Written by Coen Husain Pontoh and Translated by Jeremy Lim; A Response to Abdil Mughis Mudhoffir.
THE VICTORY of Prabowo Subianto-Gibran Rakabuming in the 2024 Presidential Election has divided critics and activists into two camps. The first are those who feel alarmed by the election of Candidates Number 2 on the ballot which sounds the death knell for democracy in Indonesia. While the second camp sees his victory as eroding the foundation of democracy, it does not destroy it entirely.
Abdil Mughis Mudhoffir is one example of a proponent of the second camp. According to him, in his article that has also been published by IndoPROGRESS, the analysis of the first camp is too personalistic. Their approach has been discredited since it was used to analyse the emergence of the figure of Joko Widodo in the 2014 Presidential Elections and his ten years in power. For Mughis, Prabowo is unlikely to replace democracy with an authoritarian system because there are structural constraints already set up by democracy itself. The structural constraints hindering Prabowo’s “ambitions,” according to Mughis, “…come not from civil society, but from competition among predatory elites who seek to concentrate power and wealth in their own hands.”
In this article, I want to show that through a Marxist class analysis approach, Prabowo’s government will actually be more authoritarian than Jokowi’s government. However, Prabowo-Gibran’s authoritarianism is not solely due to their personal desires, but rather is the result of structural pressure from the current logic of capital accumulation. In this sense, the Prabowo-Gibran government is a government that represents the interests of the capitalist class which wants to continue to preserve its exploitation and domination of the interests of the working class and poor people as a whole.
The Structural Economic Conditions of Indonesia
Some time ago, the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) issued a report that Indonesia’s economic growth in 2023 will be 5.05%. This figure is better than the government’s estimate of only 5% but lower than growth in 2022 of 5.31%. This growth rate is also much better than the economic growth rate for the United States which is only 2.5% in 2023 and the average growth rate in seven other advanced capitalist countries which is only 1.3% in 2023, down compared to 1.4% in 2022.
From this data, we can be optimistic that the Indonesian economy will be only fine in the future. However, as has been highlighted by many critical academics, these Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures do not always reflect the actual reality. If we look further, the biggest contributors to the 5.3% are household consumption (4.82%) and investment (4.40%). This high household consumption was caused by rising wages and government social assistance. However, BPS said that the 4.82% figure itself was actually down compared to the previous year which reached 4.94%. The decline was caused by declining production or consumption from the upper middle class.
What does this mean? In my opinion, there are at least two things: first, the foundation of our economy is actually very fragile because it does not stand on the support of a large-scale and high-tech productive economic sector; second, economic inequality is rising, resulting in dependence on a section of society. Still, according to BPS, which calculates the expenditure inequality of the Indonesian population based on the Gini ratio, the figure will reach 0.388 on a scale of 0 -1 points in March 2023. This figure has increased by 0.007 points compared to the Gini ratio in September 2022 which was 0.381. The Gini ratio in March 2023 is also 0.004 points higher than the figure in March 2022 which was 0.384 points.
For further context, the Gini ratio or Gini coefficient is measured on a scale of 0 to 1 point. A Gini ratio of 0 points indicates perfect equality, which means the entire population has the same per capita expenditure. Meanwhile, the Gini ratio is 1 point, indicating perfect inequality. This illustrates that only one population has all the per capita expenditure and the others have none at all. We can see it from the graph below:
This graph shows the differences in levels of inequality in urban and rural areas. If the level of inequality is higher in urban areas, rural inequality is relatively stable and will even decrease in 2023, where the figure in March 2023 was 0.313 points, a decrease of 0.001 points compared to the condition in March 2022 which was 0.314 points. But again, this figure does not reflect reality, because we remember that rural residents are not a significant contributor to household consumption. This also means that the majority of rural residents live in poverty.
A more detailed picture of the level of economic inequality was reported by the World Inequality Report (WIR) in 2022, where the richest 1% of the population in Indonesia controlled 30.16% of total household assets nationally in 2022. This figure increased compared to 2001 which was 25.75%. Meanwhile, the richest 10% in Indonesia have 61.28% of total household assets nationally in 2022, higher than in 2001 which was 58.64%. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% in Indonesia will only have 4.5% of total national household wealth in 2022. This percentage has actually decreased compared to 2001, which was 4.84%.
