The PDS was the left-wing "democratic" faction within the Italian partyist regime, which had complementary left, centre and right internal wings, all equally responsible for the present Italian situation. The forces independent of partyism were very few and they burst onto the Italian political scene solely through those referendums which represented the only true reforms that this country can really boast. If our new referendums are not once again rejected by a Constitutional Court organical to the regime, next year we will be able to vote and make the transition to a first past the post voting system that will allow us to overcome partyism.

In a quarter of our country the Communist party and its allies have been ruling for 48 years, unceasingly. In Italy we have, among workers and retired people, ten million forced union members: the employer must withold from on salary or pension, a monthly union fee, a tax on ten million people collected by the state and transferred to the trade union power. Then, we have this state financed redundancy fund which keeps on fuelling bankrupt sectors of our industry, in the absence of any competition, thanks to the converging will of the PDS-world and trade unions - like the last agreement between FIAT and the trade unions which will cost the taxpayers about 600m US$.

For those who have been dealing with Italy for a short time, it ought to be underlined that it is the great moralists of our state television (and of its trade union USIGRAI) who have been controlling the information during the fiercest and most consociative years of the secret services, of the P2 Lodge, with Berlinguer giving nine million communist votes to the Christian Democrats of Andreotti and Cossiga - as did half the deputies of the neofascist Italian Social Movement. Pecchioli was the actual controller of the secret services at the time, even though he was a communist and had close connections with the USSR. Everything belonging to that old regime - technically based on a set of criminal enterprises and which now needs impunity - supports the new order, which should be the second phase of the first Republic, controlled by those who can guarantee industrial barons against strikes and - in exchange for this - that financing of obsolete companies which is the "cassa integrazione". That's why the le

ft needs to overthrow the liberal tendency, often victorious (even if a minority) that we represent.

Regarding the countries that I know best, I must say that is a monoculture in the interpretation of the Italian situation. For decades we have had some newspaper correspondents who interpreted the facts in conformity with the Italian Left, according to which the party power was the "right-wing" one - the DC - and the others were the democracy. Faced with this, I feel like Altiero Spinelli or Ernesto Rossi, who, when in jail under the Fascist regime, felt sorrow not so much for the way the Italian situation was reported in the national press (they expected to read what they were reading), but for the interpretetion of Italian events in the great international antifascist newspapers.

I am now described as a traitor to a left which I have had no chance to agree with since 1948 : I always found them to be enemies except when it was convenient to reap the dividends of the civil rights "investments" that we had made (divorce, abortion, etc.) against them. That's why I believe that for our country the "devil" Berlusconi is much less dangerous. I hold the opposite opinion to Occhetto, who stated publicly that he prefers Fini to Berlusconi. The truth is that they needed a "devil", and they invented one. The news that also Occhetto was under judicial investigation was written on the 13th page of the "Corriere della Sera", whilst RAI 3 announced during the election campaign that "Berlusconi" had been arrested, even though it was not Silvio but his brother Paolo. In reality, by getting rid of Berlusconi they thougt they would suppress someone who could not be disdained as fascist, right-wing, etc.. The same applies to us, even tough different systems are applied, the aim is the same: they wan

t to do away with us. We must not be there, because they cannot eliminate us as traditional fascist people, whereas they do need the "authoritarian right", the monster to splash across the front page. I saddens me to have to repeat an analysis which may be challenged, but which for thirty years has been simply liquidated, ignored. We should not even be criticized (but it has always been so), because the problem is not opposing our ideas, but simply removing them. The clash in Italy is not between "progressives" and "moderates" - as they want us to believe - but between reformers and conservatives of the old partyist regime. During elections, the left has always wished that the right would get loads of votes because they were votes lost by its real partner, the non-communist liberal left, not ratified and not recognizable. So the real contest is between the reformers and the conservatives: the latter are everywhere, but above all in the historical, "sociological" left - whoses mask hides powerful interests -

and reforms can only be liberal ones, the only tipe which can guarantee the liberation of the State from the chains of party machinery.