Page Against the Machine (PATM)

Page Against the Machine (PATM) is a cooperative anarchist publishing collective based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The project grew out of Gulma Press, a self-publishing operation that began in 2019 and produced around thirty books on art and socio-political themes. PATM rebranded and reorganized with a focused team of three people: two members of an anarchist feminist collective with more than a decade of activism in feminism, ecology, queer liberation, and land struggle, and a member of Ruang Gulma, a critical art collective based in the same city. The cooperative operates under egalitarian, non-hierarchical principles, with shared access to resources and decision-making across its members.

The collective’s publishing work sits inside a longer history of anarchist organizing in Indonesia that resurged in the 1990s after three decades of suppression under the Soeharto dictatorship. Punk culture carried anarchist ideas across the archipelago through copied zines and translated lyrics, and in the years that followed, anarchists in cities like Yogyakarta, Bandung, and Jakarta built infoshops, free kitchens, and solidarity networks. PATM’s archive reflects this history: the collective holds over a thousand books and zines on anarchism and radical politics gathered since the 1990s. One of its members has translated major anarchist texts into Indonesian, including works by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. The collective has also published a book on the history of stateless societies in the Maluku Islands, written by imprisoned Indonesian anarchist Bima Satria Putra and released in the UK in August 2025 through Minor Compositions.

The current translation initiative responds directly to what the collective identifies as a structural imbalance in global anarchist discourse: Indonesian anarchist thought, shaped by post-colonial struggle, indigenous land rights movements, and decades of grassroots organizing under authoritarian conditions, rarely reaches readers outside Indonesia. PATM is working to translate key Indonesian anarchist and critical texts into English, involving local authors, particularly those without access to academic publishing infrastructure. The cooperative model extends to how benefit-sharing is structured with authors and collaborators. Beyond publishing, the collective’s members are also involved in anti-domestic violence workshops and solidarity work with farmers in land conflicts with the state and corporations.

In December 2025, one of PATM’s organizers was subjected to intimidation, surveillance, and forced displacement by Indonesian police and immigration authorities, following a pattern of state repression against anarchists and civil society after the mass protests of August 2025. The collective publicly reported the incident and is continuing its work. PATM remains one of the few publicly identified anarchist publishers in Southeast Asia producing material in both Indonesian and English, connected to a broader network of Indonesian anarchist printers, archivists, and organizers spread across the archipelago.