ABSTRACT: After the major victory of 13 May 1974, in the referendum which the clerical organizations had convened to abrogate divorce (60 percent of Italians declared themselves in favour of maintaining divorce), the Left distances itself from the civil rights movement to prepare a policy of alliances with the Catholic world. The Radical Party on the contrary relaunches the civil rights policy, and starts collecting signatures for eight referendums (abrogation of the Concordat, abrogation of military courts, of crimes of opinion contained in the penal code, of parts of the laws on mental hospitals, of the law that grants special powers to the police as regards arrest, searches and wiretapping, of the law that assigns consistent public funds to the parties, of the "Investigatory Commission" - the special "court" represented by parliamentarians which has the task of giving a preventive judgement on crimes committed by ministers). In the meanwhile, Marco Pannella has started a fast to urge the interruption of t

he censorship operated by the RAI and by the press on the radical initiatives, and to obtain, by way of amends, an adequate coverage on the contents of the referendum proposals for which signatures are being collected. In this article, Marco Pannella illustrates the meaning of the objectives and of the slogans of the Radical Party's current action. The policy of the civil rights movement today represents the spearhead of the democratic class struggle against the regime and the Establishment. If the current radical battle obtains a victory, the aspect of the Italian legislature and politics will experience a radical change. The relation between the ten objectives of the ongoing nonviolent action and the project of the eight anti-regime referendums.

Notes and remarks for a debate and for the ongoing action.

(Radical News n. 289 of 23 July 1974)

"Reinstating the republican legality", "defeating the violence of the institutions", "no to the abuse of power", "rule of law", "for a truly constitutional republic", "institutional State", "saving Parliament", "defending their laws, their programs"; are these legitimist, or at the most reformist slogans and objectives?

Does it make sense for radicals, for revolutionaries, to devote themselves "to the bitter end", risking their personal and collective lives, using the ultimate nonviolent weapon, when the positive outcome of the battle would have no other result - at best - but that of establishing or reinstating an order and methods which are no more than liberal and democratic, and not libertarian, socialist, lay and revolutionary?

While others prepare (and organize) structures and parties "for the revolution", "for the takeover of power", "for communism"? My convinced answer is: yes. Not only this regime (and this is what we are concerned about today), but even the capitalist system of production and of social organization cannot tolerate the democratic and liberal integrity, are not in the conditions of respecting the requests advanced by the French, bourgeois and Jacobin revolution, requests for equality, fraternity and freedom. Most important of all, in structural and historical terms, the exploitation of man on man, the authoritarian organization of the industrial production and of any form of productive or distributional activity, the need for a system capable of producing a surplus value to be robbed and seized, have found new expressions of class ready to finance them: no longer just the Calvinist, European, capitalist and "liberal" bourgeoisie, but also the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie rooted in the Catholic-peasa

nt culture, in communist and "Leninist" cultures have historically associated themselves to authoritarian, statist, centralized and national productive, structural, sociopolitical, suprastructural, distributive, cultural and infrastructural productive models. In our country, the ideological and national structure supporting the consumerist myth and the capitalist justification is the corporative, idealistic and populist structure, which links the fascist stage to the Christian Democratic one characterized by the edification of the Corporative State.

THE REGIME AND THE ESTABLISHMENT CANNOT TOLERATE THE INTEGRITY OF THE TRADITIONAL DEMOCRATIC DEMANDS

It is not by chance that, at this point, there is no old party or new group belonging to the Leninist school which does not proclaim, in Italy, that the safeguard of the bourgeois liberties, of the democratic method, of the social democratic hopes is possible only in the context of a socialist (or "communist") revolutionary alternative, and Lelio Basso (1) is no longer alone in considering the idea of establishing the only perspective and the political scene where the ideals of the bourgeois revolution can be upheld, achieved and overcome not as a mere "added value" of the democratic socialist and class-conscious perspective, but as the essential condition and justification of the "workers'" proposal. From the point of view of the praxis, this growth in awareness and in theoretic force remains an abstract proclamation and an element of contradiction. The civil rights campaigns remain a hypothetical and instrumental "surplus" for all our communist comrades both from the Communist Party and from the Manifesto-

PDUP (2). From the point of view of the praxis, the "class-conscious Left" no less than the "Right" represented by Berlinguer (3) or Lama (4), perceive the democratic and liberal campaigns as marginal and instrumental, they uphold them only when they suffer the illiberal and antidemocratic assault of the institutions, without any true conviction and without efficacy. The Communist Party, for its part, is the victim of a hallucination: it is not by chance that at the end of the fifties and in the early sixties, its "Left", in an attempt to make the class contradictions and the historical structure of the Italian bourgeoisie explode, it recovered not the democratic and liberating features of the upper bourgeois, European, protestant and puritan capitalism, but the authoritarian, populist, anti-industrial and anti-humanistic features of the counterreformist Church, of State capitalism, of the bureaucratic and corporative interclassism.

