Pandangan Hidup

by Tan Malaka

sesuai pengantar penerbit di awal buku ini bahwa naskah asli Pandangan Hidup Tan Malaka ini telah ikut bergerilya ke Jawa Timur bersama sang penulis dan berhasil diselamatkan oleh para pemuda.

Genres: Nonfiction

103 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1952

About the author

Tan Malaka (1894 - February 21, 1949) was an Indonesian nationalist activist and communist leader. A staunch critic of both the colonial Dutch East Indies government and the republican Sukarno administration that governed the country after the Indonesian National Revolution, he was also frequently in conflict with the leadership of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), Indonesia's primary radical political party in the 1920s and again in the 1940s.

A political outsider for most of his life, Tan Malaka spent a large part of his life in exile from Indonesia, and was constantly threatened with arrest by the Dutch authorities and their allies. Despite this apparent marginalization, however, he played a key intellectual role in linking the international communist movement to Southeast Asia's anti-colonial movements. He was declared a "hero of the national revolution" by act of Indonesia's parliament in 1963.

Reviews

[Benz]

Sebuah lagi karya Tan Malaka, seorang aktivis Komunis juga seorang teoritikus dialektika materialis Nusantara. Karya -nipis- ini boleh dikatakan sebagai kunci atau pembuka pintu kepada Madilog yang lebih tebal dan agam. Tan Malaka menjelaskan berbagai persoalan dari sejarah awal bermula manusia, sehingga ke peradaban Yunani, China, India, Arab sampailah ke Eropah. Beliau turut mengakui jasa Arab-Islam dalam memperkayakan peradaban umat manusia, utamanya kaum Muktazilah -yang digelarnya sebagai Murba Kota yang revolusioner- yang dituduh oleh para penghafal sebagai 'murtad' dsbnya. Ibn Rusyd yang mempengaruhi Eropah juga turut disinggungnya, menampakkan keluasan pembacaan Tan Malaka. Beliau banyak mengangkat nama Engels -tidak disorokkan di balik nama Marx- dihuraikan lanjut tentang dialektika idealis yang digagaskan Hegel dan dialektika materialism yang diutarakan oleh Karl Marx. Dalam karya ini kita boleh melihat bagaimana Tan Malaka mempertahankan materialisme yang dialektik yang selalu diserang kaum idealis (termasuk agamis). Tan Malaka juga membezakan antara dialektika materialism dengan mekanikal materialis. Semua ini menunjukkan Tan Malaka bukan sahaja seorang aktivis Komunis, bahkan juga seorang teoritikus ulung Marxist di Nusantara.

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was rather delighted to come across this text. I only recently encountered Tan Malaka by way of a Muslim communist I follow on twitter, who recommended Malaka’s essay “Communism and Pan-Islamism” in a thread. Malaka was an Indonesian communist who expressed a desire for communists to work together with the movement of Pan-Islamism – something he articulated at the Comintern’s 4th World Congress, though his proposal was rejected.

I’m very interested in radical Southeast Asian politics, and especially communism in Indonesia, because it is so fascinatingly entangled with Islam. The 1965-66 massacres were something I found very difficult to digest when learning about it as an international development student. It was the subject of the strange and terrifying film “The Act of Killing” which I had borrowed from the library as a student at Guelph. I still remember feeling chilled the entire week after watching it. It was extremely haunting. It’s difficult to comprehend how such a pivotal event in Southeast Asian history has remained so successfully repressed within the region. My parents who grew up in Singapore were not familiar with it, despite it unfolding during their childhood.

Far-right violence has now become fore-fronted after the so-called 'storming of the Capitol' in Washington, DC. Although the US has been covertly and overtly supporting many violent far-right groups in the Third World for decades, including para-military perpetrators in the 1965 Indonesian massacres.

