in Esperanto
Chapter 4: SKETCH OF COMMUNIST SOCIETY -- ADMINISTRATION
1. It is possible to abolish state as a political entity.
1.4. Commons' Convention System
The state that grabs taxes from the wages that we have finally earned while being exploited as wage serfs - from where we are also exploited for consumption - and then uses those taxes to use us in war. You might be tempted to exterminate such a monster now. But it is not so easy.
On this point, Marx and Engels, and later self-proclaimed communists, did not declare the abolition of the state, perhaps for fear of being confused with unpopular anarchists. Instead, they usually duck the issue by vague thesis such as "the death of the state."
However, since the state is not a living thing, it is not possible for it to wither and perish if we wait. In order to abolish the state, we must let go of the concept of the state itself and concretely present a new mechanism for social management that does not depend on the state. How, then, is it actually possible to abolish the state?
To put it straight to the conclusion, it is to create an institution that truly represents the people - this is the Commons' Convention that has already been mentioned several times - and position this institution as the sole administrative body.
The Commons' Convention is a social organization with a representative structure that differs from a parliamentary system or a political party organization. Its delegates are to be drawn by lottery - not by voting - from among citizens with a delegate license obtained through a public standardized examination. Moreover, since the Commons' Convention is not a government, it does not impose taxes or similar duties.
This communist social organization does not adopt the classic separation of powers familiar from textbooks: parliament, government, and courts.
According to the classical understanding, the separation of powers is a power distribution system to prevent dictatorship, but in reality it is a monstrous triumvirate like a three-headed dragon. In fact, even a single-headed dragon is more than enough for power.
In a Commons' Convention System, the governmental institutions that had become a many-headed dragon due to sectionalism will be completely abolished, and all institutions equivalent to today's central ministries and agencies will be converted into a kind of policy think tanks that report directly to the Commons' Convention.
However, if such an administrative organisation exists, it may be counter-questioned that it could be a body of power similar to the state.
Certainly, communism draws a clear line from anarchism. This is because, in order to maintain human society, it is impossible to deny the social norms of laws with coercive force and the administrative power based on laws. In that sense, even if the state-power is abolished, it does not mean that the legal-power is also abolished.
However, communist law and power are not "activated" from above through the body of power called the state, but "utilized" from below through the representative body of the Commons' Convention. The significance of the abolition of the state lies in this point.
In the traditional theory of the state, theses of democracy such as "popular sovereignty" and "government by the people" have been actively advocated, but they have ended up being mostly empty ones. The reason for it is that as long as the state is premised, sovereignty cannot escape being seized not by the people, but by the state itself—in other words, the politicians, bureaucrats, and military officers who control the state.
In contrast, the first principle of politics in true communism is that the common people, or the commons, are the leading role in society. It can be summarized as "commons' sovereignty," but in order to prevent this from ending up as an another empty thesis, we must establish a mechanism for the management of society without a state through the Commons' Convention.
1.5. Sublation of sovereign states
The abolition of the state will not be completed simply with the creation of the Commons' Convention. Sovereign states must be sublated in external relations as well. Rather, that is what should be preceded theoretically, but for the sake of argument, the details of this issue will be dealt with in the final chapter, so I will preempt it here to the extent necessary.
The sublation of sovereign states means that all the peoples will be freed from the cages of nation-states and will be subsumed into a world community called the World Commonwealth that binds the entire globe altogether. The World Commonwealth is a transnational administrative organization contracted by the World Commonwealth Charter, which can be said to be the "constitution of the earth."
Under this new world system, while being subsumed by the World Commonwealth, the people belong to each unit in the World Commonwealth called the zone, which retains relatively autonomous domain and is stipulated by its own charter (constitution) within the scope of the World Commonwealth Charter. However, unlike sovereign states, the zones cannot claim their exclusivity not only to other zones but also to the World Commonwealth.
Therefore, the term "domain" here is similar to, but different from "territory." It is a unit in which the entire population of the zone can exercise autonomous power of administration through the Commons' Convention of the zone, and its ultimate jurisdiction belongs to the World Commonwealth.
It is easy to understand that this World Commonwealth is a further deepening of the unity of today's United Nations, but it is a single integrated global organisation that goes beyond a mere union of sovereign states like the UN. It has a position as an world administrative organization, and when finally completed, it is designed to be responsible for a planned economy throughout the earth.
By the way, the World Commonwealth is completely different from the "World Federation" that has been advocated for some time. The "federation" will be regarded as a single state (federal state), and a federal government (world federal government) will also be created. However, since the World Commonwealth does not recognize a "state" in any sense, it should be clearly distinguished from the "World Federation."
Rather, in order to manage the World Commonwealth, especially economic cooperation, in a more decentralized and democratic way than today's UN, we will divide the world into several large, interconnected regions called the grand zones. Each grand zone consists of about a dozen neighboring zones, and also has its own Commons' Convention.
In any case, the true meaning of the abolition of the state is to sublimate the conflicting interests between the existing sovereign states into a world community in this way.
