Indonesia’s Communists Helped Forge Its National Identity

Members and sympathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party gather in a sports stadium in Jakarta on May 23, 1965, to celebrate the party’s forty-fifth anniversary. (Bettmann via Getty Images)

In an article by Jacobin, Alex De Jong reviews Communication against Capital: Red Enlightenment at the Dawn of Indonesia by Rianne Subijanto (Cornell University Press, 2025).

After the bloody repression of the Indonesian left in the 1960s, Suharto’s regime wrote it out of the history books. Indonesian communists played a crucial role in developing national consciousness among workers and peasants against Dutch colonial rule.