Krismon In The Javanese Desa

KRISMON IN THE JAVANESE DESA: THE DYNAMICS OF INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION IN THE RECONSTRUCTION OF INDONESIA'S NEW ORDER REGIME1

Jan Breman

(Dean of the Amsterdam School of Social Science Research and has published a large number of books and articles on colonial as well as post-colonial Asia)

Tilting the Balance between Capital and Labour

The Indonesian peoples, with much caution and ill at ease, are trying to free themselves of the iron grip with which the leaders of the New order have held civilian society captive for more than 30 years. Student' demonstrations which erupted in street riots have forced the precipitous eclipse of Big Brother Suharto, but the success achieved by this defiant behaviour can only be understood in combination with the free fall of the rupiah. The severe and total devalorisation of the national currency is due both to speculation and to large-scale flight of capital. The krisis moneter (krismon in popular parlance) has developed into an economic collapse of such size and intensity that one fears the worst for the future. During the last few months the metropolis Jakarta has shown a Potemkin-like fagade with deserted building sites and empty skyscrapers. The rampaged and burnt-out shopping malls, domain of the middle classes who used to come here to spend their spoils of lopsided growth, all add to the battered condition of the economy.

It is significant that, in Indonesia as elsewhere in the region, the undoing of the Asian miracle is not the result of a sudden rearrangement of industrial production but manifests its'elf as a crisis of Finanzkapital. From the start, the debacle has been dominated by 'capital' and the protection of this factor seems to have been the prime or even sole concern of the World Bank and the IMF. The impact of the malaise on the factor 'labour' has been understated policy wise and did not receive much exposure in the media. In Indonesia, undoubtedly the most heavily affected country, official sources report that unemployment has now climbed to 15 percent of the workforce. This figure is a shot in the dark and, however, and totally ignores the loss of employment and income in the very sizeable informal economic sector. Even a short round along the industrial belt that encircles the Jakarta metropole shows that many enterprises have reduced production or even stopped it altogether, and that superfluous workers have been dismissed or are only working part-time. The lack of reliable registration makes it difficult to estimate the numbers of those who have been laid off in summary fashion. This also applies to the men, women and children who, as domestic producers, have remained unlisted in occupational counts and who are now deprived of any work by their bosses-cum-suppliers. The exodus finally includes building workers and open-air artisans as well as service performers such as street caterers, hawkers, repairers, becak riders, porters, rag pickers and odd-job men.

The Exodus of the Migrant Workers

The larger part of the. workforce in the lower levels of the economy belong to the countryside. They take part in an on-going form of work migration in which these circommuters are accustomed to return to their rural homes each month or at least a few times each year. The yield of their labour away f rom- the village is needed to repay the debt that household members staying back cannot avoid to incur in order to ensure their own livelihood.

The opening-up of the countryside with a modern transport system has strongly reduced the distance to the urban economy. From the hills and plains in the Javanese hinterland it is possible to reach Jakarta, Bandung or Surabaya within a couple of hours. A mobile proletariat has come into existence which travels to a destination and works there without securing decent and permanent shelter. These are little educated, low paid workers who derive no rights from their momentary inclusion in the labour process, and dare not ask for them. The transience of their stay makes it easier for them to be jettonised, and that has occurred massively during the last few months. The authorities see the continual presence of the unemployed lumpen army as a political risk, and sees to it that this enormous labour reserve returns to the countryside. Just as in Malaysia, the expulsion of these labour migrants is prompted by more than mere economic reasons. The deportation policy is intended to prevent them taking any action to testify to their potentiality as a dangerous class. A return of these workers to their sites of urban employment is unlikely. It is predicted that the economy of Indonesia will shrink by 15 to 20 percent in 1998, but.in my view even this assessment is still too optimistic. The recession will most probably further aggravate in the years to come.

A Return to the Safety Net of the Desa?

Expulsion from the urban economy has caused the floating mass of workers to be lost from sight. Two convenient notions have played a role in this. The first is the assumption that migrant workers continue to be anchored in village society and in the agrarian mode of production. According to a conventional wisdom, they are firmly rooted in peasant households who cultivate a small plot of land and supplement its yield by seeking monetary wages outside the village. When such subsidiary incomes are lost, they can always fall back on the dependable source of living in the village, i.e. agriculture, and at least produce sufficient food for their own needs. The second facile assumption is that a social safety net, lacking in the modern urban economy, is still intact in the more traditional village household. Migrant workers who return penniless are said to be able to depend on informal support mechanisms within the local community. An initial and cursory enquiry immediately shows that neither of these cherished views is correct. The situation in two villages in the coastal plains of northern Java where I have earlier conducted fieldwork and in four other localities elsewhere on the island where research is now in progress deviates quite drastically from the image.that is so popular among policy makers, i.e. that the desa is a close-knit community in which inhabitants are partners, first in mutual prosperity, now in shared misfortune.

Men and women who return to landowning households do indeed try to keep their heads above water with the produce from the land they own, but that is far more difficult or even impossible for the the large segment that has no longer access to land, even as tenant or sharecropper. This landless class happens to share in agrarian production only as harvest labour, for which it is paid a wage under the subsistence level. Their migration to the cities arose in fact from their gradual expulsion from agriculture. The progressive exlusion of this under-class is made even worse by the disintegration of communal or religious support obligations on which vulnerable categories could formerly depend. The rules of the market economy nowadays also predominate within the village, with the consequence that social relations among its inhabitants are expressed in monetary terms. At the local level, the contrast between notables and commoners is similar to that found in the macro-society. Big landowners have little sympathy for the lot of their destitute fellow villagers. They seem to be more interested in the costs of the haj, which are going up by leaps and bounds.

