No action was taken by the UN against this act of blatant aggression or against the human violations in which tens of thousands of Timorese civilians died. In indecent haste, with Portugal now out of the way, Australia officially recognised the annexation and struck a 50/50 deal with Indonesia for the riches of the Timor sea. It seemed as though this had all been pre-planned, a political “pay-off” to Indonesia for backing down in Borneo perhaps?

Exploration since the late 1970s has revealed increasing riches of oil and gas in the Timor sea—a bonanza. Is it pure coincidence that the UN has shown increased interest, during the 1990s, in Timorese “Human Rights” in direct proportion to the increasing wealth reported lying beneath the sea “owned” by this island territory? Increasing pressure has been put upon Indonesia, by the UN, to introduce democratic elections, and in 1999 East Timor successfully voted for Independence.

An ever-opportunistic Australia, always a UN agent for Western capitalism, provided Timor with protection and peace-keeping troops on “humanitarian grounds”, after 24 years of inactivity and indifference to their plight.

A new agreement has been drawn up whereby Australia will now “manage” all the resources in the Timor Gap, worth billions of US dollars, without the need to pay any “aid”. Royalties from profits will be sufficient payment for East Timor with some left over for Australia to pocket. Indonesia will miss out completely.

All the usual major Western capitalist companies have moved into the area, among them the US giant, Phillips Petroleum and Australia’s Woodside Petroleum, etc, and—oh yes—the Dutch are back again with their Royal Shell Group.

Ron Stone

World View: Target Indonesia (2000)

From the May 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Is Australia preparing for a possible war with its erstwhile ally Indonesia?

In outback Western Australia, on a road to nowhere (actually a place called Warburton north of the Great Victoria Desert), lies Laverton; and nearby there is a forest of metal towers, military structures, which form part of a new, until recently secret, “Jindalee” over-the-horizon radar network that spies on Indonesia. There are similar radar sites at Longreach in Queensland and at the United States/Australian Joint Defense Space Research facility at Pine Gap, south-west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. These link to 16 beacon sites from Ajana, north of Geraldton in Western Australia, through RAAF Leamouth, RAAF Curtin, Broome, Humpty Doo, Horn Island south of the Torres Straits opposite New Guinea, Queensland, and downwards to RAAF Schenger and Lynd River¸ also in Queensland. Importantly, they link to a beacon station on Christmas Island, an Australian possession 250 miles south of Jakarta. The while system connects to RAAF surveillance headquarters in Adelaide.

The network enables radar operators to observe all air and sea traffic up to 2,000 miles beyond the Australian northern coast, and halfway across the Indian Ocean, to link up with the United States base on Diego Garcia, without the need for air or sea patrols.

According to the West Australian (18 March) the Jindalee network underpins “Australian defence planning based on repelling an invader through the Indonesian archipelago”. The Laverton base has twice the range of the Longreach and Alice Springs sites. The new radar system is so accurate that its operators in Australia can see RAAF Hercules C130 troop carriers turning on their final approach Dili Airport. And Jindalee radar can also detect US stealth bombers, which normally remain invisible to ordinary conventional, land-based radar. The cost, however, has not come cheap. Comments the West Australian:

“Jindalee’s losses have contributed to more than $1 billion overspent on botched Australian defence projects. Mismanagement of the original Jindalee project cost prime contractor Telstra a whopping $609 million in cost overruns before the project was rescued in 1997 by Lockheed Martin.”

Another $250 million was required for the first two of Australia’s six new Collins Class submarines; and another $272 million is needed in the current year to top up the original “defence” estimates to refit two former United States Navy ships for the Royal Australian Navy.

At the time of writing, there are about 40,000 Australian troops in East Timor. They are not there to defend Timorese workers, but to defend Australian business interests and investments, the vast oil fields and reserves under the sea between East and West Timor and northern Australia and, if necessary, to take on the Indonesian armed forces in any future dispute. It should not be forgotten that, in 1964, the government of Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, planned to bomb Indonesia and its capital, Jakarta, if it escalated its confrontation with Malaysia. And, in fact, Australia sent troops as well as the SAS into Indonesian Borneo/Kalimantan. Such are the priorities of capitalism.

Peter E. Newell

Watching the war go by (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The capitalists have never gone to war to promote Justice and they never will.

Last year The Most Dangerous Man In The World was Saddam Hussain. Pronounced Sadaaam Hoosayn by the plastic propagandists employed to spin the latest line for CNN. There had never been a nastier dictator than the Evil Saddaaam and that was why forces of the American Empire—sorry, NATO—had to “go in there and kick ass”. Any resemblance to a gangland settling of scores should be ignored. After all, that upright defender of virtue, Slick Willy Clinton, had cast himself as Batman against the Iraqi Joker, with wee Tony doing his best to look like Robin.

But let us not distract ourselves with nostalgia. That was yesterday’s war. Now, in the world of CNN-speak, an even more demonic evil has come to threaten the stability of the globe. Plucky little Kosovo must be defended. Think not of the fact that nine out of ten Americans had never heard of Serbia, let alone Kosovo, until CNN told them about it fifty times a day. The threat to the New World Order has been identified. Milosevic must be banged to rights. The propagandists, using a script uncannily similar to Wag The Dog (a fictional account of a sleazy US President saving his reputation by a bogus war against Albania), invite us to shout and curse against the crimes of the Belgrade regime.

And, blinded by the light of the TV screen, large numbers of decent people are weeping for the oppressed Kosovars and cheering NATO as it drops its bombs on Serb towns and villages. Because most people are decent and they hate to see injustice against a defenceless minority, so they are sucked in to the drama of war.

But there are some other defenceless minorities whose plight is not shown on CNN. There are some defenceless minorities for whom NATO would not so much as fire a shot from an air gun. In fact, the NATO states are the very ones which have sold the weapons by which these defenceless minorities are oppressed. For example . . .

There are the Kurds in Turkey. Between 1990 and 1994 about one million Turkish Kurds were driven from their homes. Over 40,000 Kurds have been killed. And in 1994 Turkey became the biggest single importer of US military equipment and the world’s largest arms purchaser. Turkey is a member of NATO. Its troops are currently part of the NATO forces in Yugoslavia. Why is NATO attacking Serbia and not Turkey? The US administration justifies Turkish state atrocities on the grounds that they are defending “law and order” against Kurdish terrorists. The Serbian regime uses precisely the same logic: that it has only slaughtered people and burnt villages to the ground in a war against Kosovar terrorism.