Philosophy of Life delves into religion in some rather fascinating ways, so it sits very nicely at the crossroads of faith and leftist politics (my favourite crossroads). Malaka’s perception of religious history is mapped onto the Hegelian schema of Moses as thesis, Jesus as antithesis, and Muhammad as synthesis. His comments on all three religious figures are extremely interesting and fun to read. Take for example his Marxist analysis of Moses’s leadership:

“The leader of this migration (the exodus) to Palestine, which was carried out illegally and in great secrecy, the leader in the wandering in which they risked their annihilation as a people, because they were pursued by the army of Pharaoh with all its weapons, should be spoken of as a true leader. The Jewish nation would have been destroyed or forced to return under Pharaoh's rule had it not been led by such a person as the Prophet Moses…

The Prophet Moses was exceptionally knowledgeable about human nature and about the conditions of his environment. He had an accurate opinion regarding events that could occur in the future. The prudence, patience and intgelligence of the Prophet Moses was at the service of a group of people of different ages and with varying experiences and desires, accompanied no less significantly by a belief unshakeable by danger…”

And I love his dialectical commentary on Jesus’ comments on violence and forgiveness, which is remarkably consistent with the parable of Lazarus and the rich man:

“How can we combine the main argument of the Christian religion: “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” with the saying of the Prophet Jesus: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to bring peace, but a sword.”?

Looked at in this perspective, all contradiction vanishes from our conception. The Prophet Jesus gave abundantly his love and affection, along with the sacrifice of his life, to the masses, who indeed were living in poverty at that time and who indeed were avid for rebellion, especially in Galilee. If he recommended an attitude of forgiveness, that one should “turn the other cheek”, that attitude was directed towards the masses as a whole. Towards the rabbis the Prophet Jesus clearly advanced the opposite attitude, that is to say, if it was necessary to smash the priestly class arms in hand as oppressors of the Jewish people and accomplices of the Roman colonizers at that time.”

I’m really amazed at how an Indonesian Muslim had a much better grasp of the politics of Jesus than I had for most of my years growing up in the Christian faith, and more comprehending than many Christians have still.

I’ve only read portions of the Qur’an but I’m always amazed at the dexterity the text shows with the writings of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian canon. Malaka emphasizes both the determination of Islamic propagandizing with its remarkable preservation of older wisdom that was still not properly recognized in his time:

“When one day the Prophet Muhammad's family at a meeting requested that propaganda for Islam be halted, because it brought about disputes and threatened the Prophet's life, Muhammad answered that even if the sun on the left and the moon on the right forbade such a thing he would not heed the prohibition.

… There should be more than formal recognition given by the Christian world concerning the service of Arab Islam in the mediaeval centuries even down to today as regards philosophy and empirical science, which has in fact not yet received proper recognition!

…Only a little of the Islamic philosophy of the divine, which was included in fate, in God's unavoidable desire, looked back to the old world, i.e. the society of Greece; the philosophy of Islam thereby acquired material along with valuable guidance. Islamic philosophy raised up again the Greek philosophy which had been buried for hundreds of years beneath the Roman Empire. Islamic philosophy was able to separate the full-grained rice from the empty husk and to plant the former until it grew in the mediaeval centuries.”

The last sections of this text provide a very good summary of Marxist concepts that the translator deems over simplistic and partly mistaken (in their introduction), although I think this section distils a lot of ideas into more easily understandable paragraphs. I think there are some pretty interesting comments about the abolition of police and prisons that contextualize it within Marxist theory:

“This power, which arises within society and which more and more alienates itself from society and exists above the society, Marx and Engels call the state. This power quite nakedly takes the form of the bureaucracy, the army, the courts, the police and prisons; initially stands right in the middle, like a magic force, but essentially serves as an instrument of the propertied classes for the oppression of the people of no property [kaum tak berpunya].

Where there are no class contradictions within the society there is no need for a special power distinct from that society, standing above the society itself. In other words a society of this type has no need for a state [in English in original], no need for instruments of oppression such as the bureaucracy, the army, the courts, police, prisons and executioners. So long as economic contradictions between classes within the society do not exist, that society easily enjoys peaceful relations among its members. All economic, social and cultural affairs of the society and all purchasing business abroad are managed on the basis of independence, equality, brotherhood and deliberation. Compulsion via instruments of oppression at the service of one class over another is not needed and does not appear. In face of all questions all the members of the society discuss on an equal basis in order to obtain a collective decision and finally in order to act as one. The condition of a society of this kind was apparently characterized by Engels as the self-acting armed organization of the population [in English in original]. Such an armed society acting on its own initiative is found in societies based upon ancient communism (“primitive communism”).”

