The Village Devils Wear Cooperative Masks

 

Now listen close, Constant Reader, because this is a story about numbers, and numbers can lie just as sweetly as any man standing at a pulpit with his hand on a Bible and his other hand in your pocket.

On July 12, 1953—a hot day, you can bet, the kind of Jakarta afternoon where the air sits on your chest like a wet dog—a voice came crackling out of the RRI radio sets in ten thousand kitchens. It belonged to a man they called the Father of Cooperatives, Mohammad Hatta, and he was smiling that fatherly smile fathers get right before they tell you everything’s fine. Look, he said. Look at what we’ve built. Seven thousand seven hundred cooperatives now, up two thousand in a single year. A million and more members, hands joined in the dark. Fifty-six million rupiah in savings, glowing there in the ledgers like something holy.

And for a moment—just a moment, the length of a held breath—you might have believed him. Three years old, this system, and already walking, already talking. A miracle baby.

But there was a man in another room who wasn’t smiling. His name was Dipa Nusantara Aidit, and he had the kind of mind that doesn’t take a number at face value; he flips it over first, checks underneath for the maggots. In 1959, in his Selected Writings, he came right out and said what he’d been thinking all along: that fifty-six million rupiah scattered across a thousand little enterprises was nothing—nothing—set against the great cold fortress-vault of foreign capital still sitting untouched, still humming away in the dark like a refrigerator nobody’s allowed to unplug.

Aidit had a picture in his head, and once you hear it you won’t shake it easy. He saw the cooperatives of his country as a school of anchovies—small, silver, darting, hopeful—dropped into a pond that already had groupers in it. Big mouths. Patient mouths. And everybody standing around the pond congratulating the anchovies on how well they were swimming, while under the surface, slow and certain as digestion, the groupers were doing what groupers do.

He said the whole cooperative movement, Hatta’s beautiful movement, had become a kind of theater. A stage show. Lights up, curtain rises, and there’s the friendly cooperative sign swinging in the breeze—and behind the backdrop, unseen by the audience, the same old capitalists going about the same old business, using the play to keep the crowd’s eyes up front while the real work happens in the wings.

Hatta kept at it for years. The only path to prosperity, he called it, again and again, the words worn smooth as a rosary. And the newspapers loved him for it—Kompas ran him on the front page in July of ‘66, the Father of Cooperatives once more insisting that this, this, was the only door out of the dark house of poverty.

Even President Sukarno, in his own Cooperative Day address of 1962, seemed to plant his flag against a certain kind of soft, comfortable socialism—the kind that says a pretty garden in front of a worker’s house is worth more than all the talk of revolution put together. Aidit read that as a straight line drawn right through the middle of Hatta’s cheerful claims, and he wasn’t shy about saying so.

But here’s the thing about Aidit, and it’s important, so don’t skim past it: he wasn’t out to burn the cooperative idea to the ground. He wasn’t the villain of this story, whatever you might be tempted to think. He believed—genuinely, the way a man believes in something he’s willing to walk into a swamp for—that cooperatives, done right, could do two good things. They could stitch together the little people, the small producers scattered and vulnerable, into something with teeth, something that could stand up to the landlords and the usurers and the middlemen circling like buzzards over a wounded thing. And they could put more rice in the pot, more money in the pocket, more of the harvest staying with the hands that grew it.

That was the promise. That was what it was supposed to be.

What Aidit found when he actually went and looked—and he did go and look, seven long weeks of it, February to March of 1964, forty cadres tramping through the wet fields of West Java with him—was something closer to a haunted house wearing a welcome sign.

He wrote it all up afterward in a report with a title that doesn’t leave much to the imagination: The Peasants Crush the Village Devils. And one chapter—Chapter IX—he titled, almost like a war cry: Fight false cooperatives; make cooperatives a weapon in the hands of the peasants and fishermen.

Village devils. Let that phrase sit in you a minute. Not thieves, not swindlers—devils. Something with a tail hidden under a coat, something that shakes your hand with a smile while it’s already counting what it’s about to take from you.

Take the Kemang Village Cooperative, out in Bojongpicung, Cianjur. On paper it looked like a proper cooperative—until you noticed the board was packed wall to wall with rich peasants and middlemen, the very foxes you’d expect to be locked out of the henhouse. They didn’t even bother with real recruitment; the whole village was simply declared a member, whether anyone had agreed to it or not, which is a neat trick if your business is control and not community.