Within the past month 10,000 people were killed in a war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. There are countless refugees. When did we hear about this on the TV News? Where are the calls from those incorrigible humanitarians, Albright and Cook, to send aid to these refugees and to stop the fighting? Since 1994 820,000 have died in Rwanda. Since 1986 a million and a half have died in Sudan. Where was CNN?  

What about East Timor? Conduct a simple experiment. Go on to the streets of Kansas City or, for that matter, White City in London and ask people what they think about the slaughter of the Timorese people. Most will never have heard about East Timor. The propagandists have forgotten to tell them about that atrocity because that one is a NATO-armed assault on a defenceless minority. East Timor was taken over by Indonesia in 1975, since when one third of its population has been killed—that’s 200,000 people. Since 1975 the USA has sold over $1 billion of weapons to the Indonesian dictatorship. The other main arms suppliers are Australia and Britain. Just as the NATO troops were whizzing off to knock the shit out of Belgrade, Indonesian militia entered a church full of people in East Timor and slaughtered them. Reports have not made it on to the CNN News, perhaps because the reporters are too busy congratulating the West upon its humanitarian campaign to help oppressed minorities.

There is something deeply disgusting about the pretence that bombing is a civilising mission. The people who drop bombs from the sky upon towns and villages are bullying cowards and deserve no respect from anyone. The people who give them the orders to drop their bombs are self-serving hypocrites whose concern for the safety of Kosovar refugees is about as genuine as their domestic concern for single mothers, the unemployed and the disabled. The minority who own and control the world—the Directors of USA Inc and UK Plc—are ruthless, exploitative thieves whose primary interest is in the fast buck and protecting what they imagine their interests to be. The capitalists have never gone to war to promote justice and they never will. Indeed, the notion that justice can be furthered by violence can only make sense when you have a social system that is rooted in violence and plunder.

We will no doubt be told that by opposing the military escapades of Clinton and Blair we are siding with those who are committing unspeakable acts against defenceless Kosovars. Socialists side with no state, for all states are merely organised forces of national coercion. We are opposed to the lot of them and support the interest of the oppressed, not selectively, but wherever they are. In time of war we refuse steadfastly to be deluded by the crass propaganda of any section of the ruling class or to become entrapped in the rhetoric of militarist terror.

Instead of taking sides between this nation or that, we oppose all nationalism. Workers have no country. None to live for. None to die for. Workers should refuse to fight, for every drop of working-class blood shed in battles within capitalism is wasted.  

CNN’s viewing figures have gone up since the war in Yugoslavia started. What exciting pictures the explosions make. What a terrific diversion from thinking about the poverty of life under the profit system it is for wage slaves to be presented with 24-hour live coverage of Clinton’s Heroes. CLOBBER SLOBBA, says the Sun, ever eager to find new depths of banality, illiteracy and tastelessness by which to woo its prey. So, we sit at home and we watch the war and just occasionally we might wonder how much it cost to build the US bomber planes (more than the total GDP of Albania, as it happens) and what kind of world we might live in if those resources were not used to produce ever more sophisticated weapons of death, but libraries, homes and hospitals for all.

Steve Coleman

World View: Death and destruction in Dili (2000)

From the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1996 (Socialist Standard, March) we reported, and commented upon, Indonesian repression in East Timor and Australian interest in, and control of, the vast oil deposits under the sea between Australia and East and West Timor. Much has happened since then.

East Timor is now “independent”. The Indonesians have gone. But not before they had killed thousands of Timorese and largely reduced the capital, Dili, to a burned-out ruin. Much of this has been levelled against Eurico Gutterres, a former Indonesian militia leader, now living under an assumed name in Jakarta. According to the West Australian (18 December), “the Indonesian military recruited and trained Guterres who commanded a paramilitary group called Aitarak, or Thorn, which was given the responsibility for security in Dili”. He ordered the destruction of East Timor, “carrying out his threat to turn East Timor into a wasteland if the Timorese voted to rejected Jakarta’s rule”. He now says that he does not feel guilty. He was only carrying out orders, he said.

In what the West Australian (15 January) calls “the razed capital” of Dili, “thousands of the deeply religious East Timorese Catholics turn out for Mass to thank god for delivering them from the horror of 24 years of Indonesian occupation”. But just outside Dili there are hundreds of children starving. Of the situation, reports the West Australian of the same date:

“Stagnant pools of sewage lay nearby, mixing with the regular afternoon rains, virtually ensuring that all open wounds would become infected. A girl, aged about five, stands half-naked except for a skin of massive, infected lesions which stretch from under her jaw to her waist.”

Yet,

“A blackmarket for food and goods has sprouted in Dili, with tonnes of rice and noodles being imported and held under guard in warehouses in the razed capital.”

Meanwhile, thousands of Timorese are starving in West Timor refugee camps. President Clinton is said to be concerned about a possible military coup, and the spread of religious violence in Indonesia; and Richard Holbrooke, the US Ambassador to the UN, “accused pro-Jakarta militias of blocking the return of about 125,000 East Timorese remaining in camps in West Timor. Responsibility for this lies primarily with the Indonesian military who continues to support the militia in the camps, he said” (West Australian, 17 January).

By last September, 75 percent of East Timor’s population had been displaced, and 70 percent of its houses, public buildings and essential utilities had been destroyed by the Indonesian-backed militias and military (West Australian, 8 January). However, Australian companies “have a chance to grab a slice of the $800 million which will be spent on rebuilding on East Timor over the next three years”. Indeed, more than £300 million will have been pumped into reconstruction by June this year.

There are, of course, problems for Australian capitalists, if not exactly the same as for Timorese workers and peasants. Land ownership was a problem, as records had been destroyed; and it was impossible to know who owned what. ” Conditions in Dili were tough, but foreign businesses were working there,” said Malcolm Murray, the international projects team leader with the Australian Department of Trade and Commerce. Nevertheless, Australian construction businesses have moved into Dili “with gusto”. There were many unemployed Timorese workers; but “the Australian Council for Overseas Aid also warned that pay rates for local workers could lead to gross inequality in wealth” (West Australian, 17 January).

Meanwhile, reported Agence France-Press (17 January), Australian, international and East Timorese officials held a conference to discuss a new Timor Gap oil treaty to replace the “illegal” treaty signed in December 1989, between Australia and Indonesia over the oil-rich waters between northern Australia and East Timor (see Socialist Standard, March 1996). However, Indonesia said that it would “accept a review or a cancellation of the treaty with Australia”, presumably as it now has little choice.

