ABSTRACT: The 13th radical congress, which was held in Verona in November 1973, based its discussion on the package of referendum proposals to be promoted. The referendum project - that is, the project of holding several referendums at the same time, in order to create alternative majorities on the project itself, had been established by the congress of Turin on the previous year. Throughout 1973, however, it had not been possible to launch the initiative, and the congress of Verona highlighted perplexities and reservations regarding the possibility of bringing the onerous collection of signatures to a successful conclusion (and in fact this was achieved only in 1977). Pannella's speech reflects this climate of uncertainty, enriched as it is by general political remarks and calls to hold out addressed to the leaders and to the militants of the party.

In particular, Marco Pannella, who had chosen not to be a member of the Radical Party for that year with the purpose of expanding the radical movement by means of the May 13 League, theorized the necessity to "strengthen the movement we are all part of, the radical movement, which the Radical Party is the most important body and the central moment of, but which we should be able to live out in different forms as well".

(Speech delivered at the 15th Radical Congress of Verona - November 1973 from "Marco Pannella - Works and speeches - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982).

Dear companions,

first of all, I feel the need to reassure some of you (or many of you, it matters little) as to the fact that I am well, I am alive and kicking, my nervous system is in order, and I continue to unleash all my senses reasonably and morally. I have long believed that Rimbaud's sentence, far more than other sentences by Marx, could be inscribed (and if I mention Marx it is because I consider him much closer to us, or rather because I believe we are much closer to what he represented and represents today for our time), it could be inscribed far more than others if I think of the importance this party has taken on for me, to the point of becoming an element of civilization in which I live with all the limits and the risks (a civilization always runs the risk of being self-satisfied, of being terrorist in some regards, of not being a culture. It is a risk, not a reality). This is what the party has meant to me, and this sentence by Rimbaud, for those who have been preaching since 1944, '45, '46, '47 (I don't know

when Sergino Stanzani (1) and the others started...).

This principle of the non-divorce between public life and private life, this principle according to which love and freedom, morality and spontaneity should tend to coincide or be - as they are - the same thing - both alive or both dead - as I was saying, this apparently nonpolitical sentence (and at least Giuliana Cabrini will understand me here, who was saying: poetry and politics, politics and poetry), "le raisonnable dérèglement de tous les senses", perhaps more comprehensible today thanks also to Ceccato, to cybernetics, to the fact that we know we are mechanisms, that we know that freedom begins to the extent in which we realize the occult pressure we are victims of, that we realize the relativity of the truths in which we believe day by day, we realize that the only thing we can do is behave as if these historical, partial truths were the sole truth we have.

I believe that integrity, that straightforwardness are in reality the premise, the length - a philosopher, Bergson I think, said that "length is the shape of things" - and this slow continuity which crosses so many of us and which does not end here....truly present, past and future in certain moments appear as dialogic reference points necessary to extremely relative truths.

As I was saying, perhaps I arrive at this Congress and before you a little tense, and tensions are a positive fact; I am tense to the limits of what I am, tense to the limits of the party, but not tired, not discouraged, with clear ideas and with much love, and - I believe - with much freedom.

I was saying integrity: I have been forced to fail in this, if lacking in integrity means doing it deliberately, in June-July of this year; you all know that immediately after the Congress of Turin, I said I considered it necessary for me to conquer other forms of presence and dialogue, other forms of integrity, that I needed to grow, to read and write something other than leaflets and pamphlets, to conquer the rhythm of interior silence, which is vital; and this not to detach myself, not to drift away, not to diminish my commitment, but because it was the only way to continue being a good companion.

In July, perhaps lacking faith, perhaps because the substance of the things we hoped in was slightly different and did not entirely correspond to the party, we all witnessed a feeling of discouragement: the party was dying, the referendums were off, we were over and done with, Rome - our Rome - was a desert. At that moment, I resumed my commitment, overcoming the limits of my intelligence, overcoming my intentions, and I asked the summons of that extraordinary congress which we then held.

Since then it has become clear that the rhythms, the commitments, the loves, the happiness, the duties, the calculations, the objectives were changing, and - to a certain extent - were filling me, overwhelming me, and I humbly accepted to do it. But if it is conceivable, if it is necessary for integrity to be humble, and therefore capable of conceiving exceptions, the latter must remain such. This is why I'm here today, at a moment in which I share a lot, almost everything, of what Lorenzo Strik Livers said a few moments ago about the party, its importance, its potential, about there being something extremely important under way; I share most of what Gianfranco said yesterday evening (Giulio Ercolessi, how many times I've heard you say "the party doesn't exist any longer, it's a desert", or Angiolo, Enzo, how many times have I head you say "this lousy newspaper in which we cannot liberate ourselves, which we are slaves of, in which we are not happy"...Happiness cannot tolerate impatience: it is a slow and co

nstant creation, not an object to be consumed when we feel we need it.

