First Party Congress convenes!

[Californiication]

The First Congress of the National Communist Party, the ruling body of Californiication, has convened and confirmed Comrade Mark Proctor as First Secretary of the Central Committee. A simultaneous meeting of the Federal Congress of Soviets has confirmed his position as President of the Republic for a six-year term.

Several other key measures created "alternative means of ensuring proletarian control of the means of production, through autonomous co-operative management of local enterprises and farms." This system allowed local soviets to establish themselves for the purpose of operating farms, shops, and industries. It was intended as "an alternative to the Stalinist and capitalist models, to ensure humane socialism rather than a brutal police state aimed at repression of the very workers it is intended to liberate".

While private industry remains illegal, therefore, a kind of co-operative commonwealth managed by local soviets seems the wave of the future, instead of a top-down, bureaucratic model. While the public remains the owner of the means of production, this ownership will be exercised through industrial and agricultural soviets, who will elect their management in the same manner as shareholders in the old days of capitalism.

[Californiication]

The freedoms of religion, press, speech, petition, habeas corpus, trial by jury, etc. are being formally codified into law. The right to private property has been replaced by the right to an equitable share of the fruits of collective labor. To prevent freeloading, every soviet has the right to eject able-bodied comrades who refuse to contribute. Housing is to be organized on a collective basis as well, as a collection of modest households in communities organized by neighborhood soviets. No home will be individually owned, but all will be assigned by the soviets, with "sensible regulations intended to prevent abuse of the stewardship entrusted to each household".

Unofficially, the government acknowledges that "Trotskyism is really being replaced by council-communism, which we think is more economically feasible and humanistic in nature." To prevent the acquisition of great wealth, each industry will assign profit-sharing dividends on a "more rational basis, thus avoiding the existence of a class of robber barons".

Essentially, the economic system is a compulsory co-operative commonwealth administered by a myriad of soviets. No man is to be unemployed, unless he is ejected by the soviets, in which case he is stripped of citizenship in the Soviet Federal Republic as a "parasite" and deported from the country. Vagrancy is now a crime once more, punishable by exile.