Unified state power
Unified state power is a Marxist–Leninist principle on communist state power that was developed in opposition to the fusion and separation of powers, and creates the institutional framework to practice democratic centralism in the state. It holds that popular sovereignty is expressed through a single representative organ, the supreme state organ of power, at the apex of a pyramid- like state structure and which exercises legislative, executive, judicial, and all other forms of state power. Lower-level state organs of power are not autonomous polities but administrative extensions of the SSOP within a single hierarchy. Central decisions bind subordinate levels, while local organs are accountable both to their electors and to superior organs, a system known as dual subordination. This produces a uniform flow of power from the SSOP to subordinate organs, with local discretion allowed only within jurisdiction delegated by higher law enacted by the SSOP.
The SSOP's relationship to the communist state constitution and laws is fundamental. The constitution, adopted by the SSOP, is the fundamental law binding all state organs. It does not permanently restrict the SSOP's sovereign rights, since such limits are self-imposed and may be altered through constitutional amendment. Communist state constitutions set out broad principles on sovereignty and the structure of the state—while leaving specific details to statutes and secondary norms. Socialist legality, the Marxist–Leninist concept of lawful governance, requires conformity to the constitution. However, it rejects independent or autonomous institutions, such as constitutional courts exercising judicial review, that would stand above the SSOP. Instead, legality is safeguarded through political oversight by representative organs, supervision by the supreme procuratorial organ, and electoral accountability through controlled elections.
A key feature is the unity of legislative and executive powers. Drawing on the Paris Commune and the Soviet model, representatives both make law and oversee its execution. The SSOP establishes a division of labour that delineates jurisdictions among the supreme executive and administrative organ, the supreme judicial organ, and other state organs within the unified state apparatus, but this does not create co-equal branches. Each organ operates under the law within an order established by the SSOP, remaining inferior and subordinate to it, and all are overseen by the SSOP with none standing above it. This is reinforced by the leading role of the communist party, which coordinates the unified state apparatus formally through cadre appointments to state positions and party discipline, and informally through party groups embedded in state institutions. The party guides policy while affirming that the state remains the legal locus of sovereignty. Unified power continues to be a cornerstone of governance in the communist states of China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.
Popular sovereignty as the source of unified power
Theoretical origins
In Marxist–Leninist theory, the supreme state organ of power is regarded as the institutional expression of popular sovereignty. Elected through popular elections, it is theorised to embody the collective will of the people and to hold the unified powers of the state. As the popular embodiment of state authority, the supreme state organ unites legislative, executive, and judicial functions.Communist theorists maintain that the Marxist–Leninist concept of popular sovereignty was "developed by" Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that the people formed the foundation of all legitimate state power. It was later refined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In The Social Contract, Rousseau argued that all state power resided in the people alone, expressed through the general will. This general will, he maintained, was inherently just and directed toward the common good. The people's resolutions were, in principle, always correct, as they were immune to corruption, even if they could be misled.
In Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau further argued for the necessity of a supreme power: "In short, instead of turning our forces against ourselves, let us gather them into one supreme power that governs us according to wise laws." Marxist–Leninist theoretician Đào Trí Úc interprets this as Rousseau's belief that "power cannot be separated, but state power and supreme sovereignty must belong to the people; legislative, executive and judicial powers are only concrete manifestations of the supreme power of the people."
Rousseau's notion of popular sovereignty influenced Marx and Engels’ theory of historical materialism. From this perspective, the people are the creators of history because they transform the material base through labour. Here, the material base denotes nature—more precisely, matter as the fundamental substance of reality—so that all phenomena arise from material interactions. Labour on nature generates technology and establishes specific relations of production; together these can incrementally reshape material existence or precipitate a rupture that yields a new mode of production. By extension, the state itself is seen as a human creation: "just as it is not religion that creates people but people create religion, it is not the state system that creates the people, but the people create the state system." The political project of Marx and Engels was therefore to reclaim state power from the ruling classes that had historically wielded it as an instrument of oppression.
Another source of inspiration for Marxist–Leninist practice was the emergence of soviets during the Russian Revolution of 1905. These soviets were seen as both decision-making organs and mass organisations. Lenin argued that the soviets represented a power accessible to all, arising directly from the masses and expressing their will. Although they functioned only briefly and in limited areas, according to scholar Otto Bihari, they assumed all state functions where they existed, acting in the interests of working people.
The soviets re-emerged in the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party allied with them. Lenin theorised that the soviets could provide the foundation for a new state. Yet he warned that, if left decentralised, they remained a weak and primitive form of state organisation. To address this, the Bolsheviks advanced the slogan "All Power to the Soviets", seeking to build a nationwide system of soviets that would collectively function as the supreme state organ of power. In his work Can the Bolsheviks Retain the State Power?, Lenin argued that the soviets represented a revolutionary form of state because their elected representatives combined both legislative and executive authority. From his perspective, this amounted to a practical form of anti-parliamentarism.
