Contesting Sarekat Islam in Java, 1917–1927: Elite Strategies, Communist Penetration, and the Fragmentation of an Anticolonial Movement

Abstract

This article examines the struggle over Sarekat Islam (SI) in Java between 1917 and 1927, focusing on how regional political environments shaped the penetration of socialist-communist ideas and how SI’s leading figures responded to that challenge. Rather than treating the division between Sarekat Islam Putih and Sarekat Islam Merah as a simple ideological binary, the study reconstructs the conflict as a spatially differentiated process involving Semarang, Surakarta, Surabaya, Yogyakarta, and Bandung. It argues that communist influence became significant not simply because Marxist ideas entered the Indies, but because the decentralized structure of SI, the heterogeneity of its membership, the growth of labor politics, and the concentration of industrial workers in particular urban centers created uneven opportunities for ideological competition. Henk Sneevliet and indigenous activists such as Semaun and Darsono used labor organizations, newspapers, political meetings, and dual membership to work from within an established mass movement. In response, H.O.S. Tjokroaminoto, Abdoel Moeis, and Haji Agus Salim did not initially pursue a single strategy. Tjokroaminoto combined ideological accommodation, political participation, and the formulation of Islamic socialism, while Moeis and Salim increasingly advocated organizational discipline and a clearer boundary between SI and communist organizations. The decisive institutional response came through the party-discipline policy adopted at the 1921 SI congresses, followed by organizational consolidation in 1923. The article demonstrates that the resulting split was simultaneously a failure of organizational unity and a successful defense of SI’s religious-nationalist identity. Regionally, the split redistributed political constituencies: Semarang became a major center of the communist labor movement, while Yogyakarta and other branches became important centers of the reorganized Islamic-nationalist SI. The study contributes a spatially grounded interpretation of an established episode in Indonesian political history and shows that ideological conflict was inseparable from the geography of labor, print culture, organizational autonomy, and colonial political opportunity.