The Representation Tool-Kit
The Factory System of Representation.
The architects who shaped our Second Wave industrial world created a basic view of representative government. Most Second Wave countries adopted variations on this representative system. The machinery of this system may well seem, half flippantly, a representative toolkit.
There were five fundamental elements to this system. It starts with the segment of the population who could vote. Then, there were the political parties for accumulating votes. Also, there were candidates, who gained votes, and converted them into representatives. This created governing bodies: parliaments, congresses, or assemblies in which, by voting in a legislative body fabricated the laws of the system. Lastly, came the executive body of our governors, presidents, prime ministers, or general secretaries. They supplied unprocessed material into the legislative apparatus such as policies and programs. They also implement the laws and regulations they helped create.
Votes were the central core of this Second Wave machine. Votes got amassed by political parties, which served as the driver of the system. They collected votes from select sources and fed them into the electoral apparatus, based on party influence and power to deliver the supposed will of the people— that theoretically operated the system of government.
This tool kit managed and controlled the electoral systems around the world. Often voting was controlled by voting age restrictions, sex, or race. For much of American history, only white males were empowered to vote. In authoritarian countries the whole procedure was purely a facade for management by an autocrat; in other countries, elected officials exerted substantial control.
Here in America, there were two rival political parties, but in Europe, they have a variety of parties, in other places only one party. However, the historical design is obvious as the components might be adjusted or arranged. This representative tool kit was employed in assembling the official socio-political apparatus of all Second Wave industrial nations.
As Marxists and Communists criticized bourgeois democracy, they adopted a similar electoral system. They did as all industrial Second Wave nations did and set up comparable representational systems as soon as they achieved power.
While Communism maintained a fiction of some distant future of direct democracy, they relied heavily on socialist representative institutions. Voters in the Soviet Union could vote for representatives to the Supreme Soviet but only a single candidate and one approved by the Communist Party. Soviet precinct workers were needed to turn out the vote and were essential to the system. [i] The reasoning for this Soviet electoral system was to demonstrate Communist Party unity[ii]. Communist China operates a similar system as they too claim democratic status.
Just as the industrial factory came to signify the Second Wave industrial system, so did the representative government, which became the emblem of the developed nation. European colonizers even forced undeveloped nations to establish similar representative systems.
Any hope of our advancement beyond a Second Wave industrial must reexamine our systems. Third Wave or Information Age thinking demands we reassess most facets of society. It asks for people to ask the question of the architects of the system. Who built it? What were their reasons for their system, and did they account for the rest of us? If the answer is no, then how do we make it better?
Notes:
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.polisci.11.060106.095434
[i] Smith, Hedrick. The Russians. Ballantine Books. New York. 1976. P 381
[ii] Getty, Arch J. (Spring 1991). Constitutions State and Society Under Stalin and Elections in the 1930s. Cambridge University Press. P 31.
http://www.news.cn/english/2021-12/05/c_1310352570.htm