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View all search resultsExplainer: Revisiting the complex history of Indonesian cooperatives
President Prabowo Subianto’s Red and White Cooperatives program is deemed a new chapter in the country’s long history of the economic institution that has roots in the Indonesian social value of gotong royong (mutual support).
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A worker serves a customer at a pharmacy stall on Monday during the launch ceremony of a Red and White Cooperatives program in Serang regency, Banten. The cooperative is one of 80,000 opened under the Red and White Cooperatives initiative launched by President Prabowo Subianto on Monday. (Antara/Angga Budhiyanto)
The launch of President Prabowo Subianto’s Red and White Cooperatives program, which the government claims is the poor’s “tool of struggle”, has brought renewed attention to cooperatives, an economic institution that has outlived various regime changes thanks to its firm roots in the Indonesian social value of gotong royong (mutual support).
During the launch ceremony in Klaten, Central Java on Monday, the President described the initiative as a way for “economically weaker groups” to build collective strength and a “strategic movement” aimed at challenging the longstanding economic dominance of big players.
With only 108 village cooperatives opened during the initial phase, the government aimed to have more than 80,000 firms established in three months, according to Coordinating Food Minister Zulkifli Hasan, who leads the task force behind the initiative.
While the program’s proponents have praised it as a means to reinvigorate local economies down to the village level, critics argue that it contradicts the fundamental spirit of cooperatives, which has been repeatedly tested in the country’s history.
Humble beginnings
The history of the cooperative movement can be traced to 1895, when Raden Aria Wirjaatmadja, an aristocrat from Purwokerto in Central Java, launched a savings and loan scheme to help civil servants avoid predatory lenders.
