ABSTRACT
As far as I know, the Brassika victims were all PKI or families of PKI, or other opponents of the Puri. My conclusion is that in Brassika the murders were motivated by revenge for the PKI attack on traditional power and outrage at the attempt to dismantle the social hierarchy. The aim was the restoration of the ‘proper’ social hierarchy after the intense and bitter onslaught by the PKI and its farmers’ branch, the BTI, on feudal privilege. This caste-based privilege was underpinned by gross inequalities in access to the means of production-land and labour. The massacre in Bali can be seen as a reaction to the agonizing twin shift from feudalism to capitalism and to the rule of law of the new nation-state. Workers and peasants struggled to find ways to organize themselves, with declining access to land, in order to negotiate the fairest returns to labour. The nation-state attempted to redistribute resources via egalitarian new laws. Locally,
it failed to implement these through a bureaucracy perceived to be fair and objective, triggering popular protests and a deadly backlash.
