In my all-time favorite Pink Floyd’s album, David Gilmour sings, “It’s all right, we told you what to dream.”[1] In that song, Zamyatin’s (Orwellian, for some unoriginals out there) One State is well alive, looking out for the boy in the song, supporting his dream regardless of what his mother ought to say. The Machine knows where the boy has been, what he dreams of, and most importantly, to where It may take him. Since the 70s-80s, with nuclear threat and the Cold War still raged on, Machine has been everyone’s savior and boogeyman. Even going back further, Machine – or its process, mechanization – was the backbone for the making of Uni Soviet aesthetics. Avant Gardist painters re/deconstructed their vision for a new society under socialism not only from Marxist-Leninist canonical writings, but also from physicist, aeronautical engineers, and mathematicians’ notebooks. Gravity and aerodynamics captivate Kazimir Malevich into his Black Square. This new society was a giant mechanic, technopolitical, experiment. Machine is as enigmatic as exciting as frightening.
Machine is a capitalist trickster too. It’s going to shorten our working days, cheapen the commodities (and laborers): “a means of producing surplus value.”[2] Machine is the capitalist “gimmick” to fool us into thinking the latest way to make everything efficient (re: exploiting every category of values further with even less means [capital] necessary).[3] Being overworked is not that bad if you just download Chill app; your three precarious jobs should not exhaust you if you just imagine in 10 years, you will (would) drive a Tesla. Machine simultaneously girlbosses and gaslights us. Under such utilitarian understanding of Machine, we end up with a “love-hate” relationship with social media, Google, Amazon, and smartphones. It frees us because we use it for justice, It breaks us because it consumes us. If you use it for free, you are the product falls into the same breath as Tumblr radicalizes me into feminism. Thus, if Machine is everything, it should amount to nothing. And there should be no good take away from that statement.
Still, as with the latest advancement of digital technology, Machine only captivates us further, and this time into a theoretical metaphor. X is a machine, which possibly becomes the new “X is self-producing/self-reinforcing Y.” Machine becomes the escapade for those who cannot explain who the “self” in the said automatic process is. It’s Machine; it’s capitalism, a monster, a very (un)becoming force, our postmodern Prometheus. Just like Victor was bewitched by the promise of alchemy, I too am obsessed with explaining the nature[4] of plantations – or what Braudel calls, “capitalist invention par excellence.” It is no surprise then, that I was charmed by the first line in Prof. Li and Prof. Semedi’s Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia’s Palm Oil Zone. They write, “A plantation is a machine for assembling land, labor, and capital, under centralized management for the purpose of making profit; it is also a political technology that orders territories and populations, produces new subjects, and make new worlds.” I moved forward with their description for my dissertation proposal, because I believe another description of plantations must have been futile. Saved draft. Sent it to my adviser.
A week later,[5] my adviser wrote me back with the most caring comment:[6] “What do you mean by machine?” I thought long about her comment, because if memories serve me well, my adviser is not the kind of critic who just says things. She means every word she says, her writings are eloquent – a writing advice from Edgar Allan Poe coming alive: every word must contribute to its purpose. So, when she asks me to explain “machine,” it is rather a request to think carefully through a gigantic, all-purpose, metaphor. What can this machine contribute to our understanding of plantations? Metaphor indeed is not an invitation to “fix and solve [an object/subject]” but more about finding “unanswerable curiosity.”[7] It helps me describe, providing a literary form for “ethical distance” from the problem I think about in my sleepless nights. Her question also prompts me to ask to whom I serve this metaphor – to intervene with such a metaphor so I am not adrift in it, to grapple with both the limits and possibilities within a metaphor.
Is it a singular machine? Machines, plural? Which machine? Capitalist machine (I mean, what else, truly? But wait, could there be no such machine in socialism?)? The use of machine in Li and Semedi’s book is of course not without explanation; “machine” comes from Li’s experience in going through plantation plots in Malaysia. To her, the trees feel “mechanistic… frightening,” but Li is also “curious” to know more –a machine in its modern strictest and loosest sense: a lurking, but alluring, evil. A curious Frankenstein’s creature indeed. A microscopic lens into any (palm oil) plantations, however, should suggest that there are more machines inside this machine. The Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil declares there are at least seven tiers of supply chains in the production, each changing palm oil into another form. Which machine? As a whole? In their book tours, Li and Semedi observe how unsophisticated plantation machineries are, another failed promise of modern world-making. Or at least not worth losing your hand in the mills. So, an outdated world-maker? Paradox is indeed one of plantations’ qualities.
