Kirosocialist Party
 | This article is a work-in-progress because it is incomplete and pending further input from an author. Note: The contents of this article are not considered canonical and may be inaccurate. Please comment on this article's talk page to share your input, comments and questions. |
The Socialist Party (Soksyalrisēx Plaiduv), also known as the Socialist Party of Kiravia to differentiate it from its predecessors and informally as 'Kirsok', was a socialist political party that held power in Kiravia from 21XXX to 21185, first as the leading party in the existing multiparty system, and subsequently as the ruling party of the Kiravian Union, a single-party socialist republic. During its rule, it presided over a large-scale economic and administrative transformation process, establishing a classic developmental state and attempting social engineering projects, while pursuing a strongly isolationist foreign policy.
Socialist Party Soksyalrisēx Plaiduv | |
|---|---|
.svg){kind=icon} | |
| Secretary-General | Rŵlan Jones |
| Chairman | Lávran Talàverron |
| Whip | Dēbrikaśavius Ferguson |
| Founded | 21153 |
| Dissolved | 21188 |
| Merger of | Socialist Party of Kiravia Pan-Kiravian Socialist Party Communist Party of Kiravia |
| Succeeded by | New Deal Alliance |
| Headquarters | №21, 03-ram, 12-kontruv, D District, Kartika |
| Newspaper | The Social Text |
| Student wing | Kiro-Socialist Student Union |
| Labour wing | PKCTU |
| Student wing | Kiro-Socialist Student Union |
| Ideology | Kirosocialism |
Formed as a merger of the Socialist Party of Kiravia, the Pan-Kiravian Socialist Party, and the Communist Party of Kiravia.
History
The Socialist Party was formed as a merger of three predecessor parties: the Socialist Party of Kiravia, the Pan-Kiravian Socialist Party, and the Communist Party of Kiravia. The Pan-Kiravian Socialist party, led by its political visionary founder Mixaív Paśkirin, promoted Paśkirin's ideology of "Kiravian social-nationalism" (Kiravix soksyaliɣûdrarisēn), a non-Marxist form of socialism seeking to liberate the Kiravian people and Coscivian civilisation from capitalist imperialism and Western hegemony, as well as the Kiravian bourgeoisie and traditional landowning rural élites, which it viewed as arresting the development of Kiravia into a strong and unified modern nation. The Communist Party of Kiravia
Xūrosar Convention
The Communist Party was split on the matter of attending the Convention. While a majority of the Central Committee believed that a broad front was needed to overthrow capitalism in the near term and that non-Marxist fellow travellers were necessary allies who would eventually come to accept Marxism, a large minority rejected close coöperation with parties they viewed as reformist, nationalist, idealist, and lacking a rigorous scientific analysis of capitalism. Half of the CPK delegates to the convention left in protest before its closing, but the CPK remnant that did not join the Socialist Party would eventually lose most of its membership to it. The anti-merger CPK cadre went on to form the predecessors of today's CPKF and CPGK.
The SPK had the largest membership and a strong base in organised labour, while the PKSP had the best-organised party apparatus and a well-formulated political agenda, and the CPK had a strong theoretical, academic, and propaganda [thing] and a bench of disciplined and committed activists.
Representatives of other ideological currents, such as Shaftosocialists, Neo-Verticalists, and religious socialists, were also present at the Xūrosar Convention and published a minority report.
Electoral Campaigns
Majority Party
Single-party Rule
With its capture of the state legislatures of Elegia, Knassania, Cascada and the Kaviska, the Socialist Party was able control a three-quarters majority on the Federal Council, which combined with its supermajority in the Federal Stanora and the Prime Executure enabled it to amend the Constitution at will.
Organisation
In most respects, the organisational structure of the KSP was similar to that of other socialist parties worldwide. Operating according to the principle of democratic centralism, its governing bodies were the Party Congress (Plaidūxedarma), the Central Committee (Vimnikirstuv) later termed the National Committee (Térnapélax Kirstuv), and the Politburo (Politbūro).
The Party Congress assembled periodically - once every year under the original party constitution, and later every three years after the establishment of the single-party state. Some members had ex officio standing invitations by virtue of holding important party and/or state offices, while others were issued invitations by the "outgoing" Central Committee or by state party chapters. Its main function was to elect members to the Central Committee.
