Made in Indonesia: Indonesian Workers Since Suharto by Dan La Botz, Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2001, 395 pp., ISBN 0-89608-642-9.

Dan La Botz has written an important and timely book on efforts to build labour organizations in Indonesia. Based on an extensive range of interviews conducted in 1999 and 2000, along with additional research, he provides readers with an in-depth understanding of workers’ struggles and current political developments in that country. La Botz begins by looking at three generations of student activists who joined the workers in struggling to build a genuine labour movement, and who were involved in forcing the hated dictator Suharto to resign in 1998. This approach does three things: it personifies the struggles by giving a sense of some of the actors; it allows the reader to understand that the organizing necessary to depose a dictator did not happen overnight, and it gives a sense of the issues and difficulties that activists have faced in trying to build genuine labour organizations. The first major section of the book provides an overview of the political-economic system within a larger global context. It examines Indonesia’s economic development during Suharto’s rule (1965-1997), with a particular focus on the “Asian” economic crisis of 1997 and political developments since that time. . It also recounts the terrible effects of Dutch colonialism on the people, their efforts to organize and achieve national independence, and developments in the period between independence in 1949 and the coup of 1965 that led to Suharto and the military seizing power. The second section focuses on efforts to develop popular responses to the crisis of Suharto’s “New Order.” The author begins by looking at the role of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in the struggle—and some of the contradictions within—and then looks at three different efforts to build an independent labour movement: the conservative “refommasi” wing of the state- sponsored unions that seceded through encouragement of the U.S. State Department and the AFL-CIO; the independent, but relatively moderate efforts of Muchtar Pakpahan and the SBSI labour centre; and then the independent but radical efforts of Dita Sari and the FNPBI labour centre. This section highlights the extreme diversity of the Indonesian labour movement today and the strengths and weaknesses of these various projects. The third section, “Alternatives to Global Capitalism,” concentrates on the People’s Democratic Party, with whom the FNPBI is affiliated, and its efforts to change the established social order. La Botz ends with a chapter on Indonesia and international labour solidarity, and an epilogue on “socialism from below.” The reader is thus presented with a wealth of information on the “development” (or really, misdevelopment) of Indonesia and efforts by dedicated activists to change conditions for Indonesian workers. La Botz and South End Press deserve our thanks for producing this material and distributing it so quickly. However, despite appreciating La Botz’ descriptive material, three aspects of his analysis trouble me. First, despite the title, this is a book about labour activists, not workers. We learn a lot about Indonesian production (as part of a global production network), and more about Indonesian activists who are trying to build labour unions and labour centres, but there is actually quite little about Indonesian workers. While this is understandable in a project where one visits a country for a short time and then tries to share the wealth of information obtained, we end up knowing what activists and organizers are thinking—many, if not most, of whom are college-educated—but we do not really know how “ordinary” workers are seeing things. Second and more critical, La Botz takes a Marxist approach to understanding societies and, at least in the final analysis, prioritizes economics. This reduction of political economy to simple economics leads to analytical …