Introducing Commicracy: To Rule by Commissioning, To Govern Together
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
Modern political language is exhausted. Words such as democracy, bureaucracy, technocracy, and meritocracy no longer describe how power actually moves through society. They name structures that persist in form but have lost moral coherence in practice. What we are living under today is not democratic self-rule but administrative dominance; not public sovereignty but procedural obedience. Against this exhaustion emerges a concept that names what human societies have long practised informally but never constitutionalised: Commicracy.
Commicracy is not merely a new word—it is a recovery of an old human logic of organisation, one that centres reciprocity, participation, and horizontal authority rather than command, hierarchy, and impersonality.
1. The Word Before the System
The word Commicracy is a direct portmanteau of commissioning-rule—that is, to rule by commissioning rather than by commanding.
Etymologically, the term draws from two ancient linguistic roots. The first is commission, borrowed from Old French commission, itself derived from the Latin commissio, meaning “sending together” or “to entrust jointly.” The second is cracy, from Old French cratie, meaning rule or governance.
Combined, Commicracy literally means “sending together to rule”, or more precisely, “to rule together through entrusted participation.” It is governance not by elevation above others, but by structured interdependence among those affected by decisions.
This linguistic origin is not decorative—it reveals the operational soul of the system. Commicracy does not concentrate power; it mediates it. It does not impose rule from above; it commissions rule from within.
2. From Command to Commission
To understand commicracy, one must first understand what it is not.
Bureaucracy governs by command. It assumes that order emerges from hierarchy, that intelligence flows downward, and that compliance produces stability. Rules are written by distant authorities, interpreted by administrators, and enforced upon populations who had no role in their formation. Commicracy reverses this logic.
In commicracy, rules are not imposed; they are commissioned. Authority is not concentrated; it is delegated horizontally. Decision-making power is not abstracted into institutions; it is returned to those directly affected by the decision. In its purest form, commicracy is a system of organisation in which most important decisions are taken by the organised body of those affected by the decision.
This does not mean chaos, nor does it mean unanimity. It means that power is exercised through structured participation, rather than administrative dominance.
3. Commissioning-Rule and Power-Reciprocity
At the heart of commicracy lies the principle of power-reciprocity.
Every exercise of authority produces consequences. Commicracy insists that those who bear consequences must also hold authorial power. This reciprocity is the ethical engine of horizontal governance.
Commissioning-rules establish clear boundaries of authority and participation. They define who may participate, how participation occurs, and under what conditions decisions become binding. This includes civic thresholds such as voting age, working age, non-working age, and pension age—recognising that rights of participation exist within defined social stages.
Crucially, commicracy affirms that participation is a right, not a coercion. All eligible citizens possess the right to engage in populocratic processes, but none are compelled. However, where participation generates collective benefits, voluntary withdrawal from participation also entails voluntary withdrawal from those benefits, except where lawful exemptions apply.
Thus, commissioning-rule is guaranteed, but its exercise remains a matter of civic choice.
4. Equality, Equity, and the Conditions of Participation
In its simplest expression, commissioning-rule means collective consensus of rights for every citizen. All individuals are treated equally regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, caste, religion, belief, sex, gender, language, sexual orientation, age, health status, or any other condition. Commicracy rejects all hierarchies of worth.
Yet commicracy also rejects the bureaucratic illusion that equality means sameness. Rights attached to participatory systems require participation itself. Equity emerges not from uniform treatment but from context-sensitive inclusion.
Where individuals are eligible yet choose not to participate—without recognised exemption—the system acknowledges that benefits derived from collective labour cannot be claimed in absence of contribution. This is not punishment; it is reciprocity.
5. Commicracy Within Social Populocracy
Commicracy functions as the organisational spine of social populocracy.
Populocracy is the expression of collective leadership exercised by the governed population. Unlike contemporary democracies—where sovereignty is nominally popular but functionally vested in the State—populocracy recognises sovereignty as universally held by citizens themselves.
In this framework:
- No individual is merely governed.
- All are co-governors within a shared civic order.
- Government exists to inform, coordinate, and implement—not to dominate.
The social character of populocracy abolishes class distinctions, dismantles economic hierarchies through the elimination of monetary economy, and equalises the functional roles of government and governed under a constitutionally bound interdependent leadership.
6. The Structural Conditions of Commicracy
Commissioning-rule cannot survive as abstraction. It requires structural embodiment. Among its sustaining conditions are:
- Universal access to essential rights.
- Shared interdependent leadership under the Govox-Populi system.
- Economic equality organised through ethnocorporatism.
- Individual populist sovereignty exercised within collective populocracy.
- Supremacy of citizenry-prescribed law.
- Horizontal delegation of authority across institutions.
Remove these conditions, and commicracy collapses into rhetoric. Embed them, and commicracy becomes lived reality.
7. The Ethical Core of Commissioning-Rule
At its moral centre, commicracy is animated by a principle older than any constitution: treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.
This is not sentimental ethics. It is structural morality. Rules must be generated by those who live under them. They must apply universally. And they must be supervised institutionally to prevent capture, manipulation, or abuse.
Partisan governance reduces politics to contests for dominance, where corruption and greed thrive. Non-partisan govox-populi, sustained by commissioning-rules of commicracy, empowered with populocracy, replaces power struggle with rule coherence.
Rules generate consensus. Consensus sustains shared authority. And the governed—being subject to those rules—remain their rightful authors.
Conclusion: Naming What We Already Know
Commicracy does not invent human cooperation—it names it, refines it, and protects it.
It is the logic behind councils, assemblies, guilds, palaver courts, cooperative labour, and communal decision-making that have long sustained societies outside bureaucratic domination. What is new is not the practice, but the constitutional courage to organise society around it.
In an age where command has failed and hierarchy has exhausted its legitimacy, commicracy offers not chaos, but coherence—not control, but coordination— not rule over people, but rule with them.
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