The Party's approach to the political elevation of members to positions of higher responsibility was guided by a philosophy of continuity of revolutionary succession (motorolaxalívasémrikorisēn), the principle that each generation of party leadership should be chosen by the previous generation of leadership in order to maintain ideological cohesion and keep the Party true to the spirit of the revolution, guarding against ideological drift and entryism. In situations where a lower party organ elected members to a higher party organ (e.g. the National Committee electing the Central Committee), the lower organ conventionally deferred to the list of nominees endorsed by the higher organ. In making appointments to party offices or state bodies, as well as deciding on endorsements for elevation within the party structure, the votes of committee members were weighted according to their degree of separation from the Party's founding generation of leaders.
Social Works Bureau
Directly responsible to the Central Committee, the Social Works Bureau (Askolaventabūro, abb. Askolabūro) was the body charged with establishing the Party's leadership over civil society, promoting Kirosocialist ideology, and advancing the Party's social and cultural goals. The two main activities of the Social Works Bureau were domestic propaganda and the management of party cells inside non-state, non-economic organisations, such as voluntary groups, "independent" universities, professional associations, and neighbourhood councils. Party auxiliaries came under the purview of the SWB, as did subordinate satellite parties like the CPKU and RCRP after [YEAR]. The Bureau was responsible for formulating and enforcing new cultural orthodoxies in literature, the arts, architecture, academic publishing, broadcasting, and other cultural fields, in service to the Party's goals of building a "socialist culture", "progressive Coscivian society", and "spiritual socialist civilisation", depending on the party line at the time. Through its network of party cells and embedded agents, the Bureau conducted extensive domestic surveillance, censored politically incorrect material, and suppressed dissidents. The Bureau was also responsible for the Party's language policy and developing the Standard Coscivian literary register, as well as for efforts to monitor, suppress, infiltrate, and coöpt religious organisations.
The modern Cultural, Heritage, and Civil Society Executive and the Bureau of Grand Strategy have been compared to the Social Works Bureau.
Provinical Sections
Like some other Kiravian national political parties during the First Federation, the Socialist Party comprised both a national organisation and legally distinct provincial chapters, termed "sections" (kirabwordhere). After single-party rule was established and federalism abandoned, the Party became a unitary organisation and the Central Committee imposed a more solidly top-down relationship over its Regional Committees and District Committees.
Platform & Policy
Economics
The stated goal of KSP economic policy was to "bring about the material conditions necessary for the iterative advancement of Kiravian society through progressively more advanced stages of socialism, with the ultimate goal of attaining a wholly and comprehensively socialist mode of production."
Developing Kiravian productive forces - Economic growth and modernisation and technological advancement.
Deepening social control of the means of production
- Taking state ownership of major industries, natural resources, and public services
- Increasing the power of labour unions and gradually increasing state and worker ownership interest in nonstate enterprises.
- Asserting a strong directive role for the state over economic activity through planning, regulation, government transfers, and other means.
Serving and strengthening the working class - [Social spending n' shit]
Constitutional Reform
The Kirosocialist Party was opposed to the Fundamental Statute of the Kiravian Federation, seeing it as an inherently conservative document intentionally crafted to divide the Kiravian people and hinder the translation of the popular will into law. The KSP opposed federalism in preference to unitarism and centralism and the separation of powers. In drafting a new constitution for the Kiravian Union, the KSP reconfigured the architecture of the constitution to nullify the sovereignty of state governments, remove or sideline constitutional checks on the legislature, and set a single nationwide date for elections at all levels, the second full moon of the year.
The KSP also introduced the notion of directive principles of state policy to Kiravian constitutional law, and though such principles were disposed of by the National Renewal and the Restoration Constitution, they survive in the constitutions of some states.
The Federal Council continued to exist under the name Union Council (Anūrakovar). Its main pro-forma political role was to rubber-stamp constitutional amendments.
Education and Culture
From before the Party's founding, the first generation of Party leaders and cadre understood socialism not as a mere economic system but as a holistic way of life for a people, and put the social and cultural dimensions of socialist praxis at the centre of Kirosocialist ideology. From the outset, the Party placed great emphasis on education, both in the sense of political and ideological formation of Party members and in the sense of public education, viewing it as the primary instrument for building a new socialist culture.
