At a hotel across the street from Cleveland's oldest and most prestigious businessman's club, the Citizens' Party Founding Convention last month launched a political movement aimed at eliminating the economic inequality they see symbolized by that club.

The Citizens' Party may become the strongest challenge to the two-party system from the left since the brief challenge of the Populist Party in the 1890's. In fact, author Studs Terkel convened the gathering on a Friday night by saying, "We are all born-again Populists." Much of the rhetoric that weekend recalled the Populists' fight against turn-of-the-century monopoly capitalism. But what really united the 262 delegates gathered to create a new political alternative was a shared belief that the existing political parties are no longer addressing the issues of most concern to Americans.

Terkel summed up this feeling in his denunciation of the "Republocrat" party he sees dominating contemporary politics. Barry Commoner, the environmentalist-turned-political-activist who received the near unanimous endorsement of the delgates as presidential candidate, put it more plainly when he accepted his nomination: "We are the people who are going to help our fellow Americans smile when they go into the voting booth, instead of holding their nose."

That ambitious statement, greeted by boisterous cheering, climaxed the effort Commoner, Terkel and about 100 others began last August to bring the Citizens' Party into existence. In eight months of hurried preparations, those founders managed to create party organizations in 33 states, and put Commoner on the ballot in four of those states.

Commoner himself only recently came on to the political scene, though he has been an activist throughout his career. He is probably best known as an environmentalist and energy expert, through the several bestsellers he has authored: "The Closing Circle," "The Poverty of Power," and his most recent book, "The Politics of Energy."

He is a Columbia graduate with a Biology Ph.D. from Harvard in 1941, and he currently directs the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University in St. Louis, an environmental research facility. A deceptively energetic 62 year-old. Commoner has been calling for radical changes (including reorganization of the energy industry along socialist lines) for many years now. In founding the Citizens' Party, Commoner hopes to create a vehicle for implementing some of those changes.

Delegates at Cleveland represented a wide cross-section of backgrounds and motives for being there, including left-leaning democrats, new-left radicals from the 1960's (Mario Savio, founder of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley--the group which kicked off student protests in the '60's--was there, with graying hair and beard), radical teminists, American Indians, gays, and Gray Panthers.

Ideas were just as diverse--delegates held political and economic views ranging from socialist to the American ethic of agriculture and small business. Although it has not yet had a serious effect on the party, an underlying ideological split exists between party members who favor a return to the days of small-scale capitalism and those who favor a socialist industrial state.

This split manifested itself in the most spirited debate of the convention, over the economic plank of the party platform. A delegate from Ohio rose to denounce the plank, formulated by Sidney Lens, a well-known socialist author calling it simply a "wish list" and describing it as "old fashioned socialism." Lens vigorously rebutted these charges, thrusting the meeting into a flurry of accusations and counter-accusations of intellectual dogmatism and shortsightedness.

"The Citizens' Party will not engage in politics-by-label--damning a proposal just because someone has called it 'socialist,'" Lens said. In the end, the convention voted overwhelmingly to adopt his plank, which included calls for the nationalization of certain key industries.

Other features of the platform, which must be ratified by the membership at large in a mail ballot, call for a guaranteed job for everyone who wants to work, a more even distribution of income, cutbacks in military spending, an end to nuclear power, and increased implementation of affirmative action programs.

Party members admit the platform is unabashedly idealistic and do not claim to have all the answer. In the debate over, the economic plank, Lens said, "It someone asks me how we plan to go about nationalizing these industries. I'll say I frankly don't know. We don't know how to do it, but we do know that it's necessary that we do it."

Not surprisingly, Commoner's ideas are quite influential within the party; its collective vision of the ideal society strongly reflects his ideas of a new society built around a radically restructured energy system. Commoner is a tireless advocate of solar energy as the answer to America's problems, and his analyses show how a conversion to solar energy could solve economic problems as well as the "energy crisis"--which he sees as the result of a system based on profits instead of the national interest.

The profit system is Commoner's most frequent target, along with the giant corporations which he believes dominate critical decision-making. "All the problems of this country can be traced to the fact that decisions vital to the national interest are made by corporations who are interested only in maximizing profits," he claims, adding, "They don't give a hoot about the national interest."

Commoner (and the great majority of the party members at Cleveland) favor some degree of social control over the means of production. He cites the words of a businessman speaking about the steel industry (which most likely will be unable to meet domestic demand by 1985) that you just can't expect a corporation to produce something just because the country needs it--as a rationale for social governance.