The UN made it clear in 1979 that the Indonesian invasion of the former Portuguese colony, and its subsequent occupation, was illegal and that therefore so was the so-called oil treaty. But “the Australian government has always maintained that the treaty is legal”, reports the West Australian of 18 December. As of December last year, Australian companies BHP, Santos and Petroz had already extracted 32,500 barrels of oil daily from three wells in the zone jointly controlled by Australia and Indonesia. BHP, however, have since sold its assets to the US company, Phillips Petroleum. There have been, it would seem, disputes over a number of as yet unstarted fields, including the Woodside’s Laminaria field and BHP’s Buffalo field which “would fall into an area which might be claimed by East Timor as well as Australia” (West Australian, 18 December).

East Timor has now replaced Indonesia as Australia’s partner in the Timor Gap oil treaty, according to the West Australian (12 February). The official ceremony was held in Dili at the beginning of the month, James Batley, Australia’s resident consul in East Timor, who signed the new treaty, said that “there are important investment prospects here, and this has smoothed the path for those to go ahead”. Of course! And the United Nations secretary-general, who recently visited Dili, said how pleased he was at Australia’s quick response to the UN’s call for troops to go to East Timor. Yes; of course, of course!

Meanwhile, the poverty-stricken, propertyless, often starving workers and peasants of East (and West) Timor watch, sometimes pray, and hope that things will get no worse.

Peter E. Newell

Letters: Housing problem (1991)

Letters to the Editors from the March 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Housing problem

Dear Editors,

A few years ago I gave a talk on housing at a Socialist Party branch. I pointed out that the housing problem can never be solved as long as houses are built for profit and not for human need, and quoted statistics on homelessness and the numbers of people in sub-standard accommodation. In order to illustrate the consequences of bad housing at a personal level. I cited a newspaper article (Guardian. 18 December 1982) about a man living on a council estate in East London who set fire to the flat where he lived with his wife and small daughter in a desperate bid to get rehoused. (Capitalism was able to solve his accommodation problem, in the short term at least, by sending him to prison for nine months).

In seeking material for another talk on housing recently, I came across an article (Guardian, 17 November 1990) about a man who set fire to his house, killing his two-year-old daughter as a result. This time the man “owned” the house himself, but after being made redundant could no longer keep up the mortgage payments. To stop the building society from repossessing the house, he burned it to the ground, with tragic consequences.

Such acts of desperation are only the extremes to which people can be driven. But with the number of homeless increasing, with record figures for mortgage arrears, with the unbelievable squalor of inner- city council estates, with three building workers being killed on site every week, it is clear that capitalism is utterly unable to meet people’s housing needs. The earlier claims of reformist politicians to have solved the housing problem are exposed as hollow, and nobody would make such outlandish statements now. The truth is that the “housing problem” is really a poverty problem, and will not disappear until the cause of poverty— capitalism—has been abolished.

Paul Bennett

Manchester

East Timor

Dear Editors.

Having read your November 1990 issue about the Economic Causes of the Gulf War, may I say that you should not trivialise the economic significance of East Timor.

The key to understanding Australia’s support for the Indonesian takeover in 1975 was that their oil companies knew of enormous oil reserves under the Timor Sea. Hence, well before the Indonesian invasion in December 1975, the Australian ambassador in Jakarta reminded Canberra to take this factor into account when determining its attitude towards East Timor’s future status. Australia gave de jure recognition of Indonesia’s "integration” of East Timor in 1979 and from then on entered into negotiations for the joint exploitation of these reserves. Its reward is the conclusion of the Timor Gap Treaty in December 1989 which will provide a bonanza for Australian petroleum companies. The reserves in the Timor Sea are thought to exceed reserves in the Middle East.

The oil question worked in reverse for East Timor as compared with Kuwait, i.e. that it was in the West’s interest for Indonesia to control the country.

Even without oil, East Timor produces a great deal more than carrots. Its crop of high quality coffee has always been a great world market attraction. Since the invasion, the coffee trade has been taken over by the army and has profited people like General Murdani who commanded the invasion operation and continues to take a keen interest in Jakarta's policy of colonial control and exploitation of East Timor.

Carmel Budiardjo 

Indonesian Human Rights Campaign 

Thornton Heath, Surrey

William Morris

Dear Editors,

DAP (January) agrees with my general point that there are attempts abroad to “confuse William Morris's Marxist heritage’’, but suggests that the new book, William Morris and News From Nowhere: A Vision For Our Time is not amongst them. DAP goes on to suggest that I should back up my “generalities with some facts and evidence’’. It seems to me, however, that swopping textual analysis of the book is unlikely to clarify the point at issue. This can be done without the need to quote too much chapter and verse.

News From Nowhere is probably the finest example of a number of utopian socialist works written in the last years of the nineteenth century. The motivation for their production is easy enough to see. There had not at that time existed anywhere “socialism in power". Therefore there was a need to speculate on what socialist society might be like. That does not of course make Morris a utopian socialist himself.

News From Nowhere therefore is about a vision of socialism and to focus specifically on it is to run the risk of avoiding the question of how that vision related to Morris's political practice. In this sense the book skews matters from the start.

What is needed is not to use News From Nowhere as a starting point for further utopian explorations but to tie it back to the debates in the socialist movement at the time. Some chapters in the book, for example Jan Marsh's "Concerning Love" on the woman question do this very well indeed. Although I do not, of course, agree with Marsh’s actual treatment of the subject. But others, for example. Paddy O’Sullivan's “The ending of the journey” (which DAP also criticises) which uses Morris as a stick to beat opponents in a debate about late twentieth century ecological politics, quite clearly do not.

The book is a political curate’s egg and in so far as it tries to claim Morris for some form of utopian socialism quite muddle-headed. That is not to deny that it is an interesting book. But if socialists wish to revive the memory of William Morris, and that would be no bad thing, another vehicle will be needed.

Keith Martin

London, N11

Material World: Indonesia: From Anti-Imperialism to Imperialism (2019)

The Material World Column from the October 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

In August, East Timor (Timor Leste) celebrated 20 years independence from Indonesia. The 1974 left-wing coup in Portugal led to the dismantling of its colonies including what was then called Portuguese Timor. Indonesian forces commenced covert attacks, then invaded in 1975. An estimated 100,000 conflict-related deaths through the entire period 1974 to 1999, including 18,600 violent killings. Indonesia was held responsible for 70 percent of the killings.

With the armed resistance largely crushed Indonesia held civilians in detention camps where there were 84,200 deaths from disease and starvation. In 1976 Indonesia declared East Timor the country’s 27th province. Many countries looked the other way. In 1979 Australia became the only western nation to recognise the annexation of East Timor and quickly sought a treaty with Indonesia to divide the spoils of East Timor’s sea-bed so both could access the off-shore oil resources.

