When political parties no longer educate: lessons from Indonesia’s forgotten socialists

In the din of 21st-century politics, where outrage eclipses patience and slogans replace thought, one question lingers uncomfortably: what are political parties for? The prevailing answer seems to be, to win. And yet, buried beneath the noise is an older function, now mostly abandoned, to educate.

Indonesia’s brief and often overlooked experiment with democratic socialism in the mid-20th century offers a powerful case study of what political education once meant. The Indonesian Socialist Party (PSI), led by Sutan Sjahrir, believed that politics without moral formation is mere mobilisation, and that leaders without intellectual grounding are liabilities to democracy.

Today, as the global left wrestles with crisis, fragmentation, and populist pressure, the PSI’s legacy presents a quietly radical challenge: to return to the slow, unglamorous, and essential work of forming political consciousness. This essay explores that legacy not as nostalgia, but as a provocation for the future of democratic socialism.

Sutan Sjahrir and Indonesian Socialism

To understand the Indonesian Socialist Party’s experiment in political education, one must first encounter the figure at its centre: Sutan Sjahrir. Born in 1909 in West Sumatra, Sjahrir belonged to a generation that bridged colonial inheritance and anti-colonial struggle. Educated in the Netherlands, he immersed himself in European socialist debates while remaining attuned to Indonesia’s nascent nationalism.

During his student years in the Netherlands, Sjahrir studied law and became active in Indonesian student politics while also engaging with Dutch socialist circles. He developed connections with the Sociaal-Democratische Arbeiderspartij (SDAP) and the affiliated Sociaal-Democratische Studentenclub (SDSC), institutions that shaped working-class and student socialist networks in the Netherlands. Contemporary and later accounts also record Sjahrir’s acquaintance with figures such as Salomon Tas (Sal Tas), a leading young socialist in student circles who would later play an important role in the Dutch resistance during World War II.[i] Tas and Sjahrir reportedly held extended discussions on democracy, ethics, and the dangers of authoritarian politics, an exchange that biographers and memoirists treat as influential for Sjahrir’s conception of socialism as an ethical-political project.

At the same time, Sjahrir was active in the Perhimpunan Indonesia (Indonesische Vereeniging; originally the Indische Vereeniging), an organisation that had, by the 1920s, transformed from a cultural association of colonial students into a radical anti-colonial movement. Perhimpunan Indonesia rejected compromise with Dutch colonialism and embraced international solidarity with socialist and anti-imperialist groups.[ii] For Sjahrir, this environment reinforced the idea that Indonesian nationalism could not stand apart from global currents of socialist thought. These encounters sharpened his sense that socialism was not simply an economic programme, but an ethical and cultural project rooted in solidarity and critical thinking. He learned the value of study groups, open debate, and the patient cultivation of political consciousness, methods he would later transplant into Indonesia’s political soil.[iii] This synthesis of European socialist practice and Indonesian nationalist aspiration would soon define his political path, shaping the kind of leader he became as Indonesia’s first prime minister after independence.

As Indonesia’s first prime minister after independence, Sjahrir stood apart from the revolutionary theatre that often-dominated nationalist politics. Appointed in late 1945 at the age of only 36, he represented a civilian and parliamentary alternative to the military radicalism that pressed for immediate confrontation with the Dutch. His cabinet pursued diplomacy, culminating in the Linggadjati Agreement of 1947, which temporarily secured international recognition for the young republic. For Sjahrir, compromise was not weakness but strategy: he believed that Indonesia’s survival depended on patient institution-building rather than emotional mobilization. This placed him at odds with both right-wing conservatives who dismissed socialism and left-wing revolutionaries who saw negotiation as betrayal.

