The Thinking Reed

3. Our motherland is living through a period of serious change. The success of current reform movement depends on the level of mass support and participation which it encourages. The life and death of socialism in the USSR hang on whether perestroika succeeds.

We acknowledge the constitutional role of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in our society, but the party is not united. Its ranks include those who bear responsibility for the abuses and miscalculations of the past, and who formed the rows of bureaucrats and that mass of officials, who cut themselves off from the hopes and needs of their people. We aim to support the healthy and progressive forces in the Party’s leadership and the rank and file.

4. In the centre and at local level, perestroika is meeting fierce opposition from people worried about their privileges and eager to hold on to their monopoly of information and decision-making. They either ignore or directly counter the new beginning and any popular initiatives.

The association of independent groups and organizations is determined to support the course towards developing socialism and democracy which was taken up at the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the Party. Our association is vital becuse among the informal groups some have been formed which project reactionary political views, like racism and chauvinism, Fascism and Stalinism. They also use extremist methods. By our association we can oppose the extremism in the independent movement and publicize the real nature of these groups.

5. On the basis of the above considerations and after signing our contract of organization, in full compliance with the Soviet Constitution which proclaims the freedom of association, we have decided to form a Federation of Socialist Clubs with the principal aim of supporting perestroika.

The Federation’s aims are the following:

In the ideological field: to work out a conception of democracy for our society to solve the dialectical contradiction between administrative power and social self-management; to analyse the role and place of social organizations in the political life of Soviet society and a system of self-management.

In the political field: to work out a legal status for independent organizations and movements, giving them the right to make proposals for legislation, thereby fulfilling all the decisions of the January 1987 plenum of the Central Committee of the Party; to democratize the electoral system, and give social organizations the right to put forward representatives to councils of people’s deputies at any level of government without any limit on candidates’ free access to the mass media; to extend the tie of sessions of councils of people’s deputies so that they can do constructive work; to enlarge their budgets on a firm legal basis with complete autonomy in deciding how to use their funds; to make a clear distinction in the law between criticism of deficiencies in our existing system and anti-state activity; to realize Point One of the first programme of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party [the original precursor of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union], which deals with citizens’ rights to prosecute officials for illegal activity independently of any complaints made at the administrative level.

In the economic field: to reorientate the organs of state planning and management from primarily administrative methods to economic ones; to widen the scope of commodity-money relations as a basic mechanism for regulating the country’s economic activity while firmly safeguarding workers’ social achievements — full employment, the minimum wage and guaranteed pensions.

Furthermore, to limit the amount spent on the state apparatus; to switch the economy to self-management; to guarantee an effective mechanism of controlling the administrative system from below; to lease the social means of production, such as factories and workshops, to collectives of self-managing enterprises; to democratize the planning system; and to create conditions for the free development of all forms of socialist ownership.

In the cultural field: to allow creative associations to operate freely on a self-financing basis; to provide a climate of tolerance for all creative public attitudes and tastes of whatever direction provided they do not contradict the constitution of the USSR; to give the public open access to all statistical and archival material, to all libraries and museum collections and to abolish the ‘special sections’; to remove every kind of pre-censorship; to extend the network of cooperative publishing houses and to remove all administrative obstacles preventing independent organizations from enjoying their constitutional rights and freedoms, such as speech, press, street marches and demonstrations.