by: BONO BUDI PRIAMBODO
The Unripe Feudalism of Java and the Living Commune
To truly understand why the New Order succeeded in enforcing stability without becoming a totalitarian terror-state, one must look below both the elite legal theories of Bourchier and the cosmic claims of the Javanese palaces, turning instead to the historical reality of the Javanese desa (village). The European colonial powers—the VOC, the British under Raffles, and the Dutch state—did not encounter a deeply entrenched, rigid feudal system. Instead, they stepped into a landscape of unripe feudalism.
Historically, Javanese kingdoms like Mataram were fragile land-empires characterized by fluid, weak structural control over the interior. The priyayi (aristocrats) did not own permanent, hereditary estates like European dukes; they were merely granted temporary rights by the King to collect tribute or labor from a specific number of peasant families (cacah). Because central authority was weak and plagued by civil wars, the thousands of desa scattered across the hinterlands remained largely autonomous, self-governing microcosms. They developed a sophisticated, highly resilient ecosystem of communal land tenure and collective labor—such as Hak Ulayat (communal domain) and gotong-royong—designed explicitly to prevent individual alienation from the soil and the rise of a permanent landed aristocracy.
This reality aligns in a fascinating genealogical way with the discourses of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on “primitive communism.” In an 1884 letter to Karl Kautsky, Engels explicitly highlighted the Javanese desa, noting how Dutch “state socialism” via the Cultuurstelsel (Forced Cultivation System) did not destroy this communal property structure, but rather weaponized it for colonial capitalism. It was infinitely easier for a colonial bureaucrat to extract forced crop quotas from a single co-opted village chief ruling a communal populace than to deal with thousands of individual landowners.
When the Dutch offered the traditional priyayi permanent hereditary stability and military backing, they successfully fused colonial extraction with the deeply ingrained cultural grammar of Kawulo-Gusti (the mystical unity of servant and master). The peasantry’s traditional habit of deference, conflict-avoidance (rukun), and fatalistic respect for visible power (wahyu) was seamlessly redirected. The New Order did not need to invent an Arendtian totalitarian apparatus because it simply refined this highly efficient, inherited colonial machine—a machine that ran perfectly on the structural autonomy of the desa and the cultural compliance of its inhabitants.
The Contemporary Tragedy: Digital Atomization and Historical Amnesia
This brings us to the profound contemporary irony and the real victims of this long intellectual trajectory: the newest generation of Indonesians. We have experienced a severe historical whiplash. The generation of the 1990s deployed an overkill of dense, sophisticated theory to battle a real authoritarian state. By contrast, the modern digital generation, trapped in the algorithmic loops of short-form media platforms like TikTok, has lost the capacity for deep reading, structural taxonomy, and historical memory entirely.
Alienated from the brilliant, complex ideas of their predecessors, many in the younger generation lack the intellectual tools required to critically read Arendt, Bourchier, Roosa, or Elson. In the absence of a grounded historical understanding, their political vocabulary has undergone a total semantic collapse. They flatten the immense, messy complexities of their post-colonial state into lazy, sensationalist internet buzzwords. They look at their own nation-statehood and blindly label it “fascist.” They analyze Pancasila and the UUD 1945 (1945 Constitution) and dismiss them as inherently totalitarian constructs.
This historical amnesia inflicts devastating damage upon the contemporary Indonesian psyche in three distinct ways:
First, the Misidentification of the Ideal: By calling Pancasila and the UUD 1945 inherently totalitarian, the youth confuse the substance of the foundational ideals with the cynical perversions of the regimes that weaponized them. Pancasila was originally conceptualized by Sukarno and the founders as a radical, emancipatory, and pluralistic compromise meant precisely to prevent the tyranny of the majority and the rise of a monolithic state. Because the New Order spent three decades using mandatory state ideology courses to enforce compliance, the younger generation throws the baby out with the bathwater, mistaking the regime’s cage for the foundational blueprint itself.
Second, alienation from the Nation-State Project: The “Idea of Indonesia” was an astonishing act of political imagination—a conscious choice by an incredibly diverse populace to transcend feudalism and colonial division to build an egalitarian future. When the youth dismiss the entire project as an outdated, oppressive relic, they completely sever their connection to their own revolutionary heritage. They fail to see that the traditional desa was a site of communal resilience, and that the early constitutional debates represented an intellectual mastery over Western legal forms.
Third, the Return of Real Arendtian Atomization: The ultimate irony is that while the youth casually throw around the word “fascism,” their digital lifestyle is actively producing the exact societal conditions that Arendt warned about. Her third volume states that the prime breeding ground for radical political distortion is an atomized, lonely population that has lost its grip on shared reality and historical continuity. Isolated in front of screens, fed by customized algorithms, and stripped of deep historical literacy, the modern generation becomes the ultimate passive mass—highly susceptible to emotional manipulation while believing they are practicing radical dissent.
Conclusion: Restoring the Scalpel
In the final analysis, the activist deployment of Hannah Arendt in 1990s Indonesia was an act of desperate political theater. It was an intellectual A-bomb dropped to shatter the deep Javanese spell of compliance (Kawulo-Gusti). While it successfully blasted open the public sphere and provided a brave, necessary shield for dissidents in 1995, its long-term cost has been severe. By favoring the shockwave of global, totalizing theories over the precise, localized legal and historical scalpels of Jenkins, Burns, and Elson, it set a precedent for ideological hyperbole over systemic taxonomy.
Today, that hyperbole has mutated into an uncritical, digitized cynicism. To fix the real, mundane, and dangerous ailments of contemporary Indonesian democracy—such as entrenched oligarchy, clientelism, and institutional decay—the younger generation must put down the blunt hammer of algorithmic labels. They must undergo the grueling, rewarding labor of reclaiming their intellectual history. They must look past the distortions of both the New Order and the digital feeds to rediscover the genuine “Idea of Indonesia”: a fragile, brilliant, and unfinished emancipatory project that can only be defended if it is deeply, critically understood.