They’d only buy three things—rice, corn, palm sugar—and always, always below what the market would pay. And if some poor farmer got tired of being shortchanged and sold his goods elsewhere, the cooperative wanted its cut anyway. If he didn’t pay up, twenty-four men were ready to come collect in person—local toughs, civil-defense boys, a few off-duty soldiers, the kind of debt collection that doesn’t need paperwork.

Then there was the Misaya Mina Sea Fishing Cooperative, down in Eretan Wetan, Indramayu—a name with some history to it, going back to 1926 under an older name, official since 1931. A scholar writing about it decades later, in 2010, praised its bookkeeping. What she missed—what Aidit went and found with his own eyes—was who actually owned the boats. Because in this cooperative, the only real members were the men who owned the vessels. The laborers, the ones hauling nets in the dark before dawn, had their pay skimmed automatically into “savings” they had no membership in and, it turned out, no real claim to.

Do the arithmetic with me, because Aidit did, right down to the percentage points, and it’s the kind of arithmetic that should make your stomach drop the way it drops in an elevator with a cut cable. Five percent gone to auction fees. Twenty-two percent to the cooperative’s own operations. Ten percent for gear rental. Fifteen for the boat driver. Eighteen straight into the boat owner’s pocket. By the time it was all sliced away, the laborers—the men who’d actually been out on the black water risking their necks—were left splitting thirty percent of the catch fourteen ways. Meanwhile the boat owner, sitting comfortable in a cooled office somewhere, wasn’t really getting eighteen percent at all. He was quietly gathering up nearly everything that wasn’t nailed down to the boat driver’s wage—forty percent, all told, for doing the least dangerous job in the whole operation.

Aidit even got one of these men to talk—initials only, “R. R.”—and what came out was almost too on-the-nose to write into fiction: four boats worth 1.4 million rupiah, a hectare and a half of salt ponds, five more hectares of government land, and more land quietly rented out elsewhere as an auction site, all of it dressed up in the modest clothing of a “sea-fishing cooperative.” A landlord and a salt lord, in other words, wearing the mask of a fisherman’s friend.

Next door, the Eretan Wetan Salt Cooperative ran its own version of the trick—the old ijon system, where a farmer takes a loan against a harvest that isn’t in yet, and pays it back in crop at a price that was never fair to begin with, at interest that keeps climbing no matter how hard he works. Miss a payment on your salt pond and the pond itself could slip out of your hands into the boat owners’, quiet as a tide going out.

And in Indramayu there was the Rice Purchasing Cooperative, run—Aidit didn’t dress this up either—by a man he identified only by three letters, “DDT,” whom he called, flatly, a village devil in the flesh, cooperative mask and all.

By the end of it, Aidit’s verdict on most of what he’d found in West Java was blunt as a shovel to the shin: false cooperatives, dressed up to look like the people’s shield, but built instead to feed the landlords and the men he called bureaucratic capitalists. “It is no wonder,” he wrote, “that the people do not like those false cooperatives.”

But—and this matters, so stay with me a little longer—the house wasn’t haunted from cellar to attic. Not every door in it opened onto something rotten. There were the hardship granaries. The little rotating savings circles, unglamorous, unphotographed, scattered thin across the countryside, doing exactly what a cooperative is supposed to do: standing between a desperate farmer and a usurer’s smile.

Take the Leliuran Enterprise in Sukamaju, Bogor—a hundred and twenty-four members, dues of just ten rupiah a week, loans at a gentle five percent a month for anyone who needed five hundred to a thousand rupiah to get through a hard season. Or the Gotongroyong Enterprise over in Sukatani, founded back in 1948 on the strength of forty rupiah and a shared dream—which bought, believe it or not, two cows. By 1964 that had grown, patient as compound interest, into three cows, seven goats, two water buffaloes, a small arsenal of scales and pressure lanterns, three hundred serving plates for weddings and funerals, and a meeting hall where the whole village could gather. Small things. Honest things. The kind of good a cooperative can do when nobody’s standing behind the counter with a devil’s tail tucked into his trousers.

Aidit closed his report the way a man closes a door he intends to come back through—hoping, he said, that his own cadres would take the lesson to heart, would learn not just the ideology but the plain mechanics of it: the bookkeeping, the economics, the discipline it takes to build something that can’t be hollowed out from within.

“The communists must prepare cadres who are ideologically sound,” he wrote, “revolutionary cadres who are honest and capable, in order to succeed in the struggle against false cooperatives and to make cooperatives a weapon in the hands of the peasants and fishermen.”

A weapon, not a mask. That was always the difference he was pointing at. And it’s a difference, Constant Reader, that has outlived every rupiah in every ledger from that hot July afternoon in 1953—because the devils never really go away. They just find new welcome signs to hang.