On 30 August 1999 78.5 percent voted for independence. Festivities were short-lived. Indonesian-backed militia groups terrorised the population. A three-week campaign of violence killed 2,600 people, nearly 30,000 were displaced and as many as 250,000 were forcibly relocated into Indonesian West Timor after the ballot.

August also saw a resurgence in the unrest in occupied West Papua with government troops being deployed. When Indonesia gained independence in 1945, the Dutch government declined to cede control over West Papua arguing that it was to be given the freedom to determine its own future. In 1961-1962 West Papua was invaded and annexed by Indonesia. An estimated 30,000 Papuans were killed up to its incorporation into Indonesia in 1969, after a sham referendum.

According to an article in Red Pepper :

  ‘… The occupation of West Papua receives little attention in the UK. This is, in no small part, due to Indonesia’s ban on foreign journalists and its outlawing of West Papuan social movements who try to speak out internationally. However, West Papua has not been forgotten by international corporations, including companies from the UK. For them, Indonesia’s brutal occupation of West Papua provides lucrative opportunities for profit.’ 

The article by Egret and Anderson details how mining companies exploit West Papua’s vast wealth. US company Freeport-McMoRan operates the Grasberg mine in Papua – the largest gold mine and the third largest copper mine in the world. It is Indonesia’s biggest taxpayer, making billions of dollars for the Indonesian government every year. TIME stated that ‘In 2015 alone, Freeport mined some $3.1 billion worth of gold and copper.’

BP profits from the occupation through its massive liquified natural gas fields in Tangguh, BP’s biggest operation in SE Asia. Papuan communities are also being evicted from their land for palm oil. In addition, Papua boasts timber resources worth an estimated $78 billion.

Indonesia is an ethnically diverse country, made up of 17,000 islands, with around 300 distinct native ethnic groups and 700 local languages. The country’s official language is a variant of Malay. Indonesia can be described as an invented nation-state that having been subject to colonialism has become itself imperialist.

In the pursuit of profits and administrative control, the Dutch imposed the authority of the Dutch East Indies on an array of peoples who had not previously shared any unified political identity.

The name ‘Indonesia’ is derived from the Greek (Indian islands) and was employed by an 18th century English naturalist to classify the ethnic and geographic area. ‘Indonesia’ was seized upon by nationalists as a word to imagine a unity of people. By the twentieth century, the Dutch had formed the boundaries of a colonial state that became the precursor to modern Indonesia. During the 1920s and 30s, a small elite began to articulate a growing anti-colonialism and nationalism, striving to carve out a place for themselves. In 1928, the All-Indonesian Youth Congress proclaimed the Youth Pledge (Sumpah Pemuda), establishing the nationalist goals of: ‘one country – Indonesia, one people – Indonesian, and one language – Indonesian.’ After the surrender of Japan, Sukarno proclaimed Indonesian independence. The Dutch attempted to re-establish their rule, and an armed struggle ensued but in 1949, the Dutch recognised Indonesian independence.

The Socialist Party rejects nationalism as anti-working class because it has always tied the working people to its class enemy. Nationalism is the ideology of an actual or an aspiring capitalist class. It is of the practice of native capitalists that when imperialism prevents them for building their own independent capitalist state, they lead resistance against it. Sooner or later, successful anti-imperialism then becomes imperialism.

ALJO

Letters: Just dealing with one of the effects (1996)

Letters to the Editors from the December 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just dealing with one of the effects

Dear Editors,

In his recent article ("Class, Micropolitics and Solidarity", October Socialist Standard), Jonathan Clay talks about the action in which four of us disarmed a Hawk attack plane destined for Indonesia. He states that this action was "inspired, but ultimately doomed”, and says that no doubt we realised this all along. I object most strongly to what was one of the most successful anti-arms trade actions ever being dismissed as "doomed”. Nine months after we disarmed that particular plane, it is still in England. It was due to be sent months ago to a counter-insurgency squadron in Indonesia from where it would have been used against civilians in East Timor. The many East Timorese who have written to thank us for our action certainly don’t think it was doomed.

Jonathan Clay goes on to say that our action was undertaken to publicise the situation in East Timor, and that the jury ignored the law in acquitting us. Had he taken the slighted trouble to get his facts right, he would have found that we had a defence in law—that of using reasonable force to prevent crime, a defence under the Criminal Law Act 1967. We did not undertake this action as a publicity stunt—who would risk ten years in prison for publicity? The judge allowed our defence to be put to the jury, who acquitted us on that basis. To suggest that the jury ignored the law is insulting to them and does nothing to help people understand that this kind of action can in certain circumstances be legal. I wonder what actions Jonathan Clay has undertaken to uphold justice and international law—or is he just an armchair activist whose only contribution is to make ill-founded criticisms of other people’s actions?

Andrea Needham, 

Seeds of Hope—East Timor Ploughshares

Reply:

When we said that your action was “ultimately doomed" we meant that it would fail to prevent the Indonesian military getting their attack planes in the end (that's what ultimately means). The most that you could achieve was what you did achieve—to delay delivery and to gain publicity for your cause. We assumed you realised this but if you really expected to stop delivery altogether we misjudged your level of understanding of existing political realities.

Are you holier than us? Probably, but then we don’t share your belief in the efficacy of the law to improve things. In fact, for us, the law is a reflection of private property and profit-motivated society and exists to uphold it. But it is precisely this society—capitalism—with its built-in competitive struggle between states for sources of raw materials, investment outlets, trade routes, markets and strategic positions to control these, which is the root cause of situations like that in East Timor.

Such situations will go on occurring, in some part of the world, as long as capitalism continues to exist. What are you doing to speed the end of capitalism? Or are you just a single-issue activist concentrating exclusively on trying to deal with just one of its many nefarious effects?

Editors

A good thing

Dear Editors,

Jonathan Clay’s article. "Class, Micropolitics and Solidarity" in October’s Socialist Standard was a very welcome and timely one in that it warned against taking a dismissive attitude to defensive class struggle.

Only working class solidarity can get rid of capitalism and achieve world socialism and any expression of such solidarity is a good thing, whether at work, in communities fighting to protect their local environment, or in the various getting-togethers to resist the bosses' latest laws. At least it shows that people will never roll over and die, as the ruling class so dearly wants us to. Obviously none of the above will do much at present to bring about a free society because the required mass class consciousness isn’t there.