The bleak theorization of the "national ways", with the misuse of Gramsci's (5) philosophy, with the attribution of a sort of necessary dominion of the "peasant world" to the "Catholic world" of the Christian Democratic Party and of the Church, and of the "working-class world" to the Communist Party, was the cover of a wait-and-see and ultra-conservative political outlet of the ongoing social conflicts.

In the seventies, and especially in these days, the "working-class" myth and the structuralist myth are regaining power.

Nor is the danger perceived that, by basing the social and political conflict on the "structural" "workers'" movement, this will necessarily lay the premises for an American type of "integration" of the elites or of the more strictly "blue-collar" classes into the regime and to the Establishment. The new confidence in a catastrophe of the Establishment (spontaneous or caused), in the end of the capacity of the capitalist organization of society to respond to the demands for a domestic- or world-scale wealth, order, social and economic progress of the middle and lower classes is, as it has been for fifty years, "more motivated" and on the verge of being verified; or so it seems. On the contrary we fear that, once more, the workers' movement, whose direction (thanks to the "ideological power" which oppresses and pollutes it) will become increasingly "bourgeois" and incapable, will be left alone to face the whole political conflict.

THE CIVIL RIGHTS CAMPAIGNS REMAIN MARGINAL AND INSTRUMENTAL FOR BOTH THE PARLIAMENTARY AND THE REVOLUTIONARY LEFT

Faced with the formidable corporative and "public" structure which the Italian capitalism and "bourgeoisie" have achieved, the "structural" battles which aim, above all, at the destruction of the economic mechanism, risk being quickly absorbed or isolated with respect to the majority of the masses. It is the "general", supra-structural, political campaigns which on the contrary have, under such circumstances, the greatest subversive and alternative potential, in terms of inflexibility, of explosiveness of the contradiction within the bourgeois power, but which continues to have and to propose not only liberist but also liberal and civil potentialities.

THE DEMOCRATIC AND PROGRESSIVIST IDEOLOGY IS THE VASTEST PLATFORM OF UNITY CONCEIVABLE TODAY, AND IT CAN ENDANGER THE REGIME...

In the consumerist society which every capitalism needs for its very nature, which is ideologically homogeneous to the ideology and to the reactionary, interclassist, depoliticizing and corporative interests of the traditional power in Italy, the democratic, liberal, humanist, progressivist ideology has a function of crisis, upsetting the current structure of the regime. It represents the vastest and strongest platform of popular unity which it is ever possible to conceive and to achieve. May 13 was a demonstration of this, that 13 May which the class-conscious, haughty, self-sufficient, careless Left did not struggle to ensure itself, and which the Communist Party for its part tried to avert. That 13 May has been possible because for years, the bourgeois and traditional detainees of power, such as Perrone (6), Crespi (7), Agnelli (8), played the "liberal" card instead of the authoritarian and corporative one.

If it is true that only the socialist, libertarian and democratic alternative can rescue and accomplish the bourgeois ideals, it is equally true that only by upholding and giving real social and political substance to those ideals and to that heritage will that alternative make any progress, immediately.

The actual distance and extraneity towards the political institutions, which are typical of a large part of the class-conscious Left; their merely instrumental and tactical use on the part of the vast class-conscious Right of the Communist Party, which, under this aspect, becomes homogeneous to the supporting ideology and to the anti-State and anti-Parliamentarian traditions of the Catholic world, based on the defence of the most parasitical and backward social classes, are a reason of weakness and of blatant inadequacy on the part of the Left as a whole in the current crisis of the institutions and therefore in the ongoing social conflict, which it is not in conditions of giving an immediate, more advanced and positive political outlet.

Thus, the hegemonic role of the democratic class-conscious movement remains a theoretic petition, and the policy of the alliances is ruinous, and the initiative of it is left to the liberal bourgeoisie, and its administration to the labour unions and to the more conservative currents that manage them.

The "cost-free major reforms", the "institutional reforms", the "constitutional accomplishments", the "defence of the democratic freedom and honesty of the republican institutions, the campaigns for a different quality of life (with the establishment if divorce to abortion, and the abolition of the civilian and military codes) remain totally alien to the unions, completely marginal for their class-conscious political movement as a whole and for all its traditional communist-Leninist or social democratic articulations.

