My dissertation is a global intellectual history of Indonesian Marxism in the period of postcolonial transition. It investigates four modes of internationalist praxes, namely, Soviet, Maoist, Left Third-Worldist, and Minor-Communist, emerging from the cooperation between the Indonesian left and actually-existing communism in the post-Comintern milieu. I combine insights from Marxist and postcolonial theories with critical ethnic studies to develop an experimental “peripheral Marxist” interpretive method to study Marxist movements outside of the capitalist centers and imperial metropoles. Both of my dissertation key analytics, peripherality and internationalism, allow for a treatment of Indonesia as already interconnected with other parts of the world. The former manifests a shared material condition between Indonesian and countries in the periphery of global capitalism. The latter connects Indonesian Marxism to other contemporaneous leftist struggles against capitalism, imperialism, and racism elsewhere. This dissertation proposes peripherality and internationalism be analyzed as an inextricable pair of the objective and subjective conditions for a global revolution against capitalist totality.

As a project of global intellectual history, I discovered that Indonesian left internationalists drew from a global variety of Marxist perspectives to analyze different peripheral facets of the capitalist-imperialist world system. My key finding is these Indonesian left analyses were situational and innovative. They concretely accounted for the peripheral conditions structuring the Indonesian society rather than entirely following the doctrinal imperative of Eurocentric Marxism or Soviet and Chinese interpretive authorities. In other words, they worked through the processual movements of material forces in the peripheries generating and mediated by capitalist contradictions that this dissertation collectively names peripheral dialectics. Instead of starting from abstract principles, left internationalist praxes studied in this dissertation began from a situated concrete reality of Indonesia. Indonesian thinkers whose discourses and practices this dissertation studies include Darmini, Ba Ren (Renshu Wang), Ibrahim Isa, and D.N. Aidit.

Chapter one looks at the interactions between Indonesian and Soviet feminist Marxists in their exposition of the relationship between patriarchal and imperialist oppression of women in the periphery. Chapter two demonstrates the inter-racial proletarian solidarity between Chinese coolies and Indonesian peasants in their support of both Chinese communists (in the civil war) and Indonesian anticolonial nationalists (in the Indonesian Revolution). Chapter three shows the internationalist solidarity of the left Third-Worldists in supporting Indonesia in its struggles for Papuan liberation and against neocolonial Malaysia as a part of a larger systemic fight against the intertwined capitalist-imperialist system. Finally, chapter four examines the minor-communist critique of Soviet commandism made possible by the horizontal cooperation between the Indonesian Communist Party and peripheral radical nationalist and communist parties of North Kalimantan, Malaya, North Korea, and Albania.

Summarily, my project’s four chapters investigate four different modes of internationalist praxes concerning different problematics of peripheral Marxism: feminism in the first, inter-racial solidarity in the second, anti-imperialism in the third, and communist decolonization in the fourth. These problematics provide intellectual resources for conceptualizing the intricate relationship between gender, race, and colonialism in peripheral Marxism. “Peripheral Dialectics,” hence, opens up new methodological and historiographical terrains for researching intellectual production and political theory from the periphery