However, now more than ever, people involved in defensive struggles are likely to approach the only conclusion there is: that the money system as a whole is the problem. Attacks on the working class are getting more savage by the day, every way of running capitalism has been tried and discredited and there is widespread rejection of the parties of capitalism (including the lefties and their sorry antics). Life itself is an education and the Socialist Party exists to spread the socialist case as widely as possible.

Socialists are all for working class solidarity, but are "under no illusions" that it is mass solidarity for the abolition of capitalism that is so desperately needed.

Ben Malcolm, 

Cardiff

There’s no such thing as an ethical foreign policy (1999)

From the November 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ethical foreign policy? What a joke! How, in a capitalist world where each state is competing against every other state for a share of profits, can a government base its foreign policy on anything except economic self-interest—the economic self-interest, that is, of its capitalists?

“Obtain profits or die”, that is the economic law governing the conduct of states under global capitalism. And it cannot be otherwise for as long as global capitalism lasts.

Everybody knows that the reason for the Gulf War nearly ten years ago can be summed up in three letters O-I-L. Iraq, a virtually land-locked country wanted secure access to the sea for its exports and imports, so it invaded Kuwait. This represented a threat to the oil supplies of the capitalist West, so they went to war—and are still bombing and killing and starving ordinary people in Iraq to remove this threat. This has nothing to do with the fact that Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator who couldn’t care a damn about human rights. There are plenty of other dictators in the area—beginning with the King of Saudi Arabia and the other hereditary Gulf despots—who are left alone because they are on the side of the capitalist West.

It was the same earlier this year in Kosovo. Serbia wasn’t attacked because it was a dictatorship under Slobodan Milosevic but because it was a state with a powerful army that had been causing problems for Western capitalist interests in the area and had overstepped the mark. Neighbouring dictator and fellow ethnic-cleanser, Tunjman of Croatia, was left alone because he was “our bastard”.

East Timor? Who had heard of East Timor before last month? When Indonesian troops marched into this former Portuguese colony in 1975 the UN passed a resolution saying Indonesia had broken international law and left it at that. In the following years the Western capitalist powers competed amongst themselves for lucrative contracts from the Indonesian military. The ruling generals were invited to arms shows to buy guns, tanks, warplanes, ships, any military hardware they needed to maintain their grip on the country they were exploiting for their own ends.

“Please don’t use these weapons against your own people,” requested an ethically-minded diplomat. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” replied the generals. “That’s all right then,” replied the diplomat. When confronted with evidence that the generals were using British weapons for internal repression, a British Minister replied, “if we didn’t sell them arms, then the French would.” Questioned in the Assemblée Nationale on the same point, a French Minister replied, “if we didn’t sell them arms then the British would.”

When oil was discovered in the sea between East Timor and Australia, the Australian government decided that the Indonesian invasion of East Timor was not so contrary to international law after all. In order to get a share of the oil they signed an agreement recognising East Timor as part of Indonesia. Now they are leading the forces sent in to take East Timor from Indonesia. No wonder their erstwhile friends, the Indonesian rulers, regard them as two-faced double-dealers.

And of course a place like East Timor can never survive on its own. It’s obviously going to end up as an Australian dependency, no doubt giving Australia an even better oil deal.

That’s the way of the world—the capitalist world. And it’s no good just protesting about this and appealing to governments to base their foreign policy on ethical considerations. They can’t (except in words) even if they wanted to, since this would hamper them in the struggle for profits—and the trade routes, and investment outlets, and raw material sources, and strategic areas, to secure them.

The only way out is to get rid of global capitalism and replace it by a world socialist system in which all that is in and on the Earth becomes the common heritage of all humanity so that it can be used for the benefit of every man, woman and child on the planet irrespective of where they live, a small island or the industrialised heartlands.

Adam Buick

Between the Lines: Chasing the dragon (1994)

The Between the Lines column from the June 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chasing the dragon

Aaah! Just when you thought it was safe to come out in the dark, she’s hack . . . and Nicholas Broomfield was out to make a documentary about her whether she wanted him there or not. (C4, 9.30pm, Thursday, 19 May.) The subject in question is Margaret Thatcher, a one-time Prime Minister who said that there was no such thing as society. See the Postcards from Hell on other pages for a more vivid guide to her preferred habitat. Broomfield, who is used to following around confirmed fruit and nutcases (it was he who made that superb documentary about the mad Boer, Terre Blanche), was as welcomed by the Thatcher groupies as a cockroach at a cocktail party. It Is good to see just how small and foolish "the mighty" really are.

In the same week the BBC was chasing the story of the Chinese political prisons where countless detainees are locked up for speaking out against the government. Down at the BBC they have no need to lock up the journalists who are vetted by MI5 before they can have a job and then only allowed to interview those whose words have not been banned by government edict. That’s what they call capitalist democracy, that is. On Newsnight (BBC2, 10.30pm, Wednesday, 18 May) Jeremy Paxman interviewed a smarmy businessman who insisted that human rights abuses should not interfere in commerce. Paxman put it to him that to trade with a state that can do this makes him and his fellow capitalists collaborators. Quite so. And what’s new about that? When have a few camps filled with tortured victims ever stood in the way of a healthy profit? Perhaps next time Paxman interviews Douglas Hurd he would care to ask him whether as a major arms-seller to Indonesia his government feels just a tiny bit like collaborators in the slaughter of the people of East Timor.

What’s all this then, Arfur?

ARFUR: 'Ang on Phil, I’m reading this ’ere election manifesto.

PHIL: Reading? You goin’ soft or something Arfur?

GRANT: You want me to sort him, bruv. That’s how we do things in the East End see. We put the boot in first and ask questions later. Right?

ARFUR: It says ’ere in this ’ere Socialist Party manifesto that all politicians are out to take us for a ride. Now, I’m only a simple bloke, as you well know, but 1 can’t ’elp thinking that they might have a point. What you think Michelle . . . I mean, you’ve been to that there university, ’avn’t you?

MICHELLE: Well, according to what I’ve been reading this totally leaves out of account the post-modernist critique of metatheoretical discourse. I mean, haven’t these socialists ever read Lyotard? Anyway, I’m off to tell my daughter that’s she’s really my cousin.

GRANT: Yeah, and I’m off down the Arches to sort out some geezer with a shooter who reckons Minder was just a comedy.

[Enter an old drunk with a blue suit and a political rosette who looks a cross between that dodgy lawyer used by the Mitchell Bruvvers to get them off at their last court appearance and at least half the members of the House of Commons]

SWINDLER: Hello there, jolly working folk. I’m your candidate . . . 

