Totalitarian power consolidates its control and keeps intact its power through a variety of techniques of disciplinary performance.
These disciplinary techniques of performance are given the appearance on the surface of a commitment to cleanliness, of good governance.
You hear terms such as "clean governance," "transparency," and "accountability," that prop up the regime's disciplinary techniques as methods to monitor, control, and check corruption.
The articulation of corruption becomes a communicative tool that is deployed by power, as the rationale for formation of the methods of inquiry. The elite in the power structure form the methods of inquiry, embedded into elite interests of retaining power and control.
Committees of inquiry form one such disciplinary tool of the totalitarian regime. The totality of its control is retained and reproduced through a wide range of claims to good or clean governance, performance of "checks and balances" in the system that actually work toward maintaining elite control.
Committees are given the semblance of neutrality within disciplinary structures, folded into the rhetoric that the purpose of these committees is to ensure organizational, institutional, and state accountability. Committees of inquiry look into issues, carry out their investigation, and then at the end of the investigation, issue their reports. The organization, institution, or state then acts on the reports.
Once the committee has issued a report, it is treated as sacrosanct, placed in the realm of the sacred. The findings of the committee then become the basis for the practices of disciplining. The claim produced by the committee is reproduced and circulated as a truth claim, that then gives meaning to legality. Illegal practices of totalitarian control, for instance, become legal because they have been based on a committee of inquiry. The most eggregious forms of silencing dissent can be deployed under the guise of having been based on a committee of inquiry.
Various claims regarding deviations can be made to the organization/institution/state, to be then channelled through the Committee of Inquiry into organizational/institutional/state responses. Often the sources of these claims, the processes through which the claims are channeled, and the frameworks of decision-making based on these processes are kept hidden.
Committees of Inquiry in totalitarian regimes maintain totalitarian control through the very corruption of these processes of inquiry. They serve as communicative inversions, working precisely to cover up the corrupt practices of the regime through rituals of inquiry and committee formation. The corruption of power in a regime is communicatively inverted through the tools of inquiry to attack, vilify, and delegitimize the critics of the regime.
At the same time, when accusations of corruption are explicitly made against the members of the regime, committees of inquiry are put up to mostly exonerate the members, especially top ranking members of the regime that are in line with the regime's goals. Of course, one or two low rung workers (party cadres and low level political operatives) have to be sacrified so the regime can maintain the semblance of cleanliness. Elites from within the regime are only sacrificed when they have turned into a burden on the regime. This also works as a warning to the members of the elite, deviate from the norms and question the power, you will be vilified and your credibility will be attacked.
The elites at the top of the regime can deploy such committees to clear their names when accusations are made publicly about their corruption, stating "See, an independent committee was formed, and it found nothing." In all instances of inquiries, the processes of decision-making, selection of committees and the criteria for evaluating evidence are rendered opaque. The secrecy of the inquiry process itself is written into some organizational principle, rendering opaque the structures of decision-making. The corruption of power and of process therefore is strategically rendered invisible through layers of communicative inversions. Negotiations are peddled behind backdoors to decide the outcomes.
To critically interrogate the corruption in the practices of the regime, one ought to look closely at the very processes of inquiry. One ought to ask critical questions such as: Who is doing the inquiry? How is the inquiry being carried out? Who is selected into the committees of inquiry? Who is doing the selection? Who is being targeted? Who is being exonerated? What is the available evidence? Is the evidence made public? Because layers of communicative inversions constitute elaborate processes of retaining power, each of these layers ought to be closely evaluated, situated in consideration of the empirical through public deliberation and debate. Accessing and closely reading the communication among the elites within and outside of committees of inquiry becomes one way of critically reading the workings of such committees.
One of the key resources in sustaining totalitarian control is the corruption of totalitarian power in selection of the elites that form the infrastructures of the inquiry process. These elites, belonging to a club with vested interests, are anything but neutral, often recruited and rewarded later to serve specific agendas. When one follows closely the reward structures around processes of inquiry for instance, the corruption becomes evident. Collaborators of the regime that work to silence critics are heavily rewarded later. Similarly, collaborators of the regime that exonerate the top actors in the regime are heavily rewarded with career mobility, promoted to elite power. For low rung workers, collaborating with the regime to perpetuate its lies becomes one sure way of climbing up.
Making public the forms of corruption in elite structures of decision-making is the first step toward fighting corruption in totalitarian regimes. Communicatively inverting the communciative inversions constructed elaborately by the regime offers the entry point for transformative politics located in popular participation.
In resisting this fundamental corruption of totalitarian power, peoples' participation ought to raise demands for rendering visible through democratic processes the structures of disciplinary inquiries. Popular demands for people's participation in the formation of inquiry processes is a starting point. Demands ought to be raised for ensuring the structures of inquiry are independent of political, bureaucratic, and institutional power. Inquiry documents ought to be publicly available. In sum, skepticism of opaque organizational, institutional, and state forms ought to serve as the basis for continual and ongoing demands for participatory spaces for peoples' access to elite decision-making structures. Finally, ongoing processes of resistance ought to dismantle these very corrupt structures of elite power that are anti-thetical to the principles of democracy.