| Abstract: | Following an aborted coup attempt in October 1965, the Indonesian military organized what turned out to be one of the most horrifying massacres of the twentieth century. More than half a million people were killed while hundreds of thousands of others were detained for years in prison camps throughout the country. There are two major points that this paper attempts to make. First, that the killings are in fact a case of state violence despite of the efforts to make it look like spontaneous violence. Second, that the killings are crucial to the expansion of capitalism in Indonesia. Using Marx’s concept of ‘primitive accumulation’, it attempts to show that the mass killings and arrests, the expropriation of people from their houses and lands, and the elimination of working‐class political formations, are integral parts of an economic strategy of the New Order. |