ARFUR: Ah, perhaps you can ’elp us. I was just reading this Socialist stuff about the likes of you being a lot of useless leaders. They reckons ’ere that the emancipation of the working class can only be the . . . 

SWINDLER: Put it away, my good friend. Subversive nonsense. Pure idealism. You can’t run your lives without us. Any chance of a G and T?

PHIL: You saying we can’t run the world without being led by a load of old duffers like you?

GRANT: Want me to sort him, bruv?

SWINDLER: No . . . what I’m saying is that the likes of you — decent working chaps that you are — need the likes of me — educated at Jesus and the bar, you know — to do a few things to improve life for you. A couple of new beds in the local hospital, for example. And free chiropody for all those of ninety-five and over. Jobs for everyone . . . 

ARFUR: Well thank you very much indeed. I’ll put this socialist stuff away right now. And buy this man a large G and T on me.

DOT: Did somebody mention Jesus?

BIG RON: Did somebody mention a late bar?

MICHELLE: Oh, hasn’t anyone ever told them that they’re just pathetic caricatures of workers invented by people who drink in wine bars. No wonder they’re stupid enough to be taken in by another bloody politician.

Steve Coleman

Crisis in Indonesia (1998)

From the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1965, General Suharto came to power in a military coup in Indonesia that had the full backing of Britain and the US. During a Cold War arms build-up and a world focusing on the Vietnam War and the "communist threat", Suharto became a welcome ally as he massacred 600,000 of his opponents. In the years that followed, Suharto would consolidate his power, corruption would take on a whole new meaning and Indonesia would become a by-word for human rights abuses, most notably following the annexation of East Timor and the massacre of a further 200,000. All the while, the West turned a blind eye, supplying him with arms and training his military staff--interested only in the vast oil reserves Indonesia straddles.

Western eyes are now looking cautiously at Indonesia. In July of last year, the economy began to collapse and reached real crisis point during January of this year. Inflation rocketed and bankruptcies followed. Basic foodstuffs have more than doubled in price and thousands have died of hunger.

That much of his happened during January--a month of self-restraint (Ramadan) for Indonesia's moslems--perhaps explains why food riots born of country-wide discontent did not erupt fully until February, with Chinese food stores and restaurants taking much of the impact. The Chinese, who make up five percent of the population, were readily perceived as being the cause of the food shortages. That they own 70 percent of Indonesia's wealth was reason enough to convince angry crowds that they had grown rich off the backs of the masses.

Media analysts fear more trouble ahead, indeed a total meltdown of the Indonesian economy within the next month, particularly in light of a recent IMF decision to delay disbursement of the next tranche of a $43 billion bailout.

The IMF agreed to the $43 billion lifeline on condition that Suharto reformed a structure of monopolies, tariffs and subsidies--in other words, the targeting of the interests of his cronies and six offspring.

Suharto accused the IMF of trying to impose a liberal economy on the country, which he claimed was not in line with Article 33 of the Indonesian constitution, which stipulates that the economy should be developed along "family principles and which stresses 'regulated cooperatives' rather than the 'free market'".

Back to basics

"Family principles" takes on a whole new meaning in Indonesia. Not only is nepotism rampant, with Suharto's relatives up to their necks in all manner corruption, but Suharto himself is estimated to have assets worth over $40 billion (coincidentally the size of the IMF loan he is haggling over).

Having promised to give Indonesia's central bank full autonomy over monetary policy, Suharto then sacked its governor and directors for objecting to his plans for an "IMF-plus measure"--the setting up of a currency board charged with pegging the Indonesian rupiah to the US dollar. Not only was this opposed by the IMF, the World Bank, the US and the EU, but his own critics in Indonesia lambasted it, pointing to the country's limited foreign reserves and corrupt bureaucracy.

Having just been elected president for the seventh time, to rule for another five years, by a 1,000-member electoral assembly he vetted himself, Suharto is taking economic advice from his schoolfriend Professor Jusuf Habiba. Habiba's economic competence has long been questioned--even by Western economists who still dream up futile models of how capitalism can best work--at least since his "zig-zag" theory which professed that rising inflation is best offset with low interest rates.

It is highly likely that a state of emergency will be declared shortly. Riots have been widespread, often urged on by students less inclined to the rhetoric of scape-goating. Panic buying has emptied shelves and forced many shops to close and the military is becoming edgy, fearful for its own interests. With a restless population of over 200 million, split into 300 ethnic groups, Indonesia faces a precarious next few months.

If the worst does come, we can well imagine the front page analysts pointing to Suharto's corruption and poor economic insight as a cause, and others to the "bursting bubble" of the Asian economic miracle and its wider dimensions. None, we predict, will point out that this is how capitalism functions, that capitalism is an archaic, chaotic and ungovernable system. And we are not being churlish in suggesting that nothing out of the ordinary is happening Indonesia--for this is capitalism working normally, according to its own insane logic.

Our sympathies go out to the millions destined to suffer in the madness, the millions who will in fact lend their support to the same system that has impoverished them, and who will always suffer until it dawns on them there is an alternative and that it is they alone who can bring it about.

John Bissett

Between the Lines: Death, hypocrisy and videotape (1992)

The Between the Lines column from the February 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Death, hypocrisy and videotape

Has nobody told Stormin' Norman about East Timor? Were we not told by the trigger-happy hypocrites who gave us the Gulf War that the invasion of one country by another was intolerable and must be defeated by force? First Tuesday (BBC2, 7 January, 10.45pm) told the hitherto unexposed story of the ruthless butchery of the Timorese people which has gone on for sixteen years.

In 1975 East Timor became independent from Portuguese control and elected its own government. That year Indonesia took over East Timor, outlawed the elected government and began a process of imposing control by means of brutal coercion. It is estimated that one in three of the population have been killed since the Indonesian take-over. In sixteen years as many as 250,000 Timorese workers are said to have been done away with. This is legalised terrorism on a mass scale. It is virtual genocide.

So, where are "our boys" whose task is to defend "the good" against "the evil”? (Remember all that "Free Kuwait" rubbish? The Kuwaiti dictatorship now presides over torture and mass deportations of its subjects.) The answer is that the only American and British arms being sent into the area are being sold to Indonesia.

The governments which claimed to have fought a war in the Gulf against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait are selling to Indonesia the means to unlawfully colonise East Timor. The alleged atrocities committed by Iraqis against Kuwaitis are being committed by Indonesian state thugs against the Timorese workers as a matter of course, but, despite several detailed reports by Amnesty International, the governments of Britain, the USA or Australia (the latter being a major trading partner with Indonesia) just stand by. Of course, hypocrisy is as attached to capitalist politics as fleas are to a dirty dog. How else can the cynical, anti-human policies of defending profit and damning need be justified?

