Soekarno and the Promise of Nasakom

This chapter begins by introducing an article titled “Nationalism, Religion, and Marxism” by the twenty-five-year-old, Dutch-educated ingenieur named Soekarno. It discusses the conflicts, tensions, and mistakes that had come to divide the variously Islamic- and Marxist-oriented leaders of the Sarekat Islam and the broader field of political and social action in the Indies, now described, as the title of the journal indicated, as Indonesia. The chapter details Soekarno's rallying call for unity among Muslims and Marxists and for Indonesian independence in 1926, which represented the rise of classically Andersonian nationalism among the bilingual Dutch educated elite stratum of society in the late colonial Indies. The chapter also argues that the late interwar era in Indonesia helped to lay the groundwork for communist and Islamic revolution making by sustaining transoceanic connections to diverse sources of real, imagined, and potential solidarity and support across the world, and by maintaining or (re)building discursive and institutional structures for popular mobilization in the name of communism and Islam. Ultimately, the chapter contends that the Japanese occupation period severely constrained opportunities for organization and mobilization by activists inspired by communism and other strains of revolutionary socialism in the Indonesian archipelago.