Tan Malaka goes on to draw from Marx’s Civil War in France as well as Soviet examples regarding the abolition of police and other institutions and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the part that I still struggle with. It’s hard to see Soviet and PRC history as successful examples of the abolition of class, because in their own ways they established institutions as oppressive or more oppressive than their capitalist counterparts. Of course contexts of extreme poverty are part of that equation. They had far less latitude than European colonial powers to foster consensus without first developing an economic base that first dealt with the problem of scarcity and meeting the essential needs of their population, while also fending off aggressive Western military powers.

I definitely agree that one cannot simply abolish the state overnight without some type of authority that would guide a society towards a stateless condition, but I think it’s important to recognize past failures and where authority was unjustifiably deployed. There are still many communists that hold hope that China will eventually progress past its current form of authoritarian state capitalism and hold true to its promise towards moving towards socialism and then communism. I have no idea what the future holds, but I’m always tremendously saddened when I think of the enormous suffering that oppressed workers experienced in Special Economic Zones to ‘develop the productive forces’ in China. It’s one of those old troubling narratives of redemptive suffering. Who decides what and whose suffering and sacrifices are justifiable?

I certainly think workers should own and control the means of production. But how that works in practice with minimal coercion and violence is something I think often about. It does seem like an impossible task many days. With the recent reactionary 'insurrection' in Washington, violent fascists that stormed a government building to keep a regime in power (not overthrow it), a lot of the media has focused on the need for increased need for the police though admitting the police response was rather embarrassing. It's important to understand leftist calls for the abolition of the police, in light of the recent 'storming of the Capitol', because a good portion of the mob consisted of off-duty officers and ex-military. There is very disturbing overlap between violent far-right groups and violent arms of the state (police and military). I think that's one important aspect of understanding recent movements calling for the defunding and abolition of the police. Most people recognize that violence is sometimes necessary to protect people, but perceive the police as not using violence to protect the poor and vulnerable but more often to protect the interests of the ruling class or white supremacy. It is only horrifying when violent far-right groups vandalize the Capitol Building, but far too often there is deafening silence when these fascists do this to poor and racialized communities both in the U.S. and other countries subject to U.S. meddling.

Jesus did come to bring the sword yet also said that those who live by the sword died by the sword. The sword cannot be used to sustain a society because such a society will always be characterized by death. The sword, if used at all, must be used to destroy the need for it anymore – one of the perplexing contradictions at the heart of politics. Yet it is still an article of faith for me that another world absent of swords and full of ploughshares is possible.

[farah · Rating 3 out of 5]

✨ — 3.5/5

[Aditya · Rating 4 out of 5]

buku yang mengajarkan pokok-pokok agama, filsafat, ilmu pengetahuan, dan negara secara ringkas namun memberikan gambaran yang cukup jelas hal-hal tersebut. buku yang disusun dari peradaban tertua hingga abad 20 memberikan perkembangan bagaimana manusia hidup berdasarkan logika, filsafat, ilmu pengetahuan, agama serta perkembangannya dari masa ke masa.

penjelasan yang relatif singkat pada tiap babnya terkadang kurang memberikan pembaca gambaran yang jelas ditambah beberapa kalimat yang sulit dipahami.

[Andris Sambung · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tan Malaka salah satu bapak bangsa Indonesia menulis buku ini dengan gerak klandestin,berpindah-pindah dari satu kota ke kota lainnya. buku ini berisi pandangan-pandangan beliau tentang agama,filsafat dan negara,lebih dari itu isi yang terkandung menitikberatkan kepada kejadian di Indonesia secara umum

[Andika Abdul Basith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bintang lima atas kebanggaan memiliki buku bersejarah ini. Isinya sama seperti yang banyak tersedia di Internet.

[Yoonyoon · Rating 3 out of 5]

👍 3,7/5

[Vj]

saya ingin membaca buku ini