Port Workers of Four Continents Unite for West Papua: Global Marxism and Internationalist Struggles from Left Third-Worldist Indonesia
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Utilizing the understudied historical materials of Indonesian peace activist Ibrahim Isa, this talk investigates Isa’s left Third-Worldist analysis of the internationalist struggles against the Dutch’s recolonization of West Papua. Taking Isa’s political writings seriously as an anticolonial thinker on a par with other Long Sixties radicals, it demonstrates that Isa’s situational reading of the conjuncture led him to formulate West Papua as a shared Arab-Asian struggle entailing a systemic battle against transimperial capitalist alliances. Rather than the communist vanguards, the ubiquitous “masses,” or the all-encompassing “people” as was customary for Marxists during that period, Isa invoked multiracial port workers across four continents of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Australia to boycott Dutch ships and airplanes that transported military reinforcements to West Papua. Isa’s suggestion of boycott as a resistance tactic recalled a longstanding leftist analysis from Lenin to the CCP’s People’s War that placed importance on the “weak link” as the strategic location from which to strike the system. Refusing to treat Indonesia as a Marxist “case study,” Jamkajornkeiat proposes that Isa’s integral understanding of the Netherlands and Indonesia as materially connected through chokepoints in an imperialist network and capitalist supply chain presents an opportunity to deprovincialize the global Marxist repertoire by centering Indonesia as a site of intellectual co-production.
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