State of disorder: privatised violence and the state in Indonesia

There seem to be semi-organized young men with a potential for disorder everywhere in Indonesia. From parking attendants in Jakarta to chainsaw gangs in the jungles of Borneo; from ‘security units’ for political parties to martial arts clubs; from neighbourhood watches to military auxiliaries, these groups often serve multiple purposes beyond their stated one. In an environment of high youth underemployment, poorly regulated markets and competitive inter-elite politics, they are an unruly, though photogenic, face of Indonesian politics at many levels. This book is a welcome addition to an already extensive literature about political thuggery in Indonesia. It is an ambitious project. A great range of episodes in which gangs of young men known colloquially as preman have been controversial passes the revue. There are historical sections on the semi-criminal jago that indirectly propped up the colonial plantation economy in Java and on the mostly religious gangs that assisted the military in wiping out the communist party in 1965. There are contemporary sections on the Pancasila Youth groups in North Sumatra helping plantation companies secure the land they want and on the Islamic groups that intimidate alcohol-sellers and nightclubs in Javanese cities like Solo and Jakarta. There are ethnic gangs helping Dayak gubernatorial candidates in Kalimantan and jihadist groups trying to steer politics towards an Islamist revolution. The central thrust of the book is that, behind their diversity, these activities are all driven by one fundamental mechanism: ‘predatory capitalism’. This is another term for the more commonly understood Marxian concept of ‘primitive accumulation’. Marx intended it to portray an early stage of capitalism, in which capitalists first separate themselves by violently expropriating the means of production from others. But Mudhoffir sees the process alive and well in Indonesia today. Indeed, the violence that these gangs practise serves largely to reproduce the system of primitive accumulation, while preventing it from growing into the more regulated modern form. Other authors on preman gangs have often seen them as vehicles by which the poor acquire some agency. Mudhoffir, by contrast, sees them only as instruments in the hands of powerful state and business elites. The poor enrol in them for the pragmatic reason that there is money to be made from these disruptive activities. One of them told him (108):