It is not only transfers from rich to poor that is restricted; within the family, too, the more privileged tend to show a lack of willingness to help those who are less fortunate. Relatives of poor people are usually equally poor or even poorer, and such. a situation of dire scarcity leaves little to be divided. The notion of solidarity and mutual help within one's own circle, said to have remained intact in village life, is merely an illusion. It masks unwillingness on the part of government to formulate and implement a social policy, as is also shown by its repeated refusal to increase the minimum wage. In effect, the lowest echelons of the urban economy act as a safety net for the rural poor, and that outlet has now largely been lost.

From Impoverishment to Pauperisation

My conclusion, reached on monitoring the impact of the crisis in rural West and Central Java in Spring 1998, is that the mass expulsion of migrant workers, not only from the cities but also from overseas, is leading to a process of impoverishment merging into pauperisation. Having returned to their villages without work or income, the discarded workers are also confronted with gigantic price increases in the basic necessities of daily life. one of the clauses in the ukase imposed upon Indonesia by the IMF concerned the abolition of food and fuel subsidies. It was only by the grace of such subsidies that government had been able to maintain its policy of extremely low wages, which had long fluctuated between slightly more than 100.000 and 175,000 rupiahs (at the present rate of exchange less than US$ 10 to 17.50) per month. The abrupt transition to market prices in February 1998 brought the first explosion of revolt. Contrary to the popular notion that food is cheaper in the countryside, where it after all produced, in my fieldwork villages the daily necessities cost more than was charged by urban. An upsurge of food riots in the near future is very probable, both to exact a reduction in prices and to back up claims for an adequate ration to be distributed.

Apart from this instantaneous and unorganised expression of violence, there seems to be little evidence of any collective resistance to the misery brought about by krismon. Even after Suhartols resignation, there is still a lack of free public and political space for such action. Members of the workforce who have become superfluous have no common bargaining power and are forced to act driven by their--own separated interests. At the household level I observed four strategies with which people tried to cope with the threat to their survival:

Living on savings, insofar as there were any, 'borrowing' from close kinsmen and neighbours; asking an advance from a possible employer, and buying on credit in one of the local warung. These sources of consumptive credit soon dry up, and the change is then made to the second strategy.
Pawning or selling durable consumer goods. The poor have few blongings but what they have they bring to the pawnshop, or they sell a bicycle, sewing machine, tools, furniture or clothing to petty salesmen. Urban taders send their agents to the villages to seek out and buy back golden ornaments
Restricting consumption. Not only do they waive rites de passage (delaying marriages, circumcision and other ceremonial investments in social bonds), withdraw from education, avoid medical expenditure, but they also economise drastically on the quality and quantity of food for young and old. They eat less meals, sometimes only one or even less per day. Patent medicines and milk powder (essential as baby food) are now beyond the means of an increasing number of families
They undertake desperate sallies outside the village in search of income. The enormous rise in travelling costs, caused by increased petrol prices, and the stringent control of identity papers both in and around the cities, mark the perilous nature of these attempts. The principal reason for failure, however, is the failure of finding an employer

Immisserisation without Alleviation

The loss of wages earned away from the village has also caused a fall in non-agrarian activity within the village. Transport and other localised services, artisanal production and petty trading have all been victimised by the sharp drop in external earnings. In my estimation, the village economy in those places which I visited has shrunk. by one-quarter to one-third of its earlier volume. The regional and district authorities allege that they restrict the damage with public works and through the distribution of food packets at low cost or free of charge. Such interventions turned out to be on an incidental nature, however, while corruption and nepotism frequently keep them out of reach of the target group. It is a disturbing fact that the state machinery is geared towards passing instructions and regulations from top to bottom, but that it lacks any competence to compile data regarding the Verelendung, let alone do anything about it. The policy followed in Indonesia has for many years enjoyed the appreciation and approbation of foreign agencies such as the World Bank. The Bank's favourable opinion has been expressed, for instance, in very flattering pronouncements regarding the fall in the level of poverty. The pretension of a spectacular decline, we were told to less than 12%, was a figment of official imagination and manipulated by fake statistics. The condition of the great mass at the botoom of the economy was far more unfavourable thant the government and its foreign allies would have us believe. During the past few months, moreover, the percentage that has fallen far below the povert line has increased rapidly and willl soon rise to include perhaps near to half the Javanese population.

The economic collapse is worsened even further by the drought that has affected East Indonesia in particular, forest fires which have set large tracts of Kalimantan aflame, and a plague of locusts in parts of Sumatra. What look like natural calamities at first sight turn out to be men-made disasters on further examination. The founding father and shining light of the New Order has stepped down, but the regime as such still stands. It is not inconceivable that any transition towards a more democratic form of government will be blocked by those powerholders who maintain their position arg-ueing that that the state of emergency justifies a continuation of peace-and-order politics. At all levels in society and economy, key positions are still tightly held by advocates of such a rigid line. These state controllers oppose any genuine inclusion of the great mass of the population in attempts to reduce the sharp disparities in power and prosperity. I should not find it at all surprising if the members of this caste, in my consideration the essential dangerous class, who have privatised the state for their own benefit and who have enriched themselves immensely by confiscating much of the yield of natural resources, will manage to consolidate their position with foreign help. Such a scenario will undoubtedly be enacted by making claims which are geopolitical in nature, i.e., the overriding need for maintenance of peace and stability in the Southeast Asian region.

Amsterdam, June 1998.

Notes:

1) "Workshop The Impact of The Economic Crisis on Labour in Indonesia," hold by Casa, Akatiga, Clara, Bandung 12-14 Juli 1998.

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