We are here in greater number than in Turin, more different and therefore richer than in Turin; an exemplary Congress for a libertarian party which has had the clairvoyance, the strength to work with the purpose of reducing the fatal limits of the delegations to minimum, discussing articles 367 and 94.

The debate was good, the campaign for the referendums has begun. Roberto is wrong when he says that it would have been necessary to start it 30, 35, 40 days ago: things start not with their juridical beginning; even if we wanted to decide here with a three-quarter majority which we would not have, there would be four or five madmen-wise men. There are ten of us to appeal to the Court of Cassation, that's the situation.

The moment is important, the party has a lot to do, each of us has achieved the project for which he joined in. In moments of greatest importance, that is when we need integrity, that is when everyone should grow and the leaders, witnesses and apostles should shrink: otherwise we cannot speak of libertarianism.

It is with the serenity of knowing that the Radical Party is important for me, for its peculiar reasons, just as friendship, love, the fact of being companions defend themselves defending the reasons for which friendship, love and companionship are born, and not adhering to them and to their shapes, which necessarily become mortal and end. Bearing in mind these reasons, I talk to you here having decided and knowing that I am a supporter of the radical Party without being a member.

Your Statute enables me to talk and to use the time of the party's Congress: I am doing so. I believe in this Statute, I believe in this party, I give my contribution, I conquer freedom once again, I have always told the liberals (on the rare occasions in which I find one) that the true liberal is he who believes, in moments of dictatorship, in moments of violent clashes, in freedom, in responsibility; to believe in it, in England, doesn't mean being liberal, it means believing that freedom is the best thing to live in order to grow, to solve the most dramatic problems. Things should be reversed: in that case, a libertarian party that has a father, a leader, a "more important" companion, someone toward home love is marred by admiration or for whom disesteem is marred by resent, is something it cannot afford. If it could afford it, because I believe that each of us for his part can create it, I commit myself to preventing this and creating a different relationship, at least for me and for each of you.

December 1955: Radical Party? Who is creating it? In 1962? There are many apparent contradictions, and I believe that in saying this I'm being no Narcissus, I believe I am communicating and discussing politics with you, I believe I'm giving this Congress a contribution. There have been many radical parties: one a year. Today there is no doubt that the kind of cooperation, of dialogue I advocate and I know I can obtain, is not the cooperation of a militant: my freedom is different, my responsibility should be different, not as far as you are concerned, because we are not mutually responsible, but toward the things for which we proclaim we are united and companions. To be straightforward and avoid any dramatization, I wish to say that at the end of this speech, in advancing a number of proposals and suggestions (clearly, as a supporter who is a non-member I can vote neither my motions nor the election of the leading organs), I will say that there is a national secretary of the radical party, an editor of the n

ewspaper 'Liberazione', and that I pledge to be the collaborator it is necessary for me to be, the collaborator they want me to be as a non-radical companion such as I am. If others were the national secretary or the editor, it is possible that things would be the same, or maybe not. In any case, I wish to make it clear that I am not detaching myself, I am not drifting away from the reasons which are the basis of the radical party's existence. Simply, I am living them in a different, convinced way.

An example: for two months it has been impossible for me to be honest with you and with myself, and in the conquest of solitude, of the slow interpretation of these mechanisms, I have at the most succeeded in producing a 14, 15-page letter. I thought it was one of the usual letters, and it is: it contains the only things I've written apart from leaflets and the statements. Andrea Valcarenghi tells me: "Have you read Pasolini's article on 'Il Tempo Illustrato' on my book and on your preface?" "No!" Well, Pasolini writes that "(...) The preface by Marco Pannella, ten pages long, is finally the text of a political manifesto of Italian radicalism, it is a happening in the Italian culture of these years...." etcetera.

We know Pasolini (2), we know his limits, we like him or we dislike him; but what I tried to do in a few weeks, my friends and companions, was this: not to drift away from you, not to diminish my commitment, but to give radicalism a manifesto, and try to free the Italian left-wing intellectual from his sterile and arid egocentrism and from his weak nature. You who told yourselves that Pannella was necessary to the Radical Party: it simply meant denying the sense of my presence; you will see that I am not necessary, and that I am not even necessary in those things you call human, almost to say that they are more meaningful than political things.

My humanity, which was the humanity of the Italian University Students Union, these things we have tried to live, to find day by day, these things for which we knew that laicism is revolution, because knowing that Vonet is our companion, knowing that he is different, as I am, these things we have lived and asserted, we have said that the cover of the graves powdered by ideologies, by the definitions of the demons, of the insults, of the abuse, of the fascism, "is fascist". This Left, which should be lay and which then retrieves all the worst things of politics, "the fascist" who - as I wrote in Valcarenghi's preface - is another way of saying radical, objector, pederast, drug addict, etcetera - "fascist!"