In institutionalised form
After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks moved to make the world's first attempt to institutionalise this blend of Rousseauian and Marxian theory of popular sovereignty in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union. The result was the establishment of a new state form that became the world's first communist state. One of the first decrees instituted by the new Bolshevik state, titled "All Power to the Soviets", on 8 November 1917, conferred all state powers on the All-Russian Congress of Soviets in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. This decree put an end to dual power, a situation in which the institutions of the soviets and the Russian Provisional Government were competing for state power. The All-Russian Congress of Soviets then adopted a decree that established a Workers' and Peasants' Government that was fully accountable to itself and to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, an internal organ of the All-Russian Congress. In a bid to strengthen the democratic legitimacy of the soviets, the All-Russian CEC instituted imperative mandates on 7 December 1917 that made all elected representatives recallable.In this system, the soviets became known as state organs of power, with the highest one being referred to as the supreme state organ of power, and all other organs became accountable to them. For example, an appeal of the People's Commissariat for the Interior stated, "in the communities the agencies of the local power, the soviets, are the administrative agencies, to which all institutions, irrespective of whether economic, financial, or cultural-educational, have to be subordinated." However, the first formal regulation that categorised each state organ was adopted on 30 April 1918 at the Fifth Congress of the Frontier Region of the Turkestan Soviet Federative Republic. This regulation stated that the state form in Turkestan was based on the following four organs: firstly, the supreme state organ of power, secondly, the permanent organ of the supreme state organ of power, thirdly, the supreme executive and administrative organ, and lastly, the local state organs of power.
The system outlined in the Turkestan republic was more or less adopted, with slight modifications, in the world's first communist constitution, the Russian Constitution of 10 July 1918. According to Otto Bihari, this constitution outlined in its tenth article "the principle of unity and the uniform exercise of power", and that all state powers were conferred on the soviets. This constitution conferred on the All-Russian Congress of Soviets the status of SSOP, which meant that it held unlimited state power unless constrained by itself through the state constitution, laws, or other legal documents. Despite its formal powers, it delegated most tasks to its internal state organs or the constitutive organs of the state apparatus. It did so by either electing, removing, or dismissing state organs, electing, removing, or dismissing individuals from positions within state organs, or by establishing or abolishing state organs. The fundamental principles instituted in 1918 were exported to other communist states, and remain fundamentally unchanged. Therefore, in communist states, all state organs are accountable to and function according to the directives of the SSOP and lower-level state organs of power.
In the 1918 constitution, the people elected the lowest-level organ of state power, and the members of the elected state organ would elect the one at the next hierarchical level. This process would continue until the supreme state organ of power, meaning the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, was elected. The system was eventually amended in the Soviet Union, in which half of the supreme state organ of power was directly elected by the population and the other half indirectly. Other communist states, such as present-day Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, have an electoral system where all members of the supreme state organ of power are directly elected. In China, the entire supreme state organ of power is elected indirectly. In states like the Soviet Union, the people were empowered to elect candidates; in most cases, the citizen could either vote for or against the candidate or for or against a given list, to the state organs of power, which collectively form the basis of the unified state apparatus. The manner in which these state organs are elected varies from state to state.
The system of soviets outlined in the 1918, 1924, and 1936 Soviet constitutions laid the basis for communist state governance and the Marxist–Leninist theory of popular sovereignty. For example, Article of the 1936 Soviet constitution declared that the soviets formed the political foundation of the Soviet state form. Article 3 declared that the soviets embodied the popular sovereignty of the working population of towns and villages. Similar statements about popular sovereignty have been made in all communist state constitutions. For example, the Czechoslovak Constitution of 1968 declared that the working masses governed the country through the system of state organs of power, and the 1972 North Korean constitution did the same.
Soviet theoreticians Yuri Dolgopolov and Leonid Grigoryan legitimised this system by stating that state power in communist states represented the primary means of popular governance and, therefore, reflects the will and sovereignty of the people. They believed that state power—and, by extension, the supreme organ of state power—operated on behalf of the people and served as the primary instrument of their will. This unified power allowed the state to achieve a characteristic known as state sovereignty. State sovereignty, they contended, ensures that the communist states are independent of any other state or societal power in the exercise of their functions, both domestically and in their relations with other states. Therefore, they believed, the sovereignty of communist states strengthened their internal popular sovereignty. They also asserted that the laws and resolutions passed by the state organs of power represented the will of the people, dictated state policy, and guided the actions of the unified state apparatus. Due to their formal function, the state organs of power were widely believed, according to Dolgopolov and Grigoryan, to form the core of the future stateless and pure communist system of public self-administration that communist states purportedly try to establish.
The communist theory of popular sovereignty has met with criticism. Scholar George C. Guins concludes, when writing about the Soviet Union, "there is no popular sovereignty in the Soviet Union because the people cannot either freely form opinion or express it by free elections." So, while the formal powers of the supreme state organ of power state that the people are the holders of the unlimited political powers of the state, Guins believes this to be a disguise for the communist party's monopoly on state power. Academic Ivan Volgyes concurs with Guins, noting, " is thus based on both the mandate derived from controlled elections and from Marxist ideology. A vote of no confidence, which would topple the government elsewhere, is simply unthinkable under the Communist system." Scholar Hans Peters believed the Marxist–Leninist conception of popular sovereignty to be outdated, arguing, "The identification of the people with the practised in Eastern Europe as a senseless interpretation the Rousseauist concept of democracy is not of progressive nature, but feeds on the ideas of the 19th century."