Conclusion

By retracing the social relations that produced it, the 1965 violence is seen to arise within a long arc of contention. Far from being the product of a momentary encounter between social groups, violence on this scale becomes comprehensible only if we recover a view of Indonesia as a coherent society, albeit one shot through with struggles for the ultimate rule-making power.

All the evidence points towards a notion of the state that cannot easily be divorced from society. What Robert Holden writes in Chapter 24 in this volume he could have written about Indonesia: ‘[I]t is the combined problem of violence and the state - whose principal function is to administer justice - that will dictate the course of this analysis, with the unavoidable addition of the concept of revolution in its distinctly Latin American expression as the ever-frustrated search for a just order.' Whether at the national or the local level, the boundary between state and society is porous. The discovery that state institutions are embedded in various social formations, captured by the term ‘state-in-society', continues to be fruitful in analysing Indonesian society today.^[788]

The contentious politics approach reveals that the 1965 drama involved both elite and non-elite collective actors. The popular contention that culminated in mass murder began with elite initiatives, and this is usually the case. But popular movements can in turn also influence elite behaviour. Aidit would probably not have escalated the tension in late 1963 without pressure from his large constituency of impatient peasants and workers. The military would not have been spooked by Sukarno's praise of Aidit as the nation's ‘bulwark' if peasants had not engaged in unruly actions in East Java, where they triggered religious outrage among provincial elites. This contingent sequence of events culminated by 1965 in a legitimacy crisis affecting both elites (including ‘the army') and non-elites (provincials involved in ‘local tensions'). Such a crisis can lead to genocidal violence.^[789] Those groups that could muster the greatest resources at every level of the polity won the struggle over the ultimate legitimate authority. This struggle, moreover, took place within a state that was rooted in a highly unequal political economy of primitive accumulation. Organisational and financial resources available through the bureaucracy favoured the state­dependent urban middle class. This lent a strong class dimension to the outcome, and justifies the term ‘counter-revolution' for the 1965 violence in Indonesia.^[790]