The rhetoric of the preamble

Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal)
(RCP Publications, Print, October 2010, $8 from Revolution Books)

1. Introduction
2. Republic or democracy?
3. The Preamble
1. Rhetoric

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

One can criticize the United States Constitution on a number of grounds, not the least of which is that the Constitution perpetually privileges the capitalist ruling class, albeit indirectly. But one cannot criticize the US Constitution on rhetorical grounds, and its preamble, despite (or perhaps because of) its transparent simplicity, is a masterpiece of rhetoric.

Any society, if it is to be a society with a distinct identity, must have some way of speaking with one voice. The purpose of a Constitution is to define what constitutes that voice, what we can and cannot say with that voice, and how the people are bound to that voice as members of the society. In a time of crisis — such as the imminent failure of the Articles of Confederation or after a communist revolution — a proposal for a new voice must be sold to the population. Any state must maintain at least the passive cooperation of the people; Even the most brutal and oppressive state must still establish the instruments of oppression: the loyalty of the army and police, which must come from the people. As we have seen time and again, even the most oppressive states have fallen when the people are no longer willing or able to cooperate. A candidate state that resolves to end brutality and oppression must therefore pay even more attention to selling its voice. It must gain not just the passive but the active cooperation of the people, not just their acquiescence but their enthusiasm.

I am learning from my experience as a writing tutor that the most important part of any persuasive writing is the hook. The very first sentence must make the reader want to read your paper. If you do everything else exactly correctly but your hook is lifeless, limp, boring, you cannot hope to persuade the reader: She will not be motivated to critically engage in your arguments; she will read it "at a distance" without bothering to link it to her own opinions and attitudes.

Hence the rhetorical brilliance of the preamble to the US Constitution. It gets across two of the three aims of the Constitution quickly, simply and compellingly. First, the voice of society is the voice of the people*. We the people — not the King, not God — ordain and establish the Constitution. And the people speak with this voice "in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility," and so forth. These phrases are of course vague as to what specifically constitutes a "perfect union", "justice", etc., but it's important to note that they are not at all vague in the sense that these are things we definitely want. The preamble to the US Constitution definitely "hooks" the reader: it at least offers what we want; the reader is motivated to critically engage with the material.

*At least in theory. In practice, of course, the voice of American society has always been the voice of the economic ruling class, first the slave-owning class, then various capitalist classes. But I'm talking about rhetoric, not substance.

There's a lot of good substance in the preamble to the RCP Constitution, but in contrast to the preamble to the US Constitution, the rhetoric is limpid and boring. I speak with all due humility: I myself am an incompetent rhetorician; indeed I fancy myself an expert at rhetorical incompetence. I can't offer any advice on how to write it, but I know what I want to read: I want to read something uplifting, something that makes me eager with anticipation to join this great new project. There's a time and a place for all the complications and qualifications of communist social and political theory, but the preamble to a draft constitution is not that place. There was no need in the US Constitution to quote Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau; there's no need to quote Marx and Lenin in a communist Constitution.

The best advice I can give is to lay out the positives simply and clearly: We are going to transform society to bring about true justice, true democracy; we are going to end the systemic oppression of the working class, of racial and ethnic minorities, of non-English cultures, and most especially of women. We are going to bring about not just political democracy, not just political justice, but economic democracy and justice. No longer will the oppression of the capitalist ruling class be able to hide behind the fiction of economic necessity. And — in line with my earlier comments — be explicit: are we establishing a democracy? A republic? A one-party state? A benevolent dictatorship? Whatever form of government is proposed, you're not going to sell it if people don't know what it is. If one were (entirely hypothetically) to think a benevolent dictatorship of a person or a party were necessary, come right out and say so; obfuscation doesn't sell. (And if one were (not just hypothetically but contra-factually) intending to actually deceive the people, obfuscation belongs in the small print of the contract, not the sales brochure.)

