The supreme state organ of power (abbreviated SSOP in the following) is a type of legislature and the supreme institution in communist states. It operates under the Marxist–Leninist principle of unified state power and serves as the apex of the pyramid-like structure known as the unified state apparatus, providing the structural precondition for democratic centralism in the state. Unlike systems based on the fusion or separation of powers, the SSOP holds legislative, executive, judicial, and all other forms of state power, but commonly delegates these powers to subordinate state organs in line with a division of labour. It formally regards itself as the embodiment of popular sovereignty and its activities in practice are closely shaped by the ruling communist party.
The SSOP's theoretical origins trace back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea of a "supreme power" of the people, Karl Marx's call for unity of state power, and Vladimir Lenin's vision of soviets as working organs which combined lawmaking and execution. The world's first SSOP was the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, established after the 1917 October Revolution, and it became the prototype for similar institutions in other communist states.
SSOPs meet periodically, with most of their powers delegated to their permanent organs. These organs exercise most or all of the SSOP's powers between SSOP sessions. The balance between plenary sessions and permanent organs vary; SSOP sessions in the Soviet Union were infrequent and primarily served as rubber stamps for decisions already made by the party leadership. However, historically in states such as Poland, Yugoslavia, and in present-day Vietnam SSOP sessions sometimes act as legislative forums where policies are debated and amended. In all communist states, SSOPs also have important symbolic roles as expressions of popular sovereignty and channels for representation and often include workers, peasants, women, and ethnic minorities in greater proportions than in similar entities in liberal democracies. They continue to exist in China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam, although their roles vary considerably.
Historical and theoretical origins
Marx's call for the unity of power
The concept of the SSOP traces its historical origins to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who championed the establishment of "one supreme power that governs us according to wise laws". This idea had a sizable impact on Marxist−Leninist theory, and was used to argue for the rejection of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. Karl Marx, the founder of Marxism, was skeptical of the state in general and its executive powers in particular. Marx aimed to end the situation in which the state became "independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitical excrescence." He believed that what he considered the modern constitutions of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie vested power in the executive at the expense of the legislature, and he criticised the French Constitution of 1848 for replacing the hereditary monarchy with an elected monarch (the president of the republic).
From Marx's perspective, in France the separation of powers increased the president's power vis-à-vis that of the legislature. The president alone became a symbol of state authority, and the 1848 French constitution had created a system with "two heads [...] the Legislative Assembly, on the one hand, [and] the President on the other." Marx believed that the presidency threatened the constitutional order, and its powers could easily be abused by a person who sought to overthrow the legislature and establish a personal dictatorship (as Louis-Napoléon did in 1851).
Marx vehemently opposed the separation of powers. He said about Article 19 of the 1848 French constitution, which stated that the "separation of powers is the first principle of a free government", "Here we have the old constitutional folly. The condition of a 'free government' is not the division, but the of power. The machinery of government cannot be too simple. It is always the craft of knaves to make it complicated and mysterious." By "unity of power", Marx supported the concentration of state powers in a national elected-representative organ rather than an individual. In Marx's mind, according to scholar Bruno Leipold, this would weaken the state's executive powers. Unity of power evolved into the unified power principle of communist states.
Marx preferred the French Constitution of 1793, which subordinated the executive and all other state organs to the National Assembly. That constitution established a form of government known as assembly government. In this form, the government (as the state executive) was an internal organ of the national representative institution. The underlying idea behind assembly government was to reject the separation of powers and a mixed government, in the belief that the popularly-elected national-representative institution had the right to intervene in all state affairs. The French experiment with assembly government was short-lived, and Marx sought another model that fit his theoretical frameworka model not conceived by the bourgeoisie, since "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes."
He eventually found his model of socialist governance in the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx believed that the form of government outlined by the commune was a "new point of departure of world-historical importance", and called it "the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour." The commune had replaced representative government with the idea of popular delegation through imperative mandates, the right to recall elected representatives, and the establishment of legislative supremacy. Marx called this form of government a social republic: "a Republic is only in France and Europe possible as a 'Social Republic', that is a Republic which disowns the capital and landowner class of the State machinery to supersede it by the Commune, that frankly avows 'social emancipation' as the great goal of the Republic and guarantees thus that social transformation by the Communal organisation."