While on the one hand they continue to theorize or claim to notice an increasing degree of participation of the masses to the campaigns, from a political point of view they do nothing but photograph (or "tackle" or "support") the traditional reflex represented by the defence of the living and working conditions, and the consequent campaigns.

...THE POLICY OF THE ALLIANCES ON THE CONTRARY IS RUINOUS, AND ITS INITIATIVE IS LEFT TO THE LIBERAL BOURGEOISIE (AND ITS ADMINISTRATION TO THE LABOUR UNIONS)

Apart from strikes and street demonstration, they do not want to give them any other means to struggle, or they do not understand the importance of doing so. When the radicals, at all levels, and compatibly with the existing institutional and political situations, propose to add the means of the popular referendums, and for this purpose create structures and instruments of cohesion and unity; or when they propose or devise new techniques and possibilities of mass intervention (the fiscal strike, partly launched by a handful of militants in the autumn of 1972), or, as a suggestion and an experiment, they propose the "telephone" mobilization to paralyze the most highly exposed centres of power (newspaper, ministries, police headquarters, etc.), they don't even realize what this is all about. The ideology consisting in non-change, in the use and consumption of the present, the bureaucratic ideology, is deeply rooted. In the moments of dramatic conflict, which could be a mass conflict, this leaves the usual alt

ernative between the traditional nonviolence of the "regulated" strikes and demonstrations, and inertia and "violence" on the other hand. Which, in fact, amounts to no alternative at all. Only the inertia or the traditional and passive use of the masses in the political conflict.

Similarly, the commitment for institutional reforms capable of increasing the political potential of hegemony and of democratic class conflict is also ignored in the praxis or proclaimed as an abstract notion.

The dramatization of the need for the referendum, for the campaigns against the Carrettoni bill, whereby they tried to prevent it from being convened; the dramatization of the need for the elimination of any compromisory management of the process of reforms of family law, with the contemporary, final and unavoidable placing of abortion into the political and parliamentary area which will once again represent the explosive heritage of an action which has been conceived, prepared and developed in total isolation by the Radical Party and by the federate libertarian forces, and especially by the Women's Liberation Movement, which alone will last years, and for years will weaken the regime and paralyze any "compromise" or will make its conduction into a catastrophe; of the problems relative to the anticonstitutional exclusion of the minorities from the use of the public monopoly of information, which have already found a solution which is preposterously inadequate, but which already represents an advanced campaig

n platform compared to yesterday, all this and more is the result of less than a year of activity of the Radical Party and of the League for Divorce, with the unanimous hostility of all the Letf-wing press, of all the "Left", from the neo (or palaeo) Leninist Left to the traditional Left represented by the Communist Party, the Socialist Party or "L'Espresso" (9)!

We were about to omit the campaign for the eight referendums which, in the middle of summer, we effectively relaunched until the 26th of September, which is now widely discussed and which has lead to the collection of over one million attested signatures (of the five million necessary), which correspond to at least ten million signatures collected in total freedom, of the kind of the "petitions for Vietnam" or similar ones. By signing under such conditions, one hundred thousand citizens have shown a complete and unconditional adhesion to a political project and to an alternative plan against the regime.

At this point, we can perhaps insert a few remarks on nonviolence and on fasting, without fearing to appear monomaniac. For at least one month, and after the general censure we have been the object of on the part of "Lotta Continua" (10) and "Il Secolo" (11), the regime press and the public opinion have associated the two concepts Left and nonviolence (or at least the denunciation of the violence of the institutions and of the State), and have started to conceive the fact that illegality and the struggle against unfair situations, against abuses of power and corruption may go together.

THE "STRUCTURAL" AND BLUE-COLLAR BATTLES CAN BE REABSORBED BY THE CORPORATIVE STRUCTURE OF THE REGIME WITHOUT A GENERAL POLITICAL CONFRONTATION

As I write, we still do not know if the weapon of collective fasting, of direct, nonviolent actions, will have enabled to achieve a series of objectives, without paying too high a price, which once again have not been estimated in their effective importance by our comrades of the "revolutionary" Left. For the moment, from a militant point of view, the action has involved less damage than any hard demonstration "with accidents", a considerable growth in the cognizance and in the support as regards the objectives, the methods, the formulations of the Radical Party and of the League for Divorce, a greater number of signatures for the eight referendums, the opening of new and particularly involving areas of conflict and confrontation and a mobilization of political sympathy within the parliamentary groups and the party forces which should not be underrated. Particularly with the Socialist Party, we have reached unprecedented sectors and convergences which can be of all but secondary importance for a political di

alogue on a policy based on the assertion of civil rights. All this starting from a terrible crisis which has not been solved, consequent to the political ostracