Communal executive council instead of "Head of state"

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

I've been wondering about different modes of managing an interim socialist or later communist government/administrative body, and one thing I think we should do away with is the notion of a unitary head of state. I think the head of state fits with an old fashioned, theological notion of the nation, whereby a leader, be he a king, an ayatollah, a president, a prime minister or even a party secretary dominate national affairs and are singularly lauded or held responsible when mistakes are made. For real socialism to be achieved, we need to do away with this idea.

Another mechanism would be replacing the single executive which runs a country with a council of a dozen or more ministers, representing different interest groups elected from within that interest group. In effect, I was thinking you could take the corrupt bureaucratic idea of a politburo, and turn it on its head. Instead of an unaccountable vanguard party deciding who fits the executive positions in the leadership council, various groups of labourers would.

Beneath these ministers would be deputies, and beneath them a host of bureaucrats. But unlike bureaucrats in other governments, these would be directly accountable to the people who vote in their ministries. A mechanism of recall elections will be instituted, whereby electorates can recall bureaucrats who make decisions that they see as dangerous to their class interests. These bureaucrats, and other elected bodies, would be the real decision makers in "planning" the economy, but these elected executives would oversee and manage these groups from above, while direct recall would manage them from below.

All would get to vote for a few ministries, but i don't know yet whether all people would automatically qualify to vote for all of the ministries. This would lead to a loss of integrity and expertise by those on the council.

In one alternative, you would get to vote for ministers whose decisions impact your life directly, which you have unique expertise in, or which impacts your community. For instance, if you live in a province with a high portion of petroleum extraction, you would be allowed to vote for the minister and deputy ministers of the Ministry of Extraction. If you have a PhD in Chemical Engineering, you could vote in the Ministry of Energy or the Ministry of Industry. If you are a fisherman, you could vote in the Ministry of Fisheries and Forestries.

The idea is to fulfill the following goals:
(1) To prevent political and economic power from falling into the hands of one man/woman
(2) To ensure collective power in all economic fields, where people can more directly and democratically manage their trade by elections but also making the government officials directly accountable to the decisions they make.
(3) To ensure expertise in leadership, by ensuring that ministers and executives are specialists from within their fields, not political appointees given their jobs by a president who may know nothing about their field.
(4) To make bureaucrats directly electable to their people, and to offer recall of both the executive branch and the lower level bureaucrats as a sort of backdoor direct democracy for people to clamp down on corruption
(5) To ensure that economic planning in a Marxist society is democratic in nature, or can claim to gauge the will of the people, even if that "will" is not manifest in "one person".
(6) To create a more collective form of government, where the public can see clearly the different interest groups clashing in the form of debating ministries instead of them meeting in a hidden synthesis behind the speeches and platitudes of the singular head of state.

As for how powers would be divvied up between the different ministries, and who could vote in each, that's farther than I've reached so far. For instance, I figure that most could make the case for voting in the ministry of agriculture even if they don't work or have academic expertise in that field, or work in fields directly in the supply chain of agriculture, because all people have an interest in maximizing production. But on the other hand, the "average joe" probably doesn't know what farmers in rural areas need to maximize production.

Another question is how much power each minister would have, and how much he would need to consult with other ministers before making a decision. Or how it would relate to lower political bodies and other agencies.

But combined with a free press, a free population and a transparent politics, this seems like a good system of government.

Any other thoughts on what the governing body of a DOTProletariat or a post-dotproletariat executive authority would look like?

[Die Neue Zeit]

The Soviets had the Central Executive Committee, the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee, and eventually the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Yes, but these were ultimately controlled by the party and the politburo. I was thinking of a system which transcends internal party politics, IE comes after the phase of a "vanguard party", and tries to achieve a direct "worker's" democracy.

It also seems like the leadership was determined by region (ie, Russian Soviet had leaders, Ukrainian Soviet, etc) ... I was thinking of something determined by your field of economic activity; ie, the Minister of Resource Extraction would be elected by oil workers, coal miners, people with relevant educational degrees (ie, phd in chemistry, or phd in geology, etc), or workers in related fields (ie, the industry which makes supplies for extractive industry, or uses extracted goods in their production process (ie, oil refiners, power plant workers, etc). So instead of, or at least in addition to, a representative for major geographical locations, there would be representatives for critical industries which would otherwise have a "Minister" or "Secretary" in the executive branch.

It's also designed to facilitate a level of direct democratic control over the bureaucracy.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Depending on the political maturity of the movement in power, there may or may not need to be a singular Head of State post, but this is tied to the debate on having singular Leaders of political parties.

[Tim Finnegan]

You might be interested in looking into the Swiss Federal Council. It's certainly less radical than what you're proposing, but it's a working model of an executive council- a seven-person committee, each member representing one of the Swiss cantons. (At present, it also manages to represent five parties and to have majority (4/7) female-membership.) A study of the model could be quite informative.

In fact, Switzerland in general is quite interesting, given their high degree of devolution, federalism and direct democracy. Pity the whole show is dominated by race-baiting bankers with vaults full of Nazi gold...

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

There shouldn't, IMO be a singular Head of State or head of the revolutionary movement, unless elected. It is quite clear that although the bureaucratic system the matured in the USSR had the intention of giving power to the CC, Presidium and other national, democratic-ish bodies, the reality was that the General Secretary of the Party often had a big enough, informal power base to elevate that position to that of the senior member of the revolutionary movement, particularly in Stalin's time.

The early Brezhnev era was marked by the triumvirate of the General Secretary, President and Prime Minister. Though in theory all three should have been heavily accountable to legislative national bodies, the reality was that a more top-down model emerged.

I have put thought into a model that would eliminate such a bureaucratic risk: a genuine bottom-up model that actually works in praxis, as opposed to paying lip service to the fact, whilst pursuing a bureaucratic one-party state.

Taking the example of a small country like the UK:

Elected legislatures: divide up into the town council, county/city council, regional council, sub-national council and national assembly. Town councils are made up of WXY amount of candidates. They send W amount of candidates to the county council. The county council sends W amount of candidates to teh regional council, and all the way up until the national assembly level.

Town councils should be the only full time council/assembly, with county councils meeting less often, regional councils meeting less often than county council and the national assembly meeting only to rubber stamp policy that has originated at town level (perhaps in town hall style discussions, similar to the Cuban CDR model) and been scrutinised and fine tuned at all geographic levels.

Aside from this there should be a non-executive, national, elected body (call it the Politburo) that is responsible for head of state affairs, foreign policy and technical/administrative issues, but without executive power, cannot direct policy downwards. It could perhaps be divided into those elected to foreign policy positions, and those elected to positions of 'non-executive legislative oversight'.

It is possible that the Judicial role should be carried out by this Politburo, so that in effect it is a fairly large national body, directly elected for short terms, for three main functions, each separate from each other and separately elected:

Administrative and technical oversight of legislative policy, minus the power of veto.
Judicial oversight with regards to the implementation and practice of legislative policy and the law.
Making representations in the arena of foreign and head of state-type affairs.

I've probably missed a few things out, but I don't like to become too detailed as this is simply a broad political and electoral model (probably notable for not including an economic model), that could probably be fine tuned and improved, depending on the circumstances of the time, of course.

The most important thing is that policy discussion should always begin at - and be at the behest of - ordinary people. Elected politicians should be neither career politicians nor representatives, they should merely be delegates to political assemblies, carrying out the wishes of ordinary workers.