Not only that, the 2022 WIR report also shows the rising income inequality among Indonesian people. The income of the bottom 50% group will be IDR 25.11 million per year in 2022, while the top 10% group will have income of IDR 333.77 million per year. The richest 1% have an even higher income, reaching US$1.2 billion per year.
From this graph, it appears that the capitalist economic system adopted by the Indonesian government since the New Order dictatorship until now, apart from growing on a porous foundation, also exclusively benefits a small number of the upper layers of Indonesian society which we call the capitalist class.
Capitalist Indonesia
In such an economic situation, questions, discussions and pressure arise so that the state and government in power can correct and further change the unequal and exploitative economic structure. During the last election period, candidates, campaigners and observers exchanged ideas about how the country should be managed for the greatest benefit of society. This kind of expectation seems commonplace because, in academic discourse, mass media, civil society circles, and public discussions in Indonesia, the state is always seen as a neutral entity, an institution that stands on the interests of competing groups of society to pursue and defend their respective interests.
Because of its position which is assumed to be neutral, state policy is very much dependent on the individuals or groups (oligarchs) who control state institutions. It is not surprising that an individual president then determines the progress and decline of the quality of democracy (the first camp’s thesis), or that competition among oligarchs is more decisive (the second camp’s thesis).
We as Marxists see that the state is not a neutral institution. A capitalist state is a state that serves the interests of the capitalist class. Because Indonesia adheres to a capitalist economic system, this country is automatically a capitalist country. But in a capitalist country, the capitalist class does not automatically directly control state power to then serve its interests. There are two ways in which the capitalist class uses its power to dominate and control state power: first, by direct control or colonization of state power by placing individual members of the capitalist class into high and strategic state positions. For example, placing figures such as Joko Widodo, Jusuf Kalla, Prabowo, Gibran, Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, Sandiaga Uno, and/or Erick Thohir.
The second way is through indirect control. Because it requires a large amount of funds — whether through taxes or investment — to be able to carry out its daily operations, the state must ensure that this source of funding continues to run without obstacles, threats or disturbances that stop it. Because Indonesia is a capitalist country, where the main source of funding for state operations comes from this class, the state must ensure that the interests of this capitalist class are maintained and fulfilled. Various kinds of rules and policies were created to advance the interests of the capitalist class, and various kinds of military-political actions were used to ward off all possibilities for the emergence of threats, obstacles and disruptions to the smooth operations of the capitalist class (for more details about this, see Pontoh, 2023).
From here we see the emergence of structural pressure or force for every form of government — dictatorship or democracy — or for those who occupy high government positions — Jokowi or Prabowo — to always side with the interests of the capitalist class. Those who try to challenge this structural force must be removed by all means, be it violently through military coups or peacefully through general elections. This is what in Marxist literature (such as Zafirovski, 2021) is called the Dictatorship of Capital.
Prabowo and the Future of Democracy
Returning to the question of what the future of democracy will be under the Prabowo-Gibran government. To answer this, I would like to invite readers to turn back briefly to the last campaign season, because there was a lot of information about the involvement of the capitalists behind the three presidential candidates.
From the Mongabay report, which is based on research by the Mining Advocacy Network (Jatam), it was revealed that Prabowo-Gibran received the broadest support from energy and mining entrepreneurs, as many as 21 individuals. “The candidate pair is even registered as shareholders in mining and energy interests.” Jatam’s findings were strengthened by one of its supporters, conglomerate Garibaldi Thohir or Boy Thohir, who is the older brother of BUMN Minister Erick Thohir. As quoted by Project Multatuli, Boy Thohir says “even though we may be relatively small, there is possibly a third of Indonesia’s economy in this room.”
However, it is not only that the main supporters of the Prabowo-Gibran candidacy are capitalists, the pair themselves are members of the capitalist class. According to Mongabay, Prabowo, for example, owns many companies in the coal mining sector in Kalimantan, such as PT Nusantara Energy, PT Nusantara Kaltim Coal, PT Erabara Persada, and PT Nusantara Energindo Coal with a total area of 45,703 hectares. On the other hand, Gibran has a mining network through his father’s company, namely PT Rakabu Sejahtera, affiliated with Luhut’s PT Toba Sejahtera. The company is also affiliated with Gibran’s family, from younger siblings to older cousins, to uncles.
However, the data above is not sufficient to conclude that the Prabowo-Gibran government will bring Indonesia into a dark era of authoritarianism as claimed by the first camp, or will not go that far because of the constraints of the oligarchy’s own interests as the conclusion of the second camp – represented by Mughis.
To understand this data, it needs to be complemented by other evidence in the form of a series of policies from the past that benefited the capitalist class and harmed the interests of the urban and rural working class.
Let’s take the example of the Jokowi government, which in order to protect the interests of foreign and domestic investment, issued the Job Creation Bill (Omnibus Bill) which was very pro-capitalist and simultaneously hugely detrimental to the working class. One of the business sectors that has received the red carpet treatment from the Job Creation Bill is the mining sector, with the imposition of 0% royalties for firms that raised the price of coal. It is not surprising that the Bill Was considered a textbook case of structured and systematic looting of natural resources.
What was the impact of implementing the Job Creation Bill on the natural resources sector? What was certain was the environmental damage. More than that, agrarian conflicts have escalated. The Agrarian Reform Consortium (KPA) noted that throughout 2023 there were 241 incidents of conflicts, where this number increased from 212 incidents in 2022. From these conflicts, as many as 135 thousand families were affected throughout 2023, and as many as 346 villages and several cities will be affected by agrarian conflicts. The highest cases of agrarian conflict came from various sectors: plantations (99), infrastructure (32), property (26), mining (21), forestry (20), military facilities (6), agriculture/agribusiness (4), and coastal and small island sectors (4).
The result of this conflict is, of course, acts of violence by corporations and repressive state apparatus. According to the KPA, throughout 2023, there will be 508 victims of criminalization who were arrested for fighting for their rights to their land and traditional territories. Of that number, 91 people experienced abuse and were even victims of shootings, 79 men and 12 women of which three of them died.
Up to this point, in contrast to Mughis, I have to conclude that the future of democracy under the Prabowo-Gibran government will be increasingly violent and its policies will be increasingly repressive. These repressive policies and actions are a result of the structural pressures of capitalism and, although I share the same concerns as the first camp about the bleak future of democracy under Prabowo, this is not primarily due to Prabowo’s personality as the first camp claims.
Democracy under Prabowo-Gibran is a democracy for the rich (plutocracy), where he will share his power with the super-rich to gain their support and prevent conflict between them. Here, he will continue Jokowi’s leadership style. However, when dealing with the public interest, democracy for him will only be a cover for the legitimacy of his repressive political policies and actions. Because it is faced with slowing economic growth, porous economic foundations, worsening economic inequality, and the legacy of Jokowi’s pro-capital policies which have given rise to widespread conflict, it is inevitable that the Prabowo-Gibran government will be more authoritarian than Jokowi’s government.
Conclusion
Only by identifying the electoral regime as it exists today, within the context of the dynamics of the development and expansion of capitalism, will we be able to more clearly and fully understand the future of democracy during the Prabowo-Gibran government.
It is time for critical intellectuals and social movements to point their fingers at the capitalist system adopted by the ruling regime as the primary source of the violence, inequality, ignorance and widespread poverty that is currently taking place. At the same time, advocates for the victims of development can no longer stop at human rights issues or labour improvement and protection but rather begin fighting the capitalist system and the capitalist state that protects it.
The culmination of all this must kick off the calls for non-capitalist development alternatives. Without this, and with every periodic change of power, we will return to reading increasingly depressing statistics, listening to the false promises of the competing presidential candidates, and then asking, “What is the future of democracy under the government of so-and-so?…”
Originally published in IndoPROGRESS. Coen Husain Pontoh is an editor and translator at IndoPROGRESS.
Bibliography
Pontoh, Coen Husain, “Teori Negara Instrumentalis”, IndoProgress: Jurnal Pemikiran Marxis, 2023.
Zafirovski, Milan. 2021. Capitalist Dictatorship: A Study of Its Social Systems, Dimensions, Forms and Indicators. Leiden: Brill.