Creative Sabotage Lessons from Organised Plantation Estate Workers in 1950s Indonesia

In the 1950s, just after the anticolonial struggle had brought an end to centuries of Dutch colonialism, the plantation estates of Indonesia continued to cultivate commodity crops for the world market. Yet at the same time, across those estates a radical collective consciousness was also still growing among the green shoots. The overthrow of Dutch colonial rule opened up an important conjuncture in which European planters were trying to secure and extend their plantation estates in the new context of independence. Rather than being deterred by the anticolonial struggle, British planters in particular saw decolonisation as an opportunity to strengthen their plantation interests where Dutch rule had previously favoured Dutch planters. However, the organised plantation estate workers of the archipelago had a very different vision for post-independence land use from that of the British.

After the centuries of brutal Dutch colonialism and the fresh horrors of Japanese occupation during WWII, organised workers were more determined than ever not to cede any ground to external powers. Plantation workers, along with many other collectives in Indonesia, were intent on carrying through the unfulfilled goals of the anticolonial struggle by agitating for meaningful structural change and an end to value extraction to the metropole. The Estate Workers’ Union – known as SARBUPRI – had a membership of 700,000 at that time and was one of the mass-based organisations affiliated with the Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI, which itself had 27 million affiliate members at that time. Returning to their struggle illuminates how SARPUBRI’s tactics against European (and particularly British) planters, encompassed creative and subversive methods which extended beyond the usual trade union repertoires. These huge numbers of SARBUPRI plantation workers, networked right across the plantation estates of the archipelago, organised not only extensive labour strikes, but also plantation raids, coordinated removal of crops, produce, and equipment, as well as related tactics of commercial sabotage to achieve their aims.

We can glean a lot about the extent and impact of SARBUPRI’s creative sabotage by reading its effects through the British state archive, as British firms were reporting back regularly to the Foreign Office and seeking government assistance during this period. Colonial archival documents from this time show how SARBUPRI tactics not only hit the profitability of British plantation extraction, but also generated crushing anxiety among planters and made Indonesian estates increasingly unmanageable as the 1950s unfolded. For example, Rubber Estate Agency planters in West and Central Java were considering cutting their losses and abandoning their estates altogether or (to quote the archive) “selling them for what we can get.” Around the same time, a company by the name of Francis Peek & Co. planters were complaining that the “intimidation being practised by the SARBUPRI is quite fantastic.”

The state archives document how estate worker actions gradually drove European plantation managers towards breakdowns. One extended correspondence from Peek & Co. elaborates on the psychological state of planters on the Medini plantation estate in Central Java:
I have long felt that lack of progress was due to Mr. Marang’s breakdown; as already indicated in past reports he was unable to give proper effect to instructions. Nervous tension was one of the principle causes. I had hoped that under Mr. Scherrer there would have been a marked improvement, but the situation on Medini is too much for him. […] Labour appears to be so difficult here that it would not take much more for Mr. Scherrer to ask to be relieved of his post. As known, Mr. Bruce found Medini so disheartening that he refused to return to the estate.
Collective action by plantation workers on the Medini Estate therefore exhausted three managers in a row – each in turn could no longer cope psychologically with estate worker actions. Plantations were becoming both unmanageable and unprofitable because strikes and other tactics were driving successive planters to take leave due to ‘nervous tension’.

By November of 1950, organised workers were engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with the security forces acting to protect British estate interests. For example, in West Java, security was being rotated around 31 estates belonging to the firm P&T Lands, however, when an “unguarded estate was attacked, troops were moved to it from another estate, which in turn became unguarded and attacked.” A letter from a Mr Matthewson of Harrisons & Crosfield explained the impact of SARBUPRI’s creative sabotage on planters’ nerves and their appetite for the job:
unless the almost unbearable pressure on European staff can be relieved and they can see some light on the horizon, it would appear that the recent steady loss of irreplaceable experienced men may sooner rather than later develop into a dangerous exodus, making normal working impossible […] Study of the various strikes engineered in turn in Sumatra and in Java gives the impression not of haphazard pattern, but of cunning, carefully planned design.

For those inclined to empathise with the anxious Europeans, remember that these planters oversaw a plantation economy in Indonesia which maintained profound material injustice in the form of racial labour hierarchies, exploitation, and land dispossession. Vast estates controlled by foreign planters left little land for the Indigenous population, leaving them marginalised, destitute, and largely dependent on low-wage plantation work producing for export markets. SARBUPRI’s tactics directly targeted the exploitative low-wage element of this regime and applied pressure for concessions from European planters in part with respect to exploitative wages. The union’s efficacy here is apparent across British correspondence, including that of a representative of Francis Peek & Co late in August of 1950: “As you know the strike has now become a fact, and we fear that the Union’s demands as regards a daily wage will have to be substantially met.” This indicates that the British were cognisant that plantation workers were pushing back at this point against the broader material injustice of the plantation economy.