Committing huge mistakes, not knowing, reducing abuse, thirty years of the life of our country. And those who believe that unity is the unity of the generations, those persons know nothing about happiness and love, because in reality the only unity which there is, the only continuity is that which unites the father who is unlike the son throughout the generations, and this continuity, this knowing that in fact there is something historical in dialogue, something which continues, which has its own precise rules, and that the common movements of our common mechanisms are not, cannot be, as such, great reasons of unity (not that I underestimate the generational unity of the students' movement, of the fact of being young, you will see this in the proposals and suggestions I will give at the end of this speech).

As to your new leaders or editors, if it is true that at twenty years of age there are objective conditions that make certain actions and behaviours in terms of radical liberation easier, more plausible and more possible, it is fair to underline them, to use them if you want to give them responsibilities so that they will become choices, and not usufruct of an unearned condition.

But Strik Leivers and Spadaccia are rights, you are all right: the party exists. This makes my decision and the quest for this new companionship, for this new way of going on, and even these human facts, easier. For 15, 18 years, Gianfranco, your resistance precisely on these subjects of public and private life have divided us; you will realize, you are already realizing, in this party, how much the things we wanted, the things we said, those for which you remained here, but have experienced with contradiction; you will conquer other contradictions, other pains and other joys, at all latitudes. Gianfranco D'Altri, Vincenzo Punzi, Felice Pannella, Lucio, Rolando, maybe even Roberto, will be other harbingers of 'humanity', whom I feel the need as a companion, to wish them that the party will not be too burdensome for them and for their lives.

There are these referendums. We need to be very careful. I would also like to say: let us be careful in being very honest in the contents of the referendum, and let us be careful in remembering that it is necessary to make a scandal. But the more we know it is necessary to make a scandal, the more we should also know that there is a scandal faced to which it is right to say "may the curse oppress you"; that is, we have the duty to use interior prudence, we do not have the duty (or the right) to calculate prudence, pondering other people's reflexes and reactions. What will they say?...

From this point of view, we have the duty of being deeply assured and convinced that we are also not transferring our own personal obsessions onto the referendums, but that we are transferring our certainties only; in other words, we need to be sure that we are proposing those things which we know to be ripe also for the conscience of other people, because we are not a sect but, as we said before, an organized minority, a group of people who have understood that freedom and responsibility strengthens us through the moment of the organization, and that organization does not call for sacrifices in terms of freedom and responsibility, otherwise it can go to hell, we aren't interested in it, we have nothing to do with it. (...)

In his weighty report, Angiolo Bandinelli said some things which represent a reason to believe in you and in the party. It is true: this party is the party of 51 per cent, not because we think it possible to rule with 51% (aren't we the only party that requires a 3/4-majority for its motions?). It is obvious that this is not our attitude. The problem is another: at a moment in which we give up viewing the political battle with the moral effort of a "YES" or a "NO", the day in which we give up, as the Italian political leadership has given up, the respect of the morality of a choice comprehensible to all, then the dangers are very serious, and they are dangers which are a reality, the reality of the winning regime.

I would simply like to add a remark which I have already made before, but which it is necessary to insist on: only those who do not have the conscience of a democrat can continue to repeat, as the squalid Casalegno of today (this emblematic moralist of Italian laicism, who corresponds to the lay values as the Italian Catholicism corresponds to religion) these vulgar moralists, these moralists and servants of the regime whom we should fear when one group and the other face each other clearly in Italy. But the essence of democracy is confidence in the conflict, and only those who have a Stalinist or Tridentine past can fear to say: I am fighting to make the Christian democrat Party become a minority, because they harbour the memory and the remorse of traditions in which the opponent, if different, was to be tortured or killed, be he Stalinist or Tridentine.

In his own dullness, I understand Enrico Berlinguer (3). He is someone who has the merit of having kept silent about the pre-Nazi massacres of the populations of the Volga and of the Don, of having believed in "Realpolitik", of having believed in the political creation, in the State, in ideology against life, to the point of creating the story of the torture or the killing of the other. I understand that at this point he is afraid of touching the other person, even with a caress.

This is what we need to claim: that we are the extreme Left, as we are. That we are capable of giving strength to the Italian Left because we know at all times that the opponent is worth as much as us. We realize not only the difference between the mistake and the author of the mistake, but also the real historical difference between error and truth, because we are the upholders of ancient hopes, which are alive and still fresh in Italy. Certain myths of the French Revolution, certain hopes of the bourgeoisie in the generous (and torbid, given the course of the events) moment of its adolescence, the historical Right, all these things separated by the concrete way in which they were historically used for purposes of power, are our hopes, are the hopes of equality, fraternity, justice, the hopes of the rule of law.

