This week (week 13), I translated a section of “Das Capital” into intermediate Bhasa Indonesia to create the artifact entitled “Presentational Formal Writing” along with watching and writing about “The Act of Killing” for Cultural Post 3. Understanding and effectively communicating about politics had previously replaced being able to express abstract ideas in an educational setting as a cultural goal and after this week will join my other cultural goals of surfing and formal communication. My activities not only enabled me to express my political views in Bhasa Indonesia by allowing me to pick up vocabulary essential in a political context but also gave me an improved realization of the political environment within which native speaker of Bhasa Indonesia are brought up. Three of such realizations are listed below.
First, I realized that I had previously only focused on post-Independence Indonesia since I was writing about the effects of the sudden nation building process on language in Cultural Post 2: Formal and informal language(s). Just like Indian political history, I think the post-Independence period of nation building process is significant in that it set the initial conditions for the Indonesian nation state. However, this sudden, arbitrary and unnatural process, which was the frame through which I had previously examined Indonesian language and culture, was also drawing my attention away from a gradual changes in the nature of the Indonesian nation state and civil society that arose thereafter.
Second, I realized that acquiring so much information about the political history of Indonesia was forcing me to reconsider certain familiar relationships. For example, when I lived in Indonesia I went to school with many middle-class Chinese Indonesians who were the sons and daughters of shopkeepers. The history of the 1965-66 massacre made me realize their relatively affluent economic position also must have accompanied the social position of a minority that is liable of being bullied to pay protection money. Along with the Chinese Indonesians, it also allowed me empathize with the Sama people, who I talk about in Cultural Post 5: Cultural Project, that were forced to flea as the violence between the military and the communists escalated. As a second example, in light of the complicity of the government and media with gangsters I also questioned certain things that I had acquired knowledge of second-hand. One such instance was the image of President Suharto. Between 1993 and 1998 he was the President of the nation that I lived in.
Finally, I realized that I had naively tried to disseminate Marx's “Das Capital” without realizing the context in which it would be interpreted. While Marx uses the ideas of classical economists like Adam Smith, as an abstract theoretician he also takes the liberty to describe certain things in his own way. Although I think this is an amazing stylistic tool, it can sometimes cause readers to question the definitions themselves and refuse to read further. Therefore, Das Capital is sometimes impenetrable to people biased against communism. While everyone in the modern era is biased for or against communism, Indonesia's violent history of rejecting communism makes this mechanism of rejecting Marx highly likely rendering the tool of Das Capital useless for Marxism in the Indonesian context.
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