The well-made First Tuesday documentary contained shocking footage of the 12 December 1991 funeral demonstration where Timorese workers were burying a man killed by the Indonesian army. At the funeral Indonesian troops fired on the crowd, killing one hundred mourners, others died on their way to and in hospital.

Indonesian brutality has given rise to an ill-equipped campaign of military resistance by desperate Timorese workers. Such counter-violence is futile: semi-armed guerrilla fighters will be no match for American-backed Indonesian state thugs, and anyway, killing Indonesian workers in uniform will not make anyone free, just a few more graves full.

The tragedy of East Timor reflects vividly the crass hypocrisy of Western celebrations about the coming of "Freedom" and the decency of King Capital's New World Order. It shows just how much the Gulf War was fought for oil profits and just how true it is that if Kuwait would have been as relatively poor as East Timor and if Iraq had been Indonesia things would have been different.

Aah, Freedom

The government has deregulated the law relating to TV, so now we are "free" - if we pay for it (in short, capitalist freedom) - to watch two new pom channels: After Midnight and Adult Channel. Behind the Headlines (BBC2, 8 January. 10.55pm) had a discussion on what such "freedom" will mean. In future viewers will be sold little plastic cards which they can slot into their TVs in order to watch sleazy movies made for sleazy men.

The programme also discussed the new 0898 sex lines on which consumers with such desires can pay 45p a minute listening to out-of-work actresses pretending to be naughty schoolgirls or busty nurses. There is even an 0898 number on which a genuine rape victim has been paid £3,000 to give a recorded account of her rape ordeal. Sweet freedom, eh? The poor woman is "free" to sell her pathetic story and men who are excited by rape (the stealing of the sexual commodity) can listen to her for just over a quid an orgasm.

Meanwhile Decca has announced that in February it is to release a video of the most salacious bits of the William Kennedy Smith rape trial - yours to enjoy in complete "freedom" for £10.99 a copy.

If this is freedom, then it is a lunatic's conception of what it is to be free. It is the freedom to sell, to exploit, to degrade, to abuse, to drag humanity through the dirt. Perhaps someone could market an 0898 number with recordings of children being tortured in East Timor; there might be a few bob to be made out of the screwballs who will get off on that.

Steve Coleman

"Security" and the terror in South-East Asia (1996)

From the March 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The Indonesian Government remains a military dictatorship that has little hesitation in cracking down on political dissent. Military repression in East Timor and harsh clamps on free speech and other civil liberties in Indonesia are anathema to most Australians" (West Australian, 16 December 1995).

Nevertheless, on Monday 18 December 1995, Prime Minister Paul Keating and Defence Minister Robert Ray, together with Senator Evans, flew to Jakarta for the signing, with the Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas, of the secretly negotiated security pact.

Keating, however, described the deal "as more than a defence agreement" which "tilts Australia into a security arrangement with the world's biggest Muslim country—the first time non-aligned Indonesia has signed such a treaty". Moreover, admitted Keating, it will open high-level consultation between the two countries on regional security that could lead to Australian troops defending Indonesia—and vice versa—if either country was "adversely challenged", although this would not happen automatically. Foreign Minister Senator Gareth Evans said that the security pact "showed that Australia could stand on its own feet and did not need the United States to make big agreements in the region on its behalf".

Oil
For Australia and Indonesia, there are good reason they they should be concerned with common "security interests". As elsewhere, there is the smell of oil. Between Darwin and the island of Timor to the north is the Timor Sea or Timor Gap. West Timor is officially part of Indonesia; East Timor was originally a Portuguese colony, which Indonesia invaded in 1975 and annexed in 1976, but is not recognised as being part of Indonesia by the United Nations. Nevertheless, there is an agreed seabed boundary between Australia and the Republic of Indonesia approximately two-thirds of the distance between northern Australia and southern East and West Timor. In 1989, Australia and Indonesia signed the Timor Oil Gap Treaty which covers oil exploration in 61,000 sq km of the Timor Gap. The area is estimated to hold at least one billion barrels of oil. A small part of the area north of the boundary is Indonesian-controlled; a much larger areas south of the boundary is under joint Australian and Indonesian control, and a somewhat smaller area to the south of it and to the north of Australia, is under exclusive Australian control. The future of East Timor is, therefore, of particular interest to both Indonesia and Australia.

Repression in East Timor
The number of East Timorese killed by the Indonesians is not, and may never be, known. The usually accepted (but not by the Indonesians) figure is 200, 000. A graph in the Western Australian of 30 September 1995, based on official Indonesian and Portuguese statistics, shows the population, in 1970, to be 600,000; in 1973, about 620,000; in 1980, down to around 550,000, and ten years later, about 740,000. It is now about 800, 000 but this would include Indonesians who settled there during the last years or so. According to the West Australian of the same date, there are six to none Indonesian battalions, each of 700 men, occupying East Timor. The East Timor rebels, known as the National Council of Maubere Resistance (CNRM), formed in 1988, is estimated to be no more than 100 to 500.

For the people of East Timor, the past 20 years have been dominated by fear and repression. Indeed, "Almost two decades after the brutal Indonesian invasion, the military regime still relies on terror to maintain its grip on the troubled island province, which is little more than 300km from the Australian coast" (West Australian, 30 September 1995).

Torture has been, and probably still is, widespread, although the Indonesian authorities deny that they torture people. But the physical scars on former inmates, and the consistent accounts from Amnesty International and other human rights groups, tell a different story. Moreover, between September 6 and 11 last year, there were riots and unrest in the capital Dili and other towns of East Timor.

Although most East Timorese are not involved in the struggle for independence, they do not accept Indonesian sovereignty. "Most see complete independence as an unrealistic goal as long as President Suharto and the Indonesian military hold the reigns." (West Australian, 30 September 1995). Furthermore, they realise that neither Australia, or Britain and the United States, are prepared to upset Indonesia's rulers; "a country growing in economic importance". Nevertheless, Australia at least is trying to make sure that no capitalist regime in East Timor comes to power which may upset its stake in possible future oil profits under the waters of the Timor Sea.

Peter E. Newell

Class, Micropolitics & Solidarity (1996)

From the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists recognise that workers who are involved in reform campaigns are, at least, trying to gain some control over their lives.

What do we find if we examine, quickly, the present state of class struggle in this little corner of world capitalism known as Britain?