During single-party rule every accredited university was required to have a Department of Marxism or (later) Department of Socialist Sciences, which was responsible for teaching classical Marxist texts and key Kirosocialist writings, and for conditioning students to apply Marxist and Kirosocialist theoretical lenses to other fields of study. Basic courses in Marxism were required for all undergraduate students. Only a handful of such academic departments remain.
— Article 11 of the First Manifesto
Domestic Policy
Public Administration
Kirsoc pursued a policy of centralisation (vimnisêyorāskítor) and administrative rationalisation (nāstriktor). The Union government attempted to rationalise the Kiravian addressing system with the Postal & Cadastral Designations Act of 2XXXX.
Social Policy
The Kirosocialist Party considered itself to be a socially progressive party in its time and cultural context. It promoted social equality and the abolition of hierarchies based on class, caste, and traditional rank.
Kirsok was strongly dhianbrikirisēx or "nondistinctionist", believing that tuva, the many hundreds of (mostly endogamous) ethnosocial groups to which Coscivian-Kiravians belonged, should not have any recognition from the state or carry any legal significance.
On language policy, Kirsok worked for monolingualism, promoting Kiravic Coscivian as the national language at the expense of regional Coscivian languages such as West Coast Marine Coscivian and the larger Coscivian ethnic vernaculars. It also campaigned against the use of High Coscivian in literature, higher education, law, scientific writing, and state symbolism. Campaigns against Gaelic were unsuccessful and served only to intensify ethnic Gaels' opposition to the Party, though the Party continued to undermine Gaelic education and discontinue the use of the language in government materials. However, despite its general monolingualism, Kirsok did make efforts to support the literary development of certain minority languages, such as Pretannic (Welsh-Kiravians being strong supporters of the Party), Urom and Finno-Ugrian languages, Rhūnik, and some small Cosco-Adratic or otherwise Éorsan languages spoken by small and insular communities, such as Kikik. The Party supported acceleration of dialect levelling to iron out differences among Kiravic dialects, and supported Standard Kiravic as the sole literary register, denouncing Nohæric as bourgeois and High Kiravic as élitist. Even today Standard Kiravic remains the preferred written form for most federal government documents, even though Nohæric is more common in literature, the press, and education.
Kirsok supported gender equality and women's liberation, legalising divorce in areas where it had been illegal and implementing judicial reforms to make divorce more accessible for women, encouraging female entry into the workforce, and allowing the distribution of oral contraceptives when they became available. More quietly, homosexual behaviour was decriminalised in all federal subjects under Kirosocialism, and private sexual behaviours were implicitly included in national nondiscrimination laws.
Religion
The attitude of the Party towards religion and its approach to religious policy fluctuated over time. The first generation of the Party's membership was predominantly irreligious, including many cadre with expressly nontheistic worldviews (especially among those who had belonged to the Communist Party and the more orthodox Marxist tendency). Kirsok never regulated the private beliefs of its members, though for a brief period in its early history members could not be enrolled members or active communicants of religious congregations. This was later moderated so that only clerics and ministers were forbidden to join the Party. While the party membership would remain markedly more secular than the general population throughout the Party's existence, the difference gradually narrowed over time. Writing in [Midlate Kirsok Year], John Q. Preacher, a Discipular minister involved with the Party's auxilliary groups in Elegia, recorded his impression that the old line of Marxist humanists were by then rare in the Party, and that most attendees at the Elegia Party Congress could be described as spiritual but not religious, passive practitioners of Coscivian religious traditions, or semi-practicing Christians. Féraluir Sekerin, a Party member who would later lead the NDA, described the general religious attitude of the old Party as a "vague agnostic Deism", to which he himself adhered before converting to Catholicism in [YEAR].
The Party's general approach towards religious policy was that the traditional organised religions in Kiravia were an impediment to social and economic progress, that they reinforced parochial sectarian/communal group identities against national and class unity, and that they provided institutional safe havens for reactionary individuals and created non-socialist spaces where criticism of the state ideology might be welcomed. As such, the Party actively worked to diminish the influence of organised religion. The Constitution of the Kiravian Union declared the state to be affirmatively secular (lāsgix), whereas the Kiravian Federation had merely been religiously-neutral (loryavôntix). Chapters of the party disestablished local state churches upon taking power in states where they existed. Public support to religiously-affiliated organisations was cut off in favour of government-sponsored alternatives, and party agents worked to surveill and infiltrate church bodies. However, the party never moved to prohibit religious practice outright, nor did it ever ban any major religious group.