Marx admired the Paris Commune's unification of legislative and executive powers in one organ: the Commune Council, which was a "working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time." Unification of powers meant that the Commune Council staffed ten commissions, dealing with executive and administrative matters, elected from its membership; two-thirds of the council concurrently held legislative, executive, and administrative offices, and Marx called the Commune Council a working organ. Unlike a liberal democracy, there was no president, prime minister, or cabinet minister separate from the commune council.
Lenin's establishment of an SSOP Vladimir Lenin (the key initiator of the establishment of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Soviet Union) was influenced by the writings of Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx's main collaborator. Before the communists seized power in the October Revolution of 1917, Lenin outlined the general features of the future post-revolutionary state structure in The State and Revolution. In this pamphlet, Lenin outlines how he and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) sought to violently destroy the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie because it was a "democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich—that is the democracy of capitalist society." He condemns the "con" that is the separation of powers and the state bureaucratic organisation.
The main aim of The State and Revolution was to outline the state form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Like Marx before him, Lenin believed that the proletariat could only seize power through a revolutionary takeover; he rejected parliamentarism and the idea that the proletariat could peacefully take power through elections. Lenin accused parliamentarism of being an empty form of representative democracy, and said that the future political system needed to be delegatory. In this proletarian state, the claimed false separation of the state between executive, legislative, judicial, and administrative organs would be replaced with unified power, and parliamentarism would be abolished.
Lenin believed that "[t]he way out of parliamentarism" was not through abolishing representative institutions and elections; the answer was to transform representative institutions from "talking shops" into "working organs", akin to Marx's vision. Lenin believed that this new representative institution was opposed to parliamentarism. He criticized the parliamentary systems of the United States, Switzerland, France, the United Kingdom, and Norway; in these countries, Lenin said, the state's essential functions were carried out in an opaque manner and kept hidden from the working population by its political leaders and bureaucrats.
Lenin believed that his proposed political system, inspired by Marx's views on the Paris Commune, should replace what he perceived as a corrupt parliamentary system. In this system, he said, elected representatives would be responsible for governing directly, enforcing their own laws, witnessing the outcomes of their actions, and being accountable to the people they represent (the opposite of parliamentarism and the separation of powers); the bureaucrat, elected representative, legislator, and executor were merged into one individual.
Under Lenin's leadership, Russian communists established the world's first SSOP (the All-Russian Congress of Soviets) when it convened for its first session on 16 June 1917. The institution was formalised by a decision of the fifth convocation of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets when it adopted Soviet Russia's (and the world's first communist) constitution on 19 July 1918. Presenting the draft constitution to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Yuri Steklov (a member of the constitutional drafting committee) said that unlike a bourgeois constitution with an artificial separation of state powers, the Soviet constitution aimed to concentrate all these powers ("legislative, executive, judicial") into one organ: the All-Russian Congress of Soviets and its internal organs, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars. The powers of the Congress were strengthened in the first constitution of the Soviet Union, adopted in 1924, which granted the All-Union Congress of Soviets and the Central Executive Committee the right of making decisions on "all questions which they deem to be subject to their determination"; the Congress's powers were unlimited.
The All-Russian Congress of Soviets convened at least once a year. The congress delegated its powers between sessions to its permanent organ, the Central Executive Committee; the 1918 constitution defined it as "the highest legislative, administrative, and controlling organ" of the state when the All-Russian Congress of Soviets was not in session. At the 11th Congress of the Soviet communist party, held in 1922, Valerian Obolensky proposed reforming the Council of People's Commissars into a cabinet system in which the chair of the Central Executive Committee was responsible for appointing its members. This would have weakened the unified powers of the Congress of Soviets and the Central Executive Committee, and Lenin opposed it. The Central Executive Committee was not a permanent organ; its powers were delegated to the Presidium, "the highest legislative, executive and administrative organ of power", between sessions of the Central Executive Committee and the All-Union Congress of Soviets.