Yet Sjahrir’s political path grew increasingly precarious as Sukarno, Republic of Indonesia’s first president, consolidated charismatic authority and the army expanded its influence. His insistence on democratic process and ethical responsibility often made him appear ‘too Western’ or ‘too intellectual’ in a political culture that increasingly valued mass appeal. By the late 1940s and 1950s, Sjahrir and the PSI became marginalised, branded elitist and eventually outlawed by Sukarno in 1960. Still, his stance reveals a consistent position: that politics should be measured not by its ability to inflame the crowd, but by its capacity to cultivate responsible citizens and leaders. It was in this conviction that Sjahrir located the enduring significance of Indonesian socialism, not as an ideology of mass slogans, but as a school of democratic conscience.

The Party as School

It was from this crucible of ideas and relationships that the Indonesian Socialist Party (PSI) emerged in 1948. Unlike other parties of the era, the PSI eschewed charismatic mass mobilisation in favour of cadre development. Members were trained through study groups, internal seminars, and translations of European socialist texts. The party’s internal education was led by figures such as Soedjatmoko, a young public intellectual who later became Indonesia’s ambassador to the United States and rector of the United Nations University in Tokyo.

Within the PSI, Sjahrir championed the fusion of ethical reflection with internationalist thinking, introducing cadres to debates on democracy, human rights, and development long before these became common in Indonesian discourse. Djohan Sjahroezah, meanwhile, was a party organiser and educator known for shaping methods of leadership formation based on critical discussion rather than rote learning. He helped design the PSI’s kaderisasi system, programmes of political formation that aimed not only to produce loyal members, but individuals capable of independent thought and responsible decision-making. For both men, political education was not just training for power, but a means of personal transformation.[iv]

According to a 1952 PSI manual titled Pendidikan Sosialis, ‘Leaders are not born from great enthusiasm alone, but from regular thinking exercises and the courage to take responsibility.’[v]

PSI education included readings from thinkers like Bernstein and Kautsky but always filtered through Indonesian realities. Cadres debated ethics, power, and the tension between idealism and democratic patience. The goal was not dogma but thinking citizens.[vi]

Politics for the PSI was not a popularity contest but a moral responsibility. Sjahrir viewed politics as an intellectual and ethical pursuit. He feared that opportunists and demagogues would derail the republic. He was right. The PSI was banned in 1960 by Sukarno, its memory buried. Yet its vision, of a party that educates before it mobilises, remains.

A Crisis of Formation

Indonesia’s current political parties retain organisational scale but lack formative depth. Cadre development tends to be transactional, focused on loyalty and patronage rather than ethics or ideology. Even newer, reformist parties often repeat this pattern. Post-1998 reformasi distanced politics from ideology, stigmatizing anything ending in ‘-ism.’ In its place arose a technocratic pragmatism, furthered by the commodification of education and media saturation. Universities became job training centres. Media replaced seminars with soundbites. Citizens are saturated with messaging but starved of meaning.

But this is not a crisis of ideology. It is a crisis of formation. Labels like ‘left’ and ‘right’ persist, but fewer people can articulate what they mean. Democratic socialism, in particular, cannot survive as branding. It must become culture—and culture requires cultivation.

This crisis is global. The UK’s Labour Party, once rich in educational infrastructure, now produces reactive, expressive politics. Momentum and Compass have tried to revive political education but often treat it as auxiliary. Germany’s SPD, too, has drifted into technocracy, its educational institutions rarely reaching the grassroots. Even in the U.S., the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) face the challenge of turning moral urgency into durable structures of political learning.

Elsewhere in the Global South, similar patterns unfold. In India, the decline of left-wing student unions has left a vacuum in political literacy among younger generations. In South Africa, the ANC’s historic ideological base has eroded under the pressure of bureaucratic patronage and electoral survival. Even in post-liberation settings, the impulse to consolidate power has often come at the expense of deep political formation.

In Thailand, student uprisings such as those led by the Free Youth movement showed remarkable mobilising capacity but struggled to build institutions for continued education and leadership development.[vii] The Philippines offers a mixed record: while party-list groups like Bayan Muna maintain some ideological infrastructure, they too contend with electoralism and disinformation.[viii]

The PSI, by contrast, placed formation first. It produced not just slogans, but thinkers, people trained to argue, to interpret, to act with ethical clarity. Their experiment, while short-lived, demonstrates that political parties can function as schools for citizens, not merely as vehicles for votes.