Looking first at what we might call the traditional areas of organised conflict, trade union activity, there has been something of a flurry of activity over the last couple of months with tube strikes and postal strikes particularly in the news. This has fairly predictably led to the government threatening more repression and further curbs on union powers, to the point of considering an outright ban on strikes in "essential services", though such a ban may be rendered impossible by the difficulty of defining what is or is not an essential service.

These disputes drag on as management, more used these days to little overt resistance from workers, continue to try to impose their will on hostile workforces. Simultaneously, the unions are stung to greater efforts of resistance not only by the hostile interference of both the Tory government and the Labour so-called opposition.

Of course, these remain relatively minor disputes and the reactions of the two major parties represent the efforts of the capitalist state to stamp out what it thinks are the dying embers of workers' resistance. It is possible that such efforts by the state might actually cause sparks to ignite further flare-ups of open conflict; what's certainly the case is that they can never succeed in entirely extinguishing class struggle because the capitalist system itself continually produces both fuel and ignition.

What of other manifestations of conflict? What of the so-called "micropolitical" struggles—Newbury, Wexports, the "land is ours" campaign and the like?

As far as the major parties are concerned, the future has been abandoned. Mainstream politics, with Labour and the Tories drawing so close together, has nothing to offer but more of the same, world without end—unless of course things simply get worse. This political sclerosis and ideological entropy means that all the political energy has migrated elsewhere, out of parliamentarianism and into either charities or loosely-organised protest actions, both areas being primarily defensive.

There are many people including many of those involved in such struggles, who will question the relevance of class to these protests and actions. They are, after all, specifically "micropolitical", single-issue campaigns, concerned it would seem, purely and simply with specific, very localised outcomes.

Newbury bypass protesters, for example, would probably consider the notion that their campaign to stop a road from being built (and save a rare snail) had a class aspect as absurd. But then, why should we assume that a struggle must necessarily be self-conscious? The class struggle is, in fact, an inevitable feature of the capitalist system, whether those involved are conscious of it or not, being the result of irreducible conflicts of material interest under capitalism.

While the immediate aim of those at Newbury may be "simply" to stop the construction of a road for ecological reasons, it should be recognised that this does not in itself mean that important issues of class are excluded from the entire structure of the conflict that is involved. There is a very important question of power at issue here, which is always a vitally important element of class relations. Class and capitalism are inevitably involved, so these issues are not really "micro" at all but actually have global, social and economic implications. 

Whatever else may be involved, the conflict over the Newbury bypass is one in which working-class people are struggling for some degree of democratic control over their environment, which inevitably brings them into conflict with the state and with capitalist big business.

Of course, it needs to be recognised that most struggles such as these are doomed to failure in the long term, and that when they are successful, they will lead only to further struggles ad infinitum, as long as the capitalist system itself continues to exist; as long as, that is, working people don't actually have real democratic control over our own lives. These struggles are (as in trade-unionism) defensive, as they react to impositions and the diktats passed down from the capitalists and their public lieutenants in the state, even though they also express a desire for something more, something better than what there already is. Part of the problem is that this desire is left vague, ethereal, relatively inarticulate, and the energy released by it is frittered away in specific short-term, defensive struggles, often without even recognising connections between them, or with apparently different but ultimately related and overlapping struggles such as those involving unions or tenants groups.

Solidarity

A recent example of an inspired, but ultimately doomed (as those involved will have no doubt realised all along), "micropolitical" action involved four women entering a British Aerospace factory in order to disarm military aircraft bound for Indonesia. These women, from the anti-war group Ploughshares, undertook this action as a protest against Indonesian state terrorism in East Timor, where it is assumed the planes were to be used against the civilian population (or against East Timorese rebels—although, if reports are to believed, that does in fact mean pretty much the entire population).

What is particularly interesting, and heartening, about this event is the strong element of solidarity involved. First of all, and most obviously, there is the solidarity of the women with the East Timorese people against the (Indonesian) state and big business (and not just British Aerospace—Indonesian aggression, and Australian support for it, is driven, surprise surprise, by economics, specifically by the existence of oil in the Timor Sea). Presumably the action was undertaken in order to publicise the situation in East Timor and therefore the women were expecting to be arrested and convicted of "criminal damage"; to that extent they will consider their action to have been relatively successfully.

What will have made it still more successful for them is the fact that they were actually acquitted by a jury on 30 July, despite having admitted their actions, simply arguing that they were ethically justified. This brings us to the second example of solidarity—that of the working people in the jury who decided that the women were indeed justified in their actions.

By the letter of the law, it seems apparent that these four women should surely have been convicted; they had broken the law. But, while we should hold no illusions concerning the jury's motives in acquitting them, i.e., there seems no reason to think that it was specifically done with this in mind, their act of solidarity threw the whole notion of legality into question.

Working-class solidarity can go beyond legality; there is little enough such solidarity around at the moment, and it is understandable, if, for example, threats by the state against union rights make the union movement somewhat nervous, but it must also be recognised that the union leaders seems to have forgotten that such a thing as solidarity is even possible. But it is absolutely vital; whatever the laws says, class solidarity can make the law unworkable anyway.

The laws of the state are made workable only by the active consent of its "subjects", the working class, and can therefore be made unworkable by the withdrawal of that consent. This is an absolutely basic lesson to be drawn from the history of the trade-union movement; if the relatively class-conscious workers hadn't been willing to break the law, and back each other up, in the first place, there would be no unions today. This is a lesson that trade unionists, even more than those involved in "micropolitics" (who seem to have at least some consciousness of it) have to re-learn today so that they can regroup, grow once more as an effective force within capitalism, and defend themselves and the immediate interests of working people more effectively.

That said, there is an air of expectancy among the unions at the moment, an expectancy that flies in the face of all the evidence, that Labour will somehow "put things right" if it wins the next election, that they will "set things straight" for the union movement and the working class. But the Labour Party feels little or no solidarity with working people in struggle, and things will anyway always be twisted for workers under capitalism.

As socialists have reiterated time and time again, workers need to stop putting their faith in reformism; capitalism will never, can never, be reformed in our interest. The real interest of the working class will only be served by the abolition of class altogether, along with capitalism in all its forms and will all its iniquitous effects. But also, until the majority of people come to see this and do it, those workers who are drawn into struggle should also realise that reformist appeals to the laws of the capitalist state are irrelevant and solidarity is supremely important. And who knows? Maybe such recognition of a basic commonality of interest could lead more people to realise that those interests are absolutely opposed to the interests of capitalism itself.

Jonathan Clay