Because the KSP's anticlericalism was more pragmatic than ideological in nature, the intensity of its opposition to various religious groups was uneven. It was most active against the major apostolic Christian churches in Kiravia - the Coscivian Orthodox Church, the Insular Apostolic Church, and the Roman Catholic Church. Special hostility was reserved for the Catholic Church because as an oversized share of the pre-Kirosocialist urban social and economic élite were Catholic, leading it to be viewed as a bourgeois religion, and because it was a foreign-governed entity adamantly opposed to socialism. It was less adversarial towards Protestants and certain Sectarian churches with less in the way of nationwide social influence and entrenched privilege, especially those that were less hierarchical in form and could be more easily coöpted by the Party. The KSP was less hostile to the Coscivian monotheist religions and Islam than to Christianity, and less hostile towards independent spirituality and "unorganised religion".
In the during the latter half of the Kiravian Union's existence, the Party simultaneously began incorporating references to "spirituality" and "spiritual civilisation" into its ideological pronouncements, while ramping up repression of the established churches and efforts to subordinate Kiravian religious life to Kirosocialist ideology. A party auxiliary, the Pan-Kiravian Association of Religious Socialists, was established to this end. Lower-ranking clergy, who were banned from the main Party, were allowed to join the PKARS, while bishops and analogous figures were not.
Foreign & Colonial Policy
In foreign affairs, the Party generally held to insularism, officially seeking geostrategic nonalignment, armed neutrality, and non-interventionism, while preaching opposition to Occidental imperialism and maximising autarky. The Kiravian Union had friendly relations with other socialist states and left-wing governments, and routinely used Marxist terminology and socialist rhetoric in its diplomatic statements. However, its commitment to world communism and the international socialist movement was decidedly more in word than in deed.
The Socialist Party was an active participant in socialist internationals and similar groupings.
Most overseas regions of the Kiravian Federacy would remain under the rule of the Kiravian Remnant, and while Kirsok declared the "socialist emancipation of all Kiravian and Coscivian workers worldwide" as part of its mission, it considered the Kiravian colonial empire a capitalist undertaking incompatible with socialism. Its military expeditions against Kiravian overseas regions were aimed at eliminating threats to the mainland form Federalist forces there, and territorial claims to Remnant-held territories were maintained mainly as a legal pretext to justify kinetic actions by the Union against the Remnant in such places. Nonetheless, the Party maintained a Regional Committee-in-exile for the Burgundie-occupied island of Wintergen, and the Party-sanctioned Union of Socialist Mountaineers and Polar Navigators made some efforts to establish territorial claims in the ungoverned polar regions.
Sydona, which saw its own local socialist revolution, was part of the Kiravian Union, and was ruled by a regional party committee. Due to the size, economic importance, and sheer geographic distance of Sydona, the Sydona Regional Committee was afforded a much degree of autonomy from the Central Committee and was allowed to style itself the Socialist Party *in* Sydona (rather than *of* Sydona).
Popular Support
The degree to which Kiravian citizens supported the party and its rule varied considerably by class, geography, ethnicity, religion, economic sector, and over time. During the multi-party and early single-party stages of the party's existence, it enjoyed strong support from the urban working class in Northern Kirav and from the rural working class (inc. miners and loggers) in the Northwest, industrialised parts of the Eastern Highlands, and the Western Highlands. Support was weaker among farmers in Eastern and Central Kirav. Opposition was strongest among landowners, mercantile and professional folk, and the middle and upper classes more broadly. In Farravonia, where industrial enterprises were typically smaller, class distinctions less pronounced, and working class individuals had strong communal, religious, and tribal networks to turn to for support, the working class was ambivalent at best toward the Kirosocialist movement.
Reception to the rise of Kirosocialism was mixed among South Kiravian tillers. Though many were attracted by the party's anti-landlord rhetoric and promises of land reform, most nonetheless saw the Kirosocialist Party as a Northern institution and its ideology as yet another Northern imposition. Although this was reported by Party organisers working in the South, the reports fell on deaf ears in the Party apparatus, which made no changes to its message.
Pretannic Celts, many of whom were involved in heavily-unionised mining occupations, were ardent supporters of the Party, exemplified by its Welsh-speaking Secretary-General, Rŵlon Jones.