by Paolo Vigevano
Treasurer of the Radical Party
There are two reasons inducing me to once again tackle the problem of the membership to the Radical Party: the failure of the achievement of the "intermediate" goals in terms of membership, which we has established for the current year; the many interrogatives received from various parts of the world and from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe especially, concerning the membership (its value, its meaning, the reason for this number,...).
As many of you already know, the Statute of the Party provides only the membership to the Federal Party and not the membership to Radical associations. There is only one condition to the membership: the payment of a fee. Of course, the statute provides both the commitment to join or to establish an association and, obviously, to accept the statute, but, I repeat it, there is only one thing to be done: the payment of a membership fee. This is the first, the fundamental rule of the Radical Party's Statute, that is, of a libertarian party which does not provide any form of selection of those who request a membership, and which provides no control organ, and least of all the possibility of expelling anyone. Membership is open to all, and is annual.
The combination of these two provisions - the payment of the membership fee to the federal party and the yearly basis of the membership - indirectly ensure another aspect of the party's internal democracy: the possibility on the part of the congress (which all members can take part in) of knowing and foreseeing the revenues of self-financiation in relation to the costs of the political programme of the following year. It is the congress in fact which establishes, each year, the membership fee. Apart from this power, the member of the Radical Party enjoys other prerogatives which are normally not provided for in other parties. It directly elects the General Secretary, the Treasurer and the members of the Federal Council. It also approves the motions (that is, the main priorities). More than being a member, the person who joins the party is in fact a shareholder of a private company.
It is in this context that the problem of membership and membership fee must be examined. In all Western countries (but it is a phenomenon concerning the countries of Central and Eastern Europe as well) the cost of the membership to a party is almost free of charge. For two reasons. Firstly because these party can rely on other, more or less public, sources to finance themselves. This way they can claim a great number of members (who among other things have practically no power). In the Radical Party on the other hand, each member must contribute a part of the money necessary to achieve the aims of the party. To make this even more evident, in 1981 it was decided to calculate this financial commitment on a daily basis. In other words, the daily commitment for each citizen to support the activities of the party. The parameter is the amount of money that anyone, a student or even an unemployed person, could afford every day: a bus ticket, or half of the price of a newspaper.
Because it is not possible to organize the daily correction of memberships, the criterion has been that of paying the whole sum immediately or at the most in three or four times (even if the membership is granted only when the total sum has been paid). This is another way of asserting the characteristic feature of an "active shareholder" for the Radical member, a person in other words capable of finding or borrowing the money for the membership of one whole year. It must also be said (and it is often neglected) that the membership fee is at the person's discretion, starting from a minimum sum. As a consequence, the wealthier people should pay fees that are proportional to their real possibilities. And if it is true that there are membership fees twenty and even one hundred percent above the minimum, it is also true that this is a prerogative of few, too few people.