Looking for a clarity here is not for further objecthood. I wonder how to push forward the static definition and description (mediated through metaphor) of plantations and understand why we need to. Especially, when the object in question is alive (not just an era/geo-temporality!), masquerading into, leeching off our brave new world. If plantations are a machine that creates territories – then where do these territories, and the world they make, reside? With my good friend, Ara, we learn the bitter truth that plantations multiply in space and location – from the state’s investment map to fintech bros’ talking points, to the smallholders’ prayers for wealth. Parsimonious metaphors tend to obfuscate who does the deeds and when one does, or there are too many whos, one can barely record. Those actors are just a messy conundrum of plateau; to a certain degree, each actor shares complicity in or contributes agency to such world-making.
I sit with this “machine” and other metaphors – plantations are naughty children, giants, and/or thieves, from my situated memories of running free in a palm oil plantation until I was a teenager. Nothing was normal, nothing felt normal. I spent my childhood on a palm oil plantation and in the suburb of Pekanbaru. There was no belonging either way: nothing normal about a slaughtered elephant, just as nothing normal about seeing the crude palm oil, of which its barest form I used to see and play with, sitting down nicely in a posh supermarket. Everything feels strange, to follow the Fresh Fruit Bunch to my own kitchen, to eavesdrop on the fight about debt that my neighbors had and manifest it into land mafia talking points in a Malay coffee shop. There has never been belonging in a plantation, the world it creates feels so hollow, violent, vulnerable, and shallow, yet so rooted and firm.
Either as a giant, a machine, or an ambivalently pitiful subject,[8] (palm oil) plantations, stand as they are: neither enslaved, nor free. Neither kind. They are never just off a “floating world of ideas.” Then, how should one know plantations beyond their misery and dispossession? How to think with plantations through their multiplying facets? Now that plantations are here – always have been – how to create a liberation that cared for the ashes after we burn every single herbicide and palm trees down? How to envision liberation from this frightening mechanic?[9] They are elusive as plantations latch onto forms of on-going violence, and as close as the latest land-grabbing news you scroll over on Twitter. How to, even as there is nothing new under the sun, create new suns?
Ten years before its members were decimated to the ground and its establishment banned forever, Indonesia’s Plantation Workers Union (SARBUPRI) opened its first 1955 bulletin with a hopeful enthusiasm: “The Future Looks Even Brighter,” wrote Hasan Raid.[10] The second congress of All-Federation of Workers’ Organizations (SOBSI) ran smoothly despite of pro-foreign capital, yellow unions’ intrusions. Plantation workers were highly valued members in the federation, so the Indonesia Communist Party (PKI) dedicated its brightest members to work closely with their militant plantation comrades. SARBUPRI published monthly bulletin that spared no prisoners: naming the traitors of Indonesia’s revolution in plantation businesses, detailing the labor exploitation in plantations, and demanding each branch to dedicate 30% memberships and discussion slots for women plantation workers. Plantations constantly violate and jeopardize workers’ rights and futures: but there is a dignity in working in this arable land. Someday, peace would grace plantations.[11] This futuristic aim within plantations, affirmed Raid, would ultimately lead workers to “the new victory light shining before us.”
What follows is history in the making, still. The anti-communist mass-killing dragged bodies out of plantations into rivers running on blood for weeks. Haunting stories reside on the plantations. “This is where they used to bury our friends’ bodies. At least they’re back in land,” recalled one of my informants. What is made of soil, must return to the soil. Plantations and plots (stories) are truly the twins of this parent,[12] in this case, the state. Yet, all the dignity of work that plantation workers spread on their bulletins is for the “sovereignty of our beloved Republic of Indonesia.” The very same entity that ended their lives; and curiously this being is merely a backdrop of presumably endless violence in plantations. States are just… there, despite their share in permutating plantation logic, past, present, time, and future. Typically, only Weberian understandings of states qualify them as a machine. And even so, the rationality/rationalism expected from and tempted by states is highly contestable. Thus, the corrupt third world. Banana states. Global south.