If your first sentence, or even your first clause is not compelling, you will lose half your readers. (Hence the preamble to the US Constitution begins with the phrase "We the People", itself stirring, novel and engaging.) If the first paragraph is not compelling, you will lose half of what's left. And if you don't say everything you have to say in two or three paragraphs, you will again lose half. If you don't intend to sell the people on the Constitution, there's no need to keep them, but a people under the grudging acquiescence of a superior constitution will be worse off than a people who enthusiastic embrace an inferior constitution.

Rhetoric matters. The RCP can write to its long-time membership, but I don't believe they can communicate with the people at large. Whether they view this inability as a problem, and how to correct it if they do view it as a problem, is up to them.

Republic or democracy?

Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal)
(RCP Publications, Print, October 2010, $8 from Revolution Books)

Introduction
Republic or democracy?

Probably the biggest overall criticism I have of the draft Constitution is that at least at first glance it appears to set up a republic instead of a democracy. I used to think the distinction was right-wing bullshit, until I heard Aaron Sorkin put the line in the mouth of fictional President Jed Bartlett: "In a democracy, the people rule; in a republic the people choose their rulers." Regardless of the terminology, I think the ideas are sufficiently well-defined and distinct; I'll use these terms henceforth.

In general, I consider the republican form of government to be one of the quintessential bourgeois institutions. It seems difficult — if not impossible — to prevent those who have a lot of economic power to dominate any republican electoral process. Indeed the framers of the US Constitution more-or-less explicitly choose a republican form of government because it would allow the existing land-owning, slave-owning and capitalist classes to dominate the electoral process and the government. (Indeed Bob Avakian makes a very similar point in Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy.) Whether this was the right choice under the specific historical circumstances is a much larger question than I care to address now, but the historical circumstances in 1787 were very different than they are today or immediately after a successful revolution.

I would very much prefer a form of government modeled — at least in spirit — more closely and explicitly on the Paris Commune. The people must, I believe, be brought directly and intimately into the process of government right from the start. There will, perhaps, be some need of an interim "scaffolding" while the people develop the habits and attitudes necessary to govern a large, industrially, scientifically and economically complex nation, but I think at least the form of a true democracy needs to be present from day one. Lenin's slogan was, "All power to the soviets!" Again, whether this slogan was practical or feasible in 1917, I think it is at least more superficially plausible in 21st century North America.

Keep in mind: I have only just skimmed the draft proposal: You and I, gentle readers, are more-or-less working together on a more detailed and deep reading. It may well be that the Constitution, when read carefully, adequately addresses my objections, either by making the transition to a true democracy compelling or arguing more directly for the benefits of a republican government. And too, I invite commentary, at this point focused on a more philosophical analysis (I'll get to the substantive analysis of the Constitution itself chapter by chapter): If you think the republican form of government has compelling advantages over the democratic.

The most obvious objection to democracy is scale; whether or not it was their original intention, the republican government established in 1789* has scaled from a nation of a few million to a nation of a few hundred million with only one truly catastrophic political failure (which was probably unavoidable by any system of government). So I think it's incumbent on me to offer some ideas as to how a state of many tens of millions (probably the smallest revolutionary state) or possibly many hundreds of millions (especially if Canada and Mexico were to be included) could be governed democratically.

I describe my hypothetical system as "democratic syndicalism". Essentially, it consists of a pyramiding election of delegates (distinct from representatives) from the smallest local level of neighborhoods through cities, states, regions and finally the national government. A neighborhood consists of a couple thousand people in a compact geographical area; each neighborhood elects a delegate to the city (or borough, for very large cities such as New York or Los Angeles) government. If we arbitrarily set the maximum size of a city government at about 100 delegates, then we get the smallest operating local government representing about 200,000 people. Each local government would elect a delegate to a regional government (of at most about 10-20,000,000) and those to a national government of some hundreds of millions.