With a slight difference compared to you, Giuliana, I believe I can say that I am not interested in laws, I am not concerned by them. I repeat, I am convinced that there are laws that prohibit to prohibit, that are necessary. Under this aspect I have nothing in common with the old anarchist friends (the anarchists of the funerals and of the defeats, like the communists and the socialists). All I know is that I am creating, and not destroying, spaces of greater freedom and greater love, that a political body, like a human body, by making wrong attempts can nonetheless hope to give up creating, to be perfect.

Then you can perhaps say, talking about politics, that we underline how the so-called liberal Malagodi (4), the so-called socialists of De martino, the leaders of the Italian political life who can afford the luxury, from the height of their positions, for 27 years, of attacking Togliatti (5), of attacking the communist line; from Almirante (6) to De Martino (7), all of them. This mystic vision, this corporative vision of the State - as Gianfranco was saying - needs to be understood. This is a society in which even the labour union clash should not translate into political clash, but should translate into negotiation, dialogue, into political conflict, but within the leading class of bureaucrats-politicians, of politicians-bureaucrats.

Our idea, instead, is the democratic, maybe even traditional idea of a tendential two-party system, the idea of a choice: we want the Christian Democrat Party on the minority side, because the Christian Democrat Party is fascism, fascism was the Christian Democrat Party, only we should say so without it being an insult (because in that case we should insult 99,99% of those who lived before us and whom we are in any case bound to). This is what it means to be lay.

For this, in terms of civilization, in democratic terms of class, the value of this party is that of foreshadowing in the pains and joys that are conquered, in the acquisitions of the society we all hope to create one day, one day not too far, but to get there day by day. There will never be a society void of conflicts, without contradictions, without pains. It will never exist. The only thing we can ask ourselves is not to be mortified by useless, fragile, alien pains, those which our condition of men and women at this point of history can ask us not to give up, not to die of hunger, not to see others die of hunger, not to lynch, and other things.

Today perhaps I didn't say what I wanted to say, many of the things I wanted to say this morning I didn't say because I was tired, because I carried (and I have rid myself of) the weight of the resolve, of the contradictions we have experienced in July, which we talked about, that of this Congress, of that renewed commitment on my part, of what it cost me in practical terms, a life different from the one I had foreseen and wanted, therefore failure replacing hope, hardness replacing sweetness. The problem is that this party (as I said I am a supporter of this party without being a member) needs to exist, and does exist, and I have faith in it, as Sandro and all the others who believe there are no possibilities in Italy of overthrowing the current trend and the force of regime for at least twenty years, apart from the specific force of the meaning, of the choices and of the method of the Radical Party. It is this which it is right to do: strengthen the movement we are all part of, the radical movement, whic

h the Radical Party is the most important part and the central part of, even if the Statute itself already provided for this and tendentially provides for it when not only Ivonè, not only the companions in prison, not only Igor, not only Franco Roccella, not only those whom we can call by name, but the faces, the many unknown faces will have developed the awareness that the Radical Party does not involve sublimations but on the contrary precise statements; it does not involve evasions, it does not involve phallocratic deviations. (..)

In conclusion, if this is the situation, I really believe I can say that, freed from the contradiction for which we (and I) have suffered from, I shall be a good companion. And remember one thing: I had pledged to be a good companion ten days ago and I I think I will be such for all of you.

Translator's notes

(1) Sergio Stanzani: Member of the Italian Liberal Party, he left the part together with the left wing to found the Radical Party. Elected member of the Senate in 1979, Stanzani was re-elected at the Chamber of Deputies in 1983 and confirmed member of Parliament in the elections of June 1987. Elected First Secretary of the Radical Party in January 1988 in Bologna by the XXXIV Congress and confirmed by the XXXV Congress in Budapest in April 1989.

(2) Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975): Italian writer and director.

(3) Enrico Berlinguer (1922-1984): Secretary of the Italian Communist Party from 1968 1972.

(4) Giovanni Malagodi (1904-1990): Secretary of the Italian Liberal Party from 1954 to 1972.

(5) Palmiro Togliatti (1893-1964): Secretary of the Communist Party from 1927 to his death. He spent long periods of time abroad, as member of the Comintern, and in Spain during the civil war. After the elections of 1948 he became head of the opposition movement. He laid the foundations for the autonomy of the Italian Communist Party from the USSR.

(6) Giorgio Almirante (1914-1988): Secretary of the MSI from 1969 to 1987.

(7) De Martino (1907): Secretary of the Socialist Party from 1964 to 1966 and from 1972 to 1976 (co-secretary of the unified socialist party from 1966 to 1970).