The Commonwealth, Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Coming Up With Weird Handwaved "Utopias"

In my younger days I liked to pour my brain into the art of worldbuilding, particularly coming up with strange and baroque political systems. When looking through my documents, I saw this, which I had written as late as 2025! This was a pretty fun thought-experiment. I don't think it would work out, of course, especially the economics. I don't think that the labour-hour vouchers or the Bank can function as written, and neither can the compulsory work be planned out this well. I have doubts about how effective the "objective" mask of the Assembly code of etiquette can be for actual human beings. It's an odd enough world that I've given thought to writing science fiction set in this world. In the meantime, though, here is the Commonwealth, warts and all, with enough hand-waving to make it all fall together. Truth be told this is really a variation on the Puritan communities and town meetings of colonial New England.

Consider this a sketch of a plausible utopia on an alternate Earth. It is meant to be a plausible utopia; it is not perfect, and it has points of stress and places where it breaks down. It is also not my ideal utopia. It is, however, in this fantasy still unambiguously better than the world as it is today. This is the main premise, and the following descriptions are to be interpreted in a way so as to make it plausible that it can be better while being something that perhaps real human beings, with jealousy, anger, and cruelty alongside love, hope, fellow-feeling, and intelligence, can live in. I don't think that this is a workable system or that it would be better than the world as it is; rather it's an experiment in assuming it works pretty well and working backward the amount of handwaving required for it to survive.

We will assume that this country, the Commonwealth, covers an area similar in size to that of the Lower 48 of the United States, with a similar population, while the technology is similar to what it was in 2015, though with the caveat that there has been much focus on automation, miniaturization, and decreased resource usage. In its own world, the Commonwealth, while being the most prosperous nation, happens to be not that exceptional. We will also assume that, despite or because of its massive size, it is quite withdrawn, so we can bracket out the influence of other states. The institutions of the Commonwealth nevertheless are not alien to, and are common in, the other countries in its world. Let us also say that they speak a recognizable form of English and have Anglophone culture. I’m deciding to bracket out history and how they got to this level.

The government of the Commonwealth works through sortition, i.e., members of government are randomly chosen from a pool. The Commonwealth is divided into Provinces, which are divided into smaller administrative regions, all the way down into towns, villages, and cities. The most important political body is the Assembly, which has members chosen by sortition. The people eligible for sortition are at least 25 years old and have done 7 years of government service. This includes almost every normal, well-adjusted adult. People are elected to the Assembly on rotations of five years and can claim the Assembly for their government service obligations. At the top of the mechanism is an Archon. The Archon has only ceremonial powers and is rather like a constitutional monarch, having similar powers. The Archon also presides over the Assembly and has ritual prerogatives around “emergency” situations like war, though this has been deliberately left unformalized to prevent an extended legal state of emergency. The Archon is elected by vote by the Assembly.

Every citizen has to do four hours of government service a day, starting from the age of 18, which comes out to twenty hours a week. This can include work like agriculture, military service, and menial labour like sewage. For more difficult jobs with the requirement of institutional memory, like diplomacy, high-ranking posts in the military, and posts in the space program, there is much less rotation, though it is a norm to expose those workers to some level of manual and menial labour. Since privileges like Assembly election are linked to government service, every citizen has a positive right to government service in a way befitting his or her abilities. Those who are unable or unwilling to do government service are left to be looked after by civil society. In government service, I am assigned to a particular Directorate underneath the government, which assigns me to this or that duty. There are predefined Directorates, each with a particular charter. The Directorate should not be thought of as a technocratic agency with political supervision from the Assembly, but as a kind of political association of the technically trained working through the Assembly charter. There is regular rotation between the Directorates and also staff who rotate within a Directorate to maintain institutional memory. There is also, of course, a quota of permanent staff, who are given temporary manual or non-technical work at regular intervals for social reasons. There are twelve Directorates, and they comprise the state capacity of the Commonwealth. When needed, a temporary Directorate can be set up by the Assembly, but there is a necessary sunsetting clause. The Information Directorate, for example, maintains a nationwide computer network and offers a range of computer and network services, and manages print, radio, and video broadcasting. It also maintains a universal public platform for search, communications, and data storage. The Security and Defence Directorate is in charge of the military. Strictly speaking, the military is not a Directorate.

There is also a cap of fifteen hours where I can work for guilds. Guilds are integral parts of civil society. The main difference, however, is that guilds are loosely considered part of the State, even if they are not part of the government. This is in part because of the overlapping membership and relationships of guilds and Directorates. A guild is a cross between a trade union, a medieval guild, and a corporation. They combine a legal horizontal structure with vertical master-apprentice relations. A guild is generally associated with a particular area and is associated with a particular skill and/or line of work. It is the guild for a particular skill that assesses your competence in it for government work. Guilds also run factories, laboratories, and so on. They run schools but not universities, which are non-government, non-guild civil society organizations, though the line between “public” government service and “private” guild is blurred since there is a tight feedback loop between both. A good rule of thumb, however, is that luxuries and so on are produced by guilds. Given the right to free association, anyone can come together to form a guild. However, new guilds in practice have to form relations with existing guilds and Directorates. It is allowed and normal to have membership in multiple guilds at the same time. Given the caps on labour hours, people are paid in labour-hour vouchers. Working is not required insofar as there is a guaranteed basket of necessities that is the right of each citizen, as the government does not provide UBI. The labour-hour caps also encourage a massive investment to bring down and maintain low labour hours. The flip side is that those who work are expected to uphold high standards of professionalization, which is inculcated from a young age through civil society. People work, of course, so that they can have a higher standard of living than the floor, and for luxuries and other goods.

There is economic planning, but it should not be thought that the Assembly, the Directorate, or the Labour Bank sets prices or production targets. Commonwealth economists use market pressures and data to adjust the “skill-multiplier” of guild-work labour, raising or lowering it as needed. Since a large portion of production occurs through government production and civil service, most planning is oriented through rotating civil service jobs and negotiating with guilds, which are not seen as wholly separate from the State. The other lever is banking and regional adjustments to labour quotas and hours.

Part of the reason that the system works so well is that there is an outsized influence of civil society on citizens, coming from the communitarian nature of the Commonwealth. The truth is that any random citizen who is 25 years old can plausibly work as a junior member of the Assembly if chosen, which comes from the intense socialization that citizens have from organizations like guilds, churches, clubs, and so on in civil society. The Commonwealth attitude is that there are certain areas in life where one must adopt a formal and quite external code of etiquette, which is such that a normal, competent Commonwealth citizen can pick up the etiquette book on the Assembly and speak like an Assemblyperson in session. The artificial nature of the code is known to all and is considered a positive condition for being able to speak truthfully while in the Assembly. One can always speak with shocking informality when not speaking as an Assemblyperson. This has the effect that there is a rich, subtle code that Assemblypeople have, which is made easier given the frank way an Assemblyperson might talk after sessions. Civil society organizations also have the job of managing common resources in communities, quite distinct from the right to personal and private property that citizens have. The Commonwealth is actually rather free in handing out citizenship, but only insofar as non-citizens have shown that they are able to work through a pretty demanding program of accelerated civil-society socialization.