The members of government would be delegates rather than representatives: they would be immediately recallable, rather than serving for a fixed term. A delegate would have no official power of her own; she must at all times — if she wishes to keep her position — exercise her power on behalf of her constituency. I would add that delegates receive a fixed pay while they serve, at the local level of the median income of their constituency, and at the national level no more than the 1st quartile of income. We might also have to create asset restrictions (which I'll talk about in another post when we get to economic organization).

These local and regional governments would have legislative, executive and administrative power over government services (more on this later) provided exclusively or principally in their their defined geographic areas. These powers — especially executive and administrative — would have to be indivisible: the governments could delegate the work to specific members (e.g. an "executive council"), but they could not delegate official power; the body acts only as a whole. They would have to operate openly: no act could have official or legal standing unless published openly.

This explicitly democratic organization is highly unstable by design. Thus we need to create a countervailing institution to promote stability. I recommend a semi-privileged civil service, which would be constitutionally mandated to carry out the policies of the democratic governments. This civil service would have objective criteria for entry, internal control over promotion, and — absent criminal malfeasance or insubordination to the actual government — a guarantee of lifetime employment. Thus by "executive and administrative" authority above, the local, regional and national governments would in effect constitute the head of the civil service for their respective areas. Rather than trying to fine-tune a single institution with the right balance of stability and change, this separation creates an explicit dialectic between institutions of stability and change, which will (with all good luck) evolve to meet changing circumstances and conditions.

One additional advantage of this model is that it gives an obvious role for the revolutionary party that does not have the kind of pressure to evolve into a permanent and privileged ruling class: The revolutionary party can form the core of the civil service. At first, as the people are unused to self-governance, the civil service can exercise considerable de facto power. But by having at least in name a subordinate position to the people, the people can grow to exercise their own power more directly in a natural, unforced way.

A Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America

The Revolutionary Communist Party has recently published a draft proposal for a Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (available from Revolution Books for $8). Regardless of the substantive merits of the proposed Constitution, this publication raises in my mind the intellectual credibility of the RCP as an organization sincerely dedicated to forming a working post-capitalist government and society. More importantly, they specifically request "serious and substantial engagement" with the work. I will take them at their word.

The work is long (91 pages plus an introduction) and rather dense, so I'll be covering it chapter by chapter. All page numbers will refer to the October 2010 print edition from RCP Publications.

The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and no one else's; I speak only for myself and no other individual, group or organization, and no one but myself exercises any power or influence to restrict, censor or alter anything I say here. More to the point, nothing here represents the official position of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

The introduction to the Constitution gives a realistic assessment of what the Constitution is and is not, and can and cannot be. It is first, explicitly a draft proposal, intended to "stimulate, as broadly as possible... serious and substantive engagement" about what a new socialist society would look like. The introduction explicitly predicates the adoption of the Constitution on the elimination of the existing capitalist-imperialist state and a broad popular mandate for the Revolutionary Communist Party. This is not a Constitution to be imposed from above, but serves rather to attract a popular mandate; it is to be established not by the party, but by the "millions and millions" of people who must act to bring about a revolutionary change to our society. Whether such events will actually come to pass is beside the point: this document lays out in print what the RCP would do if they were to win.

The authors also realize that the actual course of events were they to win would substantively affect any final Constitution; the draft proposal can at best be a starting point for — given the appropriate circumstances — a real Constitution for a new republic.

I would prefer a somewhat different style and organization. The RCP has a distinctive rhetorical style; it is not to everyone's taste, usually florid and often repetitive, but they can express their ideas unambiguously. The existing proposal also mixes the necessary legalese with commentary and philosophical background; I would prefer a more rigorously separated organization, such as found in the United States Constitution, distinct from the Federalist Papers. The document also seems at times to include the RCP's political platform; unless they were to intend an explicit one-party state (which they do not), this material would seem more appropriately separated out. But I offer these criticisms only to dismiss them as trivial, and get on with a more substantive analysis.