Slowness as Strategy

In today’s hyper-mediated political environment, slowness feels like suicide. Yet the PSI reminds us of that virality is not durability. Theirs was a politics of interiority: shaping how a person thinks, not just what they think. They understood that a democracy requires more than participation, it requires preparation.

Modern leftist movements face the temptation to mirror right-wing populism, to trade in slogans and outrage. But emotional energy, while catalytic, cannot consolidate movements. Only education can do that. The PSI’s political pedagogy was slow, deliberate, and reflective. It encouraged introspection, not reaction. It taught cadres to ask not only what should be done, but how one ought to be while doing it.

Indonesia’s five-year political cycles reward content production, not consciousness formation. Even progressive figures must feed the algorithm. But political education is not content. It is context. It is the slow weaving of memory and thought, something that cannot be reduced to a reel or hashtag.

Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the ‘war of position’, a long cultural struggle, offers guidance. The PSI waged such a war not through counter-charisma, but through counter-subjectivity. It sought to form citizens who could resist the militarism and performativity of their time. They were engaged in building a moral infrastructure beneath political action.

Politics as Moral Risk

Sjahrir wrote that politics is moral risk. It demands choosing what is right over what is effective. This cannot be outsourced to consultants or automated through data. It must be practised.

Moral politics means telling the truth to allies, choosing transparency over advantage, and process over spectacle. It is often unrewarded. But it is necessary. In my own work in public and regulatory affairs, I witness the detachment of policy from ethics. Restoring political education means reconnecting these realms. Leaders must be trained to think structurally without abandoning conscience.

The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, argued that education must be dialogical and liberatory, rooted in the lived experiences of the oppressed, not imposed from above. PSI's approach resonates deeply with Freire's ideal of praxis: reflection and action in a continuous dialectical loop. To be politically educated is not simply to know, but to act justly based on that knowledge.

Frantz Fanon, writing from the experience of colonial violence, also understood education as resistance. He warned that decolonisation must not simply replace the coloniser but radically reconfigure political subjectivity.[ix] For PSI, this meant forming leaders who could transcend victimhood without becoming new oppressors, who could inhabit freedom responsibly.

To lead with conscience is costly. It means being accountable, not merely correct. This is what separates leaders from demagogues. It is the ability to stay grounded when incentives pull toward expedience.

Against Populism, Not Against the People

Movements that mobilise indignation but lack political learning soon dissipate. The 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election channelled mass sentiment but left no lasting organisation.[x] Populist waves win battles but rarely build institutions. Populism flattens complexity into binaries. The PSI rejected this. It taught that transformation requires patience, not just catharsis.

This is not elitism. It is pedagogy. The left must respect people enough to offer them seriousness. Political education is a vote of confidence in the intelligence of the public. It says: you are capable of complexity. You are worthy of more than spectacle.

Relevance for the Global Left

What can the global left learn from a small postcolonial party? That moral seriousness need not come at the expense of clarity. That resisting spectacle is political. That the left’s future depends less on volume, and more on listening.

The decline of internal education is not a Southern problem. In the UK, Labour has lost its pedagogical spaces. Germany’s SPD retains think tanks like Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, but their grassroots reach is limited. Contrast this with PSI, where education was the structure, not the supplement. Cadres were developed, not just instructed.

Education must equip people to think, argue, and disagree, yet remain rooted. This task is slow, but necessary. The DSA’s Socialist Night School is one attempt.[xi] Brazil’s MST is another, offering curriculum that blends Marxist theory, local knowledge, and pedagogy. These spaces are imperfect, but essential.[xii] They show that education is not a luxury, it is a strategy.

Education as Memory Work

To educate politically is to remember, to resist the engineered forgetting of authoritarianism. PSI’s education began with history: of colonialism, failure, and betrayal. Postcolonial states often reward forgetting. History becomes pride, not complexity. The result is a populace easily mobilised but shallowly rooted.

