Communes - The Social Foundation of Tuvhalia

Most of Tuvhalian society is built around the model of the commune. This is a self-contained group usually containing around 20-40,000 comrade-citizens, although both larger and smaller examples exist. Each is largely self-governing and free to set up its own policies, institutions, and internal rules. Unlike in liberal societies, which enforce harsh barriers between the roles of citizen, worker, and individual and divide governance between them, the commune is seen as an expression of all three. A Commune represents not only political organization, but also social, cultural, economic, spiritual, and personal structures as well. The commune is therefore the foundation of Tuvhalian life.

Communes are typically led by an elected and representative citizen council tasked with organizing all aspects of communal life. Each commune tends to have its own electoral traditions – although universal suffrage is considered to be good form, variations still exist. Some communes extend the franchise based on individuals. Some instead enfranchise domiciles, with their members collectively casting a vote. Some instead enfranchise only workers. Others enfranchise only elders. More eclectic models also abound. Selection by lot is not uncommon. On some communes, the citizen council is staffed by representatives of the labour, community, and cultural councils that constitute the most common forms of social organization – here the citizen council represents not the citizenry, but the institutions which they form. Some communes built around the universities enfranchise only faculty, with a regular referendum endorsing the system. Others, particularly in communes aligned with the more religious elements, have roughly similar mechanisms for clergy. Industrial communes often enfranchise their union locals. A few even dabble with electronic direct democracy. In every case, the electoral system is considered to represent a different perspective on society.

The General Council is also made up of representatives from communes. Each commune sends one Delegate, representing the commune, to the General Council. Individuals are not enfranchised - instead, the delegate is a representative of the commune itself. Practically speaking, the Tuvhalian People's Congress' effective monopoly on organized politics - and the current emergency government - ensures that all delegates will adhere to its views and be members of the Congress. They will have gone through its Party Schools, read the classics of the Movement, and adopted the Seven Point Credo. They will have been an member of the party in good standing, having attracted respect. This is not merely careerist - the Tuvhalian People's Congress is deadly serious about maintaining its idealism. But in the long run, it is hoped, when the period of emergency is over and the National Salvation Military Council is dissolved, full political pluralism will return and the Congress' rule will be fully and freely validated.

Citizen councils, in keeping with Tuvhalia's broad aversion to abstracted power, have exactly as much authority as the citizenry are willing to delegate to them. In practice, they are usually served by a moderately-sized bureaucracy. They are tasked with maintaining social peace, advancing cultural life, bargaining out economic plans, coordinating communal tax-payments to the General Council’s institutions, and both organizing and distributing the block grants that make up the foundations of the Istani welfare state. The General Council tends not to administer programs directly – it instead establishes standards and issues Exchange Credits to communes which are then free to spend them in the manner of their choosing to provide for social welfare, cultural advances, and economic development initiatives. In general, citizen councils either run or help fund healthcare, education, parks, infrastructure, research funding, communal spaces, inter-communal trade, negotiations with unions, communal federations, and combines, and any number of other social functions. Beyond that, their role is as unlimited as their imagination and the tolerance of the commune as a whole. Some make art. Others conduct sport. It is not unpopular to run a boutique intelligence service for the sheer joy of it.

Beyond the powers granted to the commune’s citizen councils, however, is a more potent role – that of mediator. Tuvhalian social life is diverse, interconnected, and constantly on the verge of chaos. It is the Citizen Councils commanding the Communes which use their moral legitimacy and status as representatives of social will to mediate disputes, patch up compromises, and organize common directions. Their power is as much of coordination as of command. In many councils, where representatives are delegates of feuding organizations, the communal council is a sacred space for the hashing-out of social will. Tuvhalian political philosophy valourizes the unifying of differing perspectives in a common, higher, and mutually satisfactory goal. It is this process which makes citizen councils the beating heart of Tuvhalian democracy. Virtually all of social life is coordinated through these bodies, and the boundless complexity of Tuvhalian social fabric spins almost unconsciously in their orbit.

In general, citizens historically did not tend to circulate between communes. Communes are generally not fully ethnically homogenous, but more often than not any given commune is dominated by one of the Eight Peoples. Some do, whether for work or out of interest. The state and Tuvhalian People's Congress are also increasingly introducing programs to incentivize circulation between Communes, placing young organizers and Tuvhalian Youth in new social environments to bind the peoples together and build solidarity. The dislocations of the war with Republica, along with the roiling crises surrounding the overthrow of the Ethics Council, broke traditional barriers down even further. The inclusion of former Parganzal and the founding of the Tuvhalian state also introduced large sectors of the population to a system with which they were previously unfamiliar. The citizens of the former Derflekktagen took to the communal system well due to existing traditions of communal self-defence and self-sufficiency along with the remnants of Consensualist philosophy, but still happily venture beyond their communes to visit new lands. This is an attitude which the People's Congress, hoping to weld together a broader consciousness of Tuvhalian civilization and life, is hoping to promote.

Between the state and the commune exist a wide range of inter-communal associations. Communes are free to federate in whichever combinations they see fit, distributing their resources between them however they wish so long as they retain control over spending on and delivery of the key services set out in the General Council's mandates. The most notable of these federations are the Golden Rain and Silver Cloud combinations, cabals of communes, economic combines, labour groups, and mutual-aid societies working together to advance a common political, cultural, and developmental agenda. Communes must cooperate to accomplish economic tasks, leveraging specialties and expertise to advance socialist construction. Many also conduct cultural and academic exchanges, studying each others’ societies, institutions, and philosophies. Labour unions spread between communes, serving both as the voice of workers in a certain sector and as a social, economic, and cultural interest group. Ethnic associations advance particular visions of the Tuvhalian civilizational perspectives, preserve history and traditions, and advance common culture. Combines, representing vast intercommunal collections of workplaces organized towards some common task, usually have facilities on hundreds, if not thousands, of communes. The bureaucracy is a vast, distributed organism – with advances in electronic technology, it is possible to scatter administration across the entirety of society. Cultural and religious societies rarely respect communal boundaries, although they often are practically little more than collections of fractious local chapters. And the Tuvhalian People's Congress, the party of state, serves its educational and organizational functions with branches in every commune across Tuvhalia.

The commune does not prevail everywhere. Some Tuvhalian citizens, particularly those working on major industrial facilities in deep-space, prefer the trade-union organization as a way to manage economic and social life. It offers more discipline, more structure, and a more direct task-orientation. Others avoid rootedness in communes altogether, maintaining small kinship groups and travelling freely between them. State bureaucrats affiliated with the agencies of the General Council are often housed in communes, but many live in the orbitals near the Chamber of the General Council and have slowly, but surely, developed a more rigid, hierarchical way of life. In the former Parganzal, alternate institutions - socialist municipalities, nonstatist Zones of Consent, militias and military units, refugee camps turned into effective municipalities, small ethnic nation-states, and the like - persisted even in the midst of years of socialist education and reconstruction. So did capitalist relations. But the Tuvhalian People's Congress, and the state around it, steadily advance the communal system in a vast campaign of Socialist Construction until it will embrace all of the peoples under its leadership - and then, once this is done, it will push it beyond. It was, and will remain, the cradle of civilization and a vision of a potential better future for the benighted barbarian races.