The National Background: Social Change In New Order Java

Almost two decades after national independence, the mid 1960s witnessed the arrival of a New Order government determined to reorganize Indonesian politics and economics. More than anything else, this set the stage for subsequent changes in rural Java. The example requires us to "bring the state back in" (Skocpol 1985, 4) to agrarian analysis, recognizing the critical—if often pluralistic (Emmerson 1983)—impact of government on politics, production, and social differentiation.

The final years of the preceding Sukarno regime had seen ruinous hyperinflation (Arndt 1971; Mackie 1971), infrastructural decline, falling rice production (Timmer 1981, 86), and the flight of foreign capital (Booth and McCawley 1981b). In the political arena, parliamentary government had given way in 1957 to a more restrictive "Guided Democracy" dominated by President Sukarno and an intensifying three-sided rivalry between the Communist Party (PKI), Muslim organizations, and the armed forces (Lev 1966; Ricklefs 1981, 245-71). Political tensions increased in the 1960s. In response to the challenge, the PKI attempted to outflank its urban-based rivals through vigorous mobilization in the countryside. The party's campaign concentrated on implementation of recently passed land-reform legislation (Utrecht 1969). In the contest that ensued, the communists lost control of many of their rural supporters, and their Muslim rivals responded with surprisingly effective counterattacks (Mortimer 1974, 276-328). Some of the most extreme incidents of violence occurred in East Java. The political struggle took an unexpectedly bloody turn, however, in the aftermath of a failed left-wing officers' coup in Jakarta the night of October 1, 1965 (Crouch 1978, 97). In the months that followed, the PKI was banned and hundreds of thousands of its supporters were rounded up and killed. The stage was thus set for the New Order Suharto government.

The New Order government immediately set a different course than its predecessor. Opening the country to Japanese and Western investment, it soon managed to bring inflation under control, attract significant foreign capital, and achieve a positive balance of payments. It also launched new initiatives in agriculture, including programs for the distribution of fertilizers, pesticides, and newly developed modern rice varieties (Booth and McCawley 1981b). The programs expanded after 1973, when international oil prices climbed and government revenues swelled. After some initial setbacks owing to coercive administration

(Hansen 1973), the extension program began to take effect. By the late 1970s the majority of rice fields in Java were planted with new rice varieties and fertilizer use had become among the highest per hectare in Asia (Booth 1979; Timmer 1981). Yields increased dramatically. With annual increases of 3-5 percent, Indonesia's total rice production almost doubled in the 1970s to 18.5 million tons and reached 22 million in the early 1980s.

These achievements were offset by the poverty of Java's enormous population and by distributional trends that threatened to exclude the rural poor from the benefits of increased production. Despite an ambitious—and, by Third World standards, successful—family-planning program, the island's population continued to grow at a rate that ensured that it would double every 35-40 years (Hull and Mantra 1981). By 1985 Java's population was nearing 100 million, with "population densities ... higher than any other agrarian region of comparable size in the world" (Husken and White 1989, 236). The weight of population on the land was reflected in shrinking landholdings. Between 1963 and 1973, the size of the average Javanese farm fell from 0.7 to 0.66 ha. (Booth and Sundrum 1976, 94). Although macroeconomic data indicate that landholding inequality remains moderate by Third World standards (Booth and Sun-drum 1976, 95), these figures exclude the many rural people who own no land at all—usually more than 40 percent of the population in wet-rice areas of the island.

Other developments underscore the plight of Java's rural poor. Between 1924 and 1976 the proportion of the rural population identifiable as "very poor"—defined as all those with an annual per capita income less than the equivalent of 240 kg of rice, or roughly U.S. $50 (in 1985 dollars)—is estimated to have grown from 3.4 to 39.8 percent (Palte 1984, 85; Sajogyo 1977). Trends during the first years of the New Order also pointed to a situation of worsening distribution, with growing inequality between urban and rural areas. Despite increases in rice production, absolute consumption for the lowest 40 percent of the rural population did not improve, and indeed may have deteriorated (King and Weldon 1977, 708).

Employment trends raised troubling questions as well. From 1961 to 1980 the proportion of the work force identified as agricultural fell from 73.6 to 55.0 percent (Scherer 1980; Hart 1986, 62). The decline occurred at a time when there was little rural-urban migration, and the proportion of the island's population residing in rural areas fell only a few percentage points, to about 75 percent (Speare 1981). Half of the employment growth was in petty trade, services, and cottage industries, which are even less remunerative than rice farming (McCawley 1981; Hart 1986, 64). As Gillian Hart (1986) has argued, this pattern suggests that the decline in the agricultural labor force was at least in part the result of forcible displacement, not enticement into more lucrative off-farm enterprises.

Other evidence confirms that the lowland poor were being excluded from traditional farm employment. In East and Central Java, for example, the spread of modern rice varieties was accompanied by new, more restrictive labor arrangements. These barred villagers from harvests in which they had once had a right to work (Stoler 1977; Collier et al. 1973). Around this same time, many farmers replaced the hand-held harvest knife (ani-ani ) with the sickle, reducing demand for harvest labor, and eliminating poor people's right to glean (Stoler 1977). The introduction of mechanical rice hullers, finally, made hand pounding obsolete. Although they lowered milling costs for people who paid to have rice pounded, the machines displaced some 7.7 million part-time pounders (Timmer 1973; Collier 1978). The majority of these were landless and land-poor women supplementing meager household incomes. Although recent surveys indicate that, for those able to find work, wages in rice farming increased in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Husken and White 1989), the sad fact is that large numbers of people are barred from farm employment entirely.

Many of these developments were also seen, of course, in other areas of Southeast Asia. There, too, gains in production have often been offset by more imbalanced patterns of employment and distribution (Bailey 1983; Ganjanapan 1989; Peletz 1988; Scott 1985). The situation in Indonesia, however, was further complicated by political events in the years just prior to the green revolution. As a number of scholars have noted (White 1976; Hull and Hull 1976), the opening of Java's rural economy coincided with the shutting down of most of the political organizations of the pre-1965 period. The watchwords of the New Order government have been "development and security" (pembangunan dan keamanan ). Its overriding concern has been to avoid any recurrence of the agrarian conflict that characterized the final years of the Sukarno government. With this in mind, the regime initiated political reforms designed to reduce the influence of political parties and increase loyalty to the government. Government policies spoke of the need to transform rural society into a "floating mass." Under this policy, the rural population was encouraged to participate in national elections. Outside designated electoral periods, however, the populace was not to be bothered with politics. Instead, it was enjoined to devote its energies to the more pressing task of social and economic development (Crouch 1978, 272). Political parties were barred from organizing in villages.

Whatever their official intent, the New Order's programs have had a strong impact on all areas of Java and all aspects of rural life. Policy changes have made Indonesia's once-powerful political parties marginal players in a national arena dominated by the military. Equally serious, the programs have left rural people with little voice in the political process. At the same time, economic developments have increased rural dif-

ferentiation and raised troubling questions as to the political and distributional consequences of development.

All of these changes have brought problems of equity and power to the center of attention in Javanese studies, which have recently reinvestigated Java's agrarian history in an effort to gauge the scale of recent changes by looking more closely at what preceded them. The results of this research challenge received images of rural society. Clifford Geertz's (1963a) pioneering study argued that the Dutch excluded Javanese from the capital-intensive export sector, forcing most of Java's growing population into an already "labor stuffed" (1963a, 80) sawah ecosystem. The resulting process of "agricultural involution," as Geertz calls it, did not split native society into opposed camps of "large landlords and a group of oppressed near-serfs" (1963a, 97). Instead, he argues, native institutions "maintained a comparatively high degree of social and economic homogeneity by dividing the economic pie into a steadily increasing number of minute pieces."

In line with this view, some scholars have interpreted the developments of post-1965 Java as a breakdown of long-established sharing arrangements. Traditional values stressing "social concern for the poor," it is argued, have been replaced with ones stressing efficiency and profit maximization (Collier 1978).

Though it does not contradict Geertz's primary thesis that colonialism did not produce a simple pattern of class polarization, more recent research indicates that class differences were more pronounced, and sharing values much weaker, than Geertz thought. It has been demonstrated, for example, that a large pool of landless and land-poor villagers existed in lowland areas even in the nineteenth century. Village officials and large landowners, it appears, thrived under colonial programs, often at the expense of their less-privileged neighbors. Rather than sharing poverty, those who played key roles in the colonial system appear to have used it to their benefit.^[5]

Most of this recent research, however, has focused on the wet-rice lowlands, again neglecting upland agriculture and society. What was mountain Java like prior to this period? How has it changed? Has it experienced the same exclusionary pressures as the lowlands? More basically, what comparative lessons can we learn here about the processes of agrarian change? Mountain society remains to be incorporated into our understanding of Java's history and contemporary development; its lessons provide comparative insight into rural differentiation in Java and all of Southeast Asia.

[5] Though this revisionist literature is vast, some of the most insightful contributions include Alexander and Alexander 1982; Breman 1982 and 1983; Elson 1978a and 1984; Hart 1986; Husken and White 1989; Knight 1982; Van Niel 1982; and White 1983.