Pengertian kawasan frontier, dalam nalar “pusat dan periferi”, “tradisional dan modern” serta “rural dan urban”, sepertinya perlu kita baca kembali mengingat perubahan yang berlangsung carut-marut hari ini. Sebagai contoh, di Yogyakarta, pendirian apartemen dan hotel bak jamur di musim hujan, tidak pernah peduli peruntukan tata ruangnya entah pemukiman, persawahan, atau tangkapan air. Dampaknya? Mungkin kita tidak asing melihat seorang bapak tua terengah menuntun sepedanya yang dipenuhi rumput pakan kambing, sementara sebuah mobil Alphard melewatinya penuh angkuh. Mungkin, kita juga tidak asing dengan perempuan paruh baya yang membawa tumpukan cucian kotor melewati pagar gelap setinggi lima meter, pemisah antara kampungnya dengan perumahan elit di mana mobil Alphard itu berasal. Pemandangan itu demikian lumrah hingga lama-kelamaan dianggap tidak pernah ada. Kita mengalami ketercerabutan dari sebuah ruang yang selama ini dianggap mampu mencukupi kebutuhan hidup sehari-hari tapi t
Authoritarian and paternalism in Indonesian peasant cooperative: A former plantation workers’ cooperative from the 1950s to the neoliberal era
Abstraction This paper examines the dilemmas of a former plantation workers’ cooperative attempting to develop an egalitarian and self-managed agrarian community in the face of persistent military influence in Indonesian’s rural areas. These dilemmas are related to the question of how the ex-worker community shapes and is shaped by exclusionary politics as their cooperative shifts from a peasant political movement into an instrument of capitalistic relations of production. The paper focuses on an ex-plantation workers’ cooperative in West Java (Indonesia) which has been struggling since the rise of the socialist movement in the 1950s. At that time, the plantation workers occupied the former colonial rubber plantation and initiated land reform for the subsistence plots of landless households. The rest of the undistributed land was maintained as an independent cooperative owned and managed by the members under the guidance of the Indonesia Peasant Movement (GTI), a movement inspi