Indonesia’s many silenced histories, 1965 massacres, repression of indigenous struggles, and the erasure of democratic socialists, demand reckoning. Political education must recover these stories, not for bitterness, but for resilience. Memory work builds ethical readiness. Citizens who remember are harder to manipulate and more capable of acting with strategic patience. Remembering is not nostalgic, it is preparatory. It builds the moral orientation required for long-term struggle.

The educational theorist John Dewey also insisted that democracy is a way of life sustained by habits of inquiry and memory.[xiii] Political education in this light becomes a civic ritual, a form of ethical maintenance. It is how we stay alert to creeping authoritarianism, through the disciplined practice of remembering.

Lessons for Renewal

How might political education be revived today? First, parties must reclaim ideological spaces. Not necessarily schools, but reading groups, dialogue circles, and mentorship networks. Continuity and rigour are key. Second, education must be delinked from electoral cycles. It is not strategy. It is culture. Valuing critical thinkers, even dissenters, is vital. Third, parties must collaborate with civil society. Initiatives like DSA’s Socialist Night School or Brazil’s MST offer useful templates. The latter’s Escola Florestan Fernandes trains organisers in both theory and pedagogy.[xiv]

In Southeast Asia, early stirrings exist. Grassroots organisers speak of dignity and justice in Sjahririan tones, even if unnamed. The task is to give structure without suffocation. Political education is slow and often invisible. But without it, the left risks becoming reactive and unmoored. Education is not a side project; it is the architecture.

Conclusion: A Quiet Revolution

The PSI did not survive, but its ethos did. It lives in those who believe politics is not marketing but meaning. Not just about seizing power, but about being worthy of it. Sjahrir called for a ‘quiet revolution’ that transforms not just structures, but souls. No hashtags. No virality. Just readers, thinkers, and organisers.

To remember Sjahrir is to reimagine the future. It is to choose a political ethic that is reflective, human, and morally serious. In my own work, whether mentoring young colleagues or shaping policy frameworks, I try to uphold this ethos. It is not always efficient. But it keeps me politically alive.

Education is not an accessory to politics. It is its heart. If the democratic left is to live, it must learn again how to teach. If it is to endure, it must invest not only in message, but in memory.

Deny Giovanno is a public affairs strategist and political thinker based in Jakarta.

[i] Rudolf Mrazek, Sjahrir: Politics and Exile in Indonesia, Cornell SEAP, 1994.

[ii] Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912–1926, Cornell SEAP, 1990.

[iii] Heather Sutherland, The Making of a Bureaucratic Elite, Heinemann, 1979.

[iv] George McTurnan Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, Cornell University Press, 1952, pp75-90.

[v] Pendidikan Sosialis, PSI internal publication, 1952, archived in Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia (ANRI).

[vi] Arif, ‘Lepaskan Dogma Marxisme dan Ubah Partai Kader, PSI Jeblok di Pemilu 1955’, blitar.inews.id, 5 January 2023.

[vii]Tyrell Haberkorn, Starving for Justice in Thailand, dissentmagazine.org, 26 January 2023.

[viii] Nathan Gilbert Quimpo, Contested Democracy and the Left in the Philippines after Marcos, Yale University Press, 2008.

[ix] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, 1961.

[x] Marcus Mietzner and Burhanuddin Muhtadi, ‘Explaining the 2016 Islamist mobilisation in Indonesia: Religious intolerance, militant groups and the politics of accommodation’, Asian Studies Review, Vol 42 No 3, 2018, pp479-97.

[xi]Jarek Ervin and Melissa Naschek, A DSA Night School, dsausa.org/blog/, 11 January 2018.

[xii] Rebecca Tarlau, Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education, Oxford University Press, 2019.

[xiii] John Dewey, Democracy and Education, Macmillan, 1916.

[xiv] Alessandro Santos Mariano and José Claudinei Lombardi, ‘Método de formação política da escola nacional Florestan Fernandes do MST’, Germinal: Marxismo e Educação em Debate, Vol 11 No 1, 2019, pp203-9.