Plantations make worlds, multiply, and move through their territories. The racialized/abled workers, wealthy/poor smallholders, rural/urban. Through which means do plantations trespass, reinforce, and reify those boundaries and categories? In my seven years of plantation studies, I attend to such territorial permeability, orchestrated, subjugated and surrendered by this lawful demarcation called the state. “I never stop being Indonesian,” said a political exile of the 1965 mass killing in the latest documentary of post-1965 exiles (mostly in the Netherlands and other Eastern/Western European countries) by Lola Amaria. Plantation logic[13] is simultaneously borderless and barb-wired, but rather than mounting to nothingness, it is just, once again, neither kind. The past of plantations blends and marches towards this future, the death of an ID card that refuses to accept it.
Sitting with this machine called plantations forces me to repeat Wynter’s question in the opening of her seminal essay: What, in our context, is history? What is our context? In 1964, the Indonesian Communist Party and Peasants Front of Indonesia held a region-wide “going to the masses” type of participatory research in many impoverished villages. From this ambitious political and scientific endeavor, the party leader D.N Aidit wrote, “Peasants Destroying Village Devils.” Gathering the research reports in West Java, PKI identifies “Seven Village Devils” who sucked the blood of farmers and workers. Beyond the rural border, those devils move around the rural-urban-state (from shark loans, brokers, land mafia, to “capitalist bureaucrats”). Through such history and contexts, plantations too sit with their own metaphor (“plantations act like a state within a state”[14]), but rather comfortably.
In Fall 2021, I delivered my thoughts on Problem-Solving Sociology and my reflection from studying plantations. Perhaps, I said, (dis)solving plantations means reckoning and rewriting Indonesia’s history. “They’re all devils, every single one of them,” cursed an indigenous farmer in North Sumatra. The devil here refers to lines of state officials who allowed the land grabbing in his sacred incense forest and transformed it into a eucalyptus plantation. He has eight children to feed. My informants and I dream of a big star here. This machine, plantations, wants workers and smallholders to play a mean guitar and drive a Jaguar. Because it’s all right here in plantations. The problem is, they do not, and they are not. Plantation workers and smallholders absorb, become, and resist this diabolical desire promised by plantations. And the state. The latter has always been there, not just. In every attempt to build their own Palmares, a dream dies, a life reigns. Welcome to the Machine, let the devil find his way in.
[1] “Welcome to the Machine” is the second track in Pink Floyd’s 9th studio album, Wish You Were Here (1975).
[2] Marx. “Chapter 15: Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” and “Chapter 15.5: The Struggle Between Worker and Machine.” Capital Vol 1. 1990.Penguin: London
[3] Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Harvard University Press, 2020).
[4] Assuming any.
[5] This whole paragraph is dedicated to how the works of Monica Prasad, Katherine McKittrick, and Kareem Rabie confront my idea of writing (clarity, metaphor, visions), especially doing and writing the social at this atrocious time.
[6] According to my most favorite critic, Merve Emre, the antithesis of ignorance is critique.
[7] Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2020).
[8] Sophie Chao, In the Shadow of the Palms: More-than-Human Becomings in West Papua (Duke University Press, 2022).
[9] Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17, no. 3 (42) (2013): 1–15.
[10] Warta Sarbupri, 06/01 (1955). “Djalan ke Depan Makin Terang.” Hasan Raid is a leading member of Indonesia Communist Party (PKI). His autobiography, Pergulatan Muslim Komunis (2001), explores his making sense of Islam, Marxism, and communism.
[11] Warta SARBUPRI often discuses about world peace, anti-nuclear war position, and other global topics at that time that were perceived important to their interest in international solidarity of the workers.
[12] Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Savacou 5, no. 1 (1971): 95–102.
[13] Extracted from McKittrick’s “Plantation Futures,” (2013) the logic here draws from George Beckford’s plantation thesis – the persistent underdevelopment that plantations create underpins our contemporary global political economic inequality, including the racialized and othered subjects, uneven [racial] geographies.
[14] To see the critiques of this “state within a state” statement, refer to Henri Lefebvre’s essay collections, On the Rural (2022).
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