10-Point Constitution, Unitary People’s Republic, (Centralized Democratic Republic), People’s Governing Body, People’s Courts (My Political System)

Written by Bābur Timurid

In short: 10PC-UPR-(CDR)-PGB-PC-(MPS)

Context and Pretext

1. This is not a description of a workers’ republic per se but a “revolutionary democratic republic” (Lenin), one rung below the workers’ republic. It is an ideologically-pluralist partisan-democratic republic that welcomes contending parties from many different standpoints. 

2. This piece of writing serves as a more fully fleshed out version of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ hints laid out throughout their corpus, which when synthesized together spell out a damning critique of both decentralized and tyrannical governance, as well as revealing their ambitious advocacy for a centralized democracy, only initially on a national basis, as the vehicle and scaffolding for proletarians as a social class to ascend to the ruling class.

3. In other words, this is as centralized as a democratic republic can get. In a symmetric inversion or linguistic turn, the systems of political operations summarized in this document are also the most democratic that a centralized republic can get.

4. One thing that should be noted is that this Constitution describes a “single-layer” model, a system of voters of whichever locality electing delegates straight to the national level, as opposed to the schema described in Marx and Lenin’s available works on the matter (e.g., Marx’s The Civil War in France, Lenin’s The State and Revolution), in which there is a “multilayer” model for delegation of political power, in which voters vote for and have the ability to recall delegates for their locality, those local delegates vote for and have the ability to recall delegates for their region, and finally, those regional delegates vote for and have the ability to recall delegates for the national-level assembly of delegates. (The example I gave is arbitrary; any other hypothetical ordered listing of political layers for the sake of describing a “multilayer” system will also demonstrate the point.) I intentionally made this change, due to my perception of obvious and severe logistical problems from a complex and chaotic “multi-layer” system in real world practice, as well as the fact that such a model will induce disproportionalities in the representation of voting citizens of different localities, problems that may be epitomized with a modern-day example, the Electoral College for the Presidency of the United States that crudely distorts the real proportions of the residential population of the 50 states.

Body Text of the 10-Point Constitution

1. This Constitution describes the qualities and guidelines for a centralized Unitary People’s Republic (UPR) system that aims to avoid falling prey to the deficiencies of the modern Constitutions of the contemporary world.

2. [Brackets] surround constant factors that cannot be determined a priori, because they depend on the material conditions of the country in question. Their exact number should only be solidified and explicitly written into law after a lengthy term of trial of the utility or disutility of different values of the constant factor in question.

3. Every term length of [2-10 years], (1) citizens of the country each have the right to vote in the traditional way for one national political party out of the total list of political parties; or (2) they have the discretion to submit electorally a weighted subset of 2 or more parties out of the total list of political parties to show their more-nuanced preferences for the selection of their desired national delegates in a more precise and crucial fashion that carries more political information than does the signal of a single, indivisible monochromatic vote for a single party, so as for the final selection of delegates from the ensemble of political parties to be more beholden to their electoral base; (3) finally, they can further submit a ballot of abstention. How does this system of split votes and abstention work? Do note here a novel enhancement of the traditional electoral schema: instead of casting a single vote for a single political party, every voter get 100 sub-votes (or rather, percentile-votes) which they can assign in integral proportions to the available national political parties, e.g., 60 votes for Party A, 23 votes for Party B, and 17 votes for Party C, so long as it adds up to 100 total percentile-votes (or sub-votes). In this manner, citizens can declare a hierarchy of party preferences so that even if their favorite party is insufficiently popular in the eyes of the general voting base, they can signal their desire to allocate seats to another party they hold in secondary regard instead of having their ballot be completely wasted. Moving onwards, citizen voters can cast a single full 100 percent vote to abstain, or even allocate sub-votes towards a vote of abstention in a percentile-vote, if they wish to dilute their vote for whatever reason there may be. In that case, they could, for example, cast 55 percentile-votes for Party A and cast 45 percentile-votes for abstention. Political parties can govern their internal life however they wish, and this 10-Point Constitution does not provide any a priori restrictions on said internal dynamics within a political party. Political parties must register with the administration beforehand so that they can disseminate their political platform and be placed on the electoral roster for voters to study and vote for, respectively, during voting season, which happens during the end of the term. All partisan election campaigns that (1) are registered in a timely manner, (2) which have the barest minimum of reasonable policies, and (3) with leading public members that are serious, sincere, responsible, and wholehearted about participating in public policy (∴) shall be funded equally by the State and cannot take private funds, in an effort to prevent corporate bribery and other forms of corruption. Note that while this Point 3 repeatedly mentions the concept of a “citizen” as a human person with the right to vote in this country’s national election, barring limitations to be determined later by the relevant public institutions, this document does not describe citizenship-in-itself, nor does it concern itself with the process for an individual to become a citizen of this country. This Constitution is a legal layer of abstraction distinct from the legal code for citizenship or residency, and the relevant political bodies defined in this Constitution have the right and obligation to define citizenship and residency, and the process for gaining or losing such a status, using logical reasoning, legal knowledge, and trial & error to generate a rigorous and just system in a manner that is efficient from a public administrative sense, a manner that enhances the country’s well being, as well as a manner which is pushed, accepted, and enthusiastically endorsed by the voter base.

4. There are no avenues for citizens to directly choose their representatives other than the aforementioned national election of national political parties, e.g., there are no popular mass elections for political offices on the provincial, state, or regional level. This is unlike some parliamentary systems today in which citizens of a province or district have a local election featuring members of various parties inside their locality to elect a representative from their specific location to send over to represent their local interests in a national parliament. This helps prevent certain abuses of decentralized governance, such as the gerrymandering system that severely corrupts U.S. politics on the local and state level, the development of perverse incentives that do not proportionally represent the interests of the people of the nation due to national parties’ focusing nearly all of their electoral campaigns and promises to swing state voters, or even the electoral college system that severs the direct will of the people (majority vote) from the keys to the White House (electoral college system). Instead, voters’ votes are equivalent no matter where the voter is located, i.e., no matter which region a voter is from, their vote has the same political impact on a national level. Keep in mind that this only goes as far as to say that there are no democratic institutions formally defined in this Constitution except for the national party election; it is possible and even very likely that public institutions will draw upon the powers invested in them, powers which soon shall be described, to set up referendums and local elections when manually sampling the public outlook outside of the [X year] length term election is found to be necessary or even beneficial. If anything, granting these democratic experiments will likely increase the public’s faith in the accountability and benevolence of their country under this 10-Point Constitution.

5. The primary body of political power in this country, aside from the implicit political power invested in the citizen-voter base, is called the People’s Governing Body (PGB). After every term length of the aforementioned a posteriori duration, the PGB will be emptied, because winning the election in the last prior term should have no direct causal effect on one’s term as a representative in the newest term. Subsequently to this event and without undue delay, the citizens of the Republic shall be notified about and vote in the national election, the votes be collected and counted, preferably through electronic means, and following the statistics tabled from the country-wide voting process, each national party must proportionally assign a number of their appointed party members to the PGB, a political council with a capacity of [100-1000] representatives, according to the nationally-tallied votes for each party in the party-list, i.e., if Party A gets 65.5% of the vote, Party B gets 30.2% of the vote, and Party C gets 4.3% of the vote, and if the governing body is 1000 persons, then 655/1000 will be chosen by Party A, 302/1000 will be chosen by Party B, and 43/1000 will be chosen by Party C. In case the numbers do not add up to the capacity size, the statistics for each party may be modulated to a tiny degree to result in integral number of seats for each party that add up to the capacity size, and also to prevent empty seats. If a party happens to have such little votes that they would not even qualify for a single seat in the PGB, then they will not have any of their delegates sitting in the previously mentioned political council. Take important notice of how ballots containing abstention are processed: to calculate the number of seats for an individual party, the raw numerical figure of percentile-votes for said party are divided by the raw numerical figure of percentile-votes for any party, as opposed to dividing it by the raw total number of sub-votes in the whole election including sub-votes of abstention. Otherwise, the arithmetic involved with abstaining would not work out well, and the voters’ signal for abstention in their ballots would lead to empty seats in the PGB instead of having those seats that metaphorically “would be assigned to the abstention party” otherwise be passed proportionally to all of the actually existing political parties. In any case, once a political party is guaranteed a certain number of seats, by their own discretion, they can place any selection of appointees to fill up exactly those number of seats, no more and no less, so long as these soon-to-be representatives can (1) pass a government-administered standardized test of several areas of study crucial for excellent governance, including some meaningful subset of topics in political science, sociology, history, law, economics, finance, business, rhetoric, philosophy, public health, public policy, social welfare, and STEM, with each one of their scores published publicly, (2) are members in good standing of said political party, (3) do not have any black marks in their political history, and (4) did not get recalled in the previous electoral term. This decision can be made by the national party’s central leadership, by a plurality vote of all of the party’s members, or anything else imaginable, as long as it is defined in the party bylaws. The Constitution does not impose itself in parties’ internal worlds, because it anticipates that incompetent political parties with a decadent, stagnant, corrupt, or rotting internal political life will naturally and assuredly give way to stronger political parties with honor, responsibility, effectiveness, and confidence. Furthermore, and in the same spirit, there are no Constitutional restrictions on inter-party dynamics, such as two or more parties allying temporarily to pass or block a certain policy, or permanently as a formal alliance. Because of this, this 10-Point Constitution gives room for political parties to develop, mingle, and network in a natural manner. It is important to note that by implementing proportional representation as the method for composing the executive-legislative body we call the PGB, we bypass all of the adverse consequences of the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system currently implemented in the United States of America and some other Anglosphere countries for their legislatures. The winner-takes-all system in FPTP means that votes for more minor parties essentially go to waste, and hence that the continual political practice of FPTP almost always causes the political scene to collapse into a 2-party system, which obviously represents the population far less accurately than a multi-party system, because (1) instead of in practice, for all intents and purposes, only ever being able to express a binary political signal⸺Party A or Party B⸺, they can pinpoint from among the whole set of registered political platforms the political party that most closely matches their political views, and (2) they can do this without fearing that their vote would go to waste for not choosing one of the top 2 parties, as it would in a FPTP system, and (3) they can rest assured that the political signal they imbued into their ballot will register in the official statistics for the PGB election.

6. The PGB possesses massive political power since they are the body which most efficiently represents the aggregate political will of the populace, summing together the political positions of millions of citizens into a relatively small number of chosen delegates of the people. As such, they (1) have the ability to create and remove any governmental positions at will, except for the PGB itself, in theory potentially delegating political capital or powers to subordinate persons or bodies, (2) can appoint or recall all public servants from the political offices the PGB has created, viz., all of them except the PGB itself, in substance actually delegating political capital or powers to subordinate persons or bodies, and (3) have full legislative, executive, and judicial authority, in effect assuredly including the ability to amend or create legal definitions of (A) (groups of) people(s), (B) land, and (C) capital. This is true for all levels of administration, and all of these mentioned prerogatives are what we consider political powers or capital. The PGB cannot delegate any political power or capital to a subordinate that the PGB itself does not possess, e.g., to be able to remove a PGB delegate by majority vote. To prevent some blatant cases for governmental corruption, a PGB representative cannot be simultaneously appointed to one of previously-mentioned subordinate governmental bodies that the PGB holds power over in the last instance. This is not strictly binding, but it is strongly encouraged in this Constitution that PGB representatives and administrators appointed by the PGB garner an income from the State no more than the typical average salary that is garnered by the petty-bourgeois, upper-middle-class, and professional-managerial class. This is a rule that aims to allow working class people to be able to consider running for a term in the PGB, while avoiding having governmental salaries be too stratospheric and create a hotbed of corruption, favoritism, nepotism, clientelism, and rent-seeking behavior.

7. The PGB makes all decisions by vote: if it is a yes/no proposition, then the system of majority vote will be used, and if it is a dilemma with three or more possible and reasonable answers, then the system of plurality vote will be used. The PGB will always have an even number of seats for delegates, aside from an extremely rare unforeseen national crisis. In the event of an even-split in the PGB, then the triumvirate of the president, prime minister, and majority vote of the general public will help break the tie, either best two out of three or a consensus of all three. See Point 9 for a description of the president and prime minister. In the absence of a president and prime minister due to an extremely rare unforeseen national crisis, then the majority vote of the general public will be the sole tiebreaker. (Note that this here portion enclosed in parentheses concerns a political scenario, of which we can guarantee that, while numerically possible, is of such a minute probability of occurrence that it will practically never come to play and be formally executed in real life political practice in any country: In the exceedingly rare and grossly atypical scenario of an exact even-split of the popular vote, virtually impossible in terms of probability theory, a panel of [3-21] randomly-selected odd number of citizens will discuss and argue amongst themselves, with access to any public data they could possibly need, and then vote and decide on the matter. The PGB would have the right to vet individual chosen citizens, and with a majority vote, disqualify any of them for treasonous interests, bias, incompetence, corruption, disability, bigotry, personality disorders, sociopathy, criminality, or any other property that would negatively influence their decision-making to fall below that of an average typical citizen. In that case, another citizen would have to be randomly selected to fill up that seat of power. Citizens selected can also petition to be removed from the panel of citizens by stating whichever conditions in their life prevent them from being able to be a responsible and competent voter on the panel, but this is not guaranteed to pass, as a subordinate national public body of judicial power residing inside the People’s Courts (PC) will finalize the decision. See Point 9 for a succinct description of the PC. All of the expenses needed to bring together the panel for discussion and vote will be paid by the State. End of niche Constitutional code.) Since this Point of the Constitution concerns how the PGB’s power is to be demonstrated in real-world practice, note that a lone PGB delegate, or even a non-majority (or non-plurality, depending on the political context) grouping of PGB delegates, has not any de jure or de facto political powers or capital whatsoever, nor do they have any other privileges above those of an ordinary citizen or organization of citizenry, respectively. They obviously always do have the right to convince other PGB members to vote the way that they advocate for and believe in. Only the PGB as a concerted total movement—whose internal discourse is always recorded and publicly available for the sake of accountability—has the lawfully-defined cardinal power and obligation to steer the country top-down by majority or plurality vote, while being directly elected by the national public from the bottom-up.

8. Citizens can recall political officers via majority-vote referendum as well, and the scope of the voter base for this act of recall depends on the level of administration or jurisdiction that the political officer presides over, such as a city-level mayor, province-level governor, state-level viceroy, etc. Citizens can also recall any PGB representative by majority-vote on a nationwide basis, since the PGB is a national-level political organization. To prevent the PGB from being able to abuse its appointing powers, once citizens have successfully recalled a political officer, that person cannot hold office for the next term-length. Finally, national political parties can choose to recall members of theirs that they appointed into seat(s) of the PGB. Their bylaws should define whatever procedure the political party should use to arrive at the conclusion to recall their member from the PGB. In any case, the party must immediately select a replacement representative to ensure that the PGB is running at full capacity for discourse and voting. The same goes if a party member who is a representative (1) is recalled by the general public, (2) passes away during office in the PGB, (3) resigns from their position, or (4) becomes mentally incompetent due to gross disability. The dissolution of a political party with 1 or more seats in the PGB immediately triggers a snap election of the entire PGB even if the representatives themselves of the ex-party are willing to stay in office in the PGB, because this 10-Point Constitution calls for electoral competition between candidate political parties with weighted strength as opposed to judging the candidacy of specific persons or personalities, and requires each PGB delegate to be governing in the name of a formal political party with a formal and specific political platform. In other words, no independent PGB representatives should exist. Any “independents” wishing for a political career and standing against all of the current parties is free to create their own party and run a party campaign with public funds, so long as they can meet the twin requirements of having a formal registered national political party with a platform and those specifications listed earlier for being an appointee of a party for the PGB.
   

9. It is not strictly legally mandatory, but in their prior-defined capacity to create seats for and appoint subordinate public servants or public bodies under their prudent supervision, the PGB should in almost all circumstances appoint a head of state to handle foreign policy, as well as a head of government as a leading executive body to handle domestic policy. In this case, the PGB delegates certain political powers or capital that they hold in the last instance to specialized public bodies for the sake of streamlining and facilitating the orchestrated, big-picture, administrative/political process unfolding on the international and national/domestic fronts, respectively. The former should be called “president”, and the latter should be called “prime minister”. Both of them should appoint a cabinet to facilitate their efficacy in governance. Both of these public servants answer to and govern only with the explicit approval of the PGB and the general public, both of whom must scrutinize the activities and records of the head of state and head of government, ready to recall these two public servants and their cabinets after any sign of corruption, incompetence, treason, inappropriate personal behavior, inability to show humility after committing serious political errors, etc. The PGB should also appoint and delegate judicial powers to a subordinate and supervised national public body of judges, viz., the People’s Courts (PC), to serve the public interest by making verdicts on controversial civil or criminal matters that are passed to the PC.

10. Neither the PGB, nor its direct or indirect affiliates and appointees can alter this Constitution, i.e., these 10 points of order listed here, except to modulate [Bracketed] constant factors in the early years of the Republic, and of course, due to Revolution, which invariably discards older Constitutions and enact a newer Constitution.

Appendix

 The only necessary change(s) to form a workers’ state from this revolutionary-democratic state are at least one of the following, their necessity and sufficiency to be determined through experimental political practice:

1. To rigorously restrict political parties to being socialist in words and deeds, with an independent public body to vet political parties’ theory and practice of socialism and their orientation and affinity towards the proletariat and the other segments of the working masses of the country in question,

2. For there to be a dominant party inside the given system that is socialist, preferably communist in ideology and also Marxist or Marxist-Leninist, affiliated with other more minor socialist or workers’ parties in orbit and in cooperation on the ground level and in the legislature-executive body to keep a workers’ government in power, and to organically and incrementally modify the political system, with the support of the overwhelming masses, to such a degree as to ensure the long-term or even institutional political dominance and societal hegemony of the proletariat and its allies, including writing itself into the Constitution,
   
3. To reserve some constant proportion of the seats of the ruling body to a constitutionally-defined (competent and thoroughly vetted) Marxist or Marxist-Leninist party, e.g., a system in which 333/1000 seats of the ruling body become guaranteed for the aforementioned party, popular votes for said party also get proportionally allocated to the remaining 667 seats, and all parties compete on an even basis for the last 667 seats at the very least, or

4. To have a second (upper) house inside the ruling body that is solely occupied by the members of a constitutionally-defined Marxist or Marxist-Leninist party (with the same stipulations as mentioned previously), with the power dynamics between the two houses to be determined naturally when discrepancies arise in practice, i.e., when the two houses of the ruling body directly conflict from standing face-to-face in a political sense, only to deliver diametrically-opposed verdicts for the same socio-political question.

5. It also would not hurt the socialist cause if the PC were filled with appointed socialists, communists, and workers’ representatives when a workers’ majority comes to power in the PGB, but as stated previously, whether or not this point is necessary or sufficient for workers’ power in a centralized democratic republic is yet to be determined.

Liked it? Take a second to support Cosmonaut on Patreon! At Cosmonaut Magazine we strive to create a culture of open debate and discussion. Please write to us at CosmonautMagazine@gmail.com if you have any criticism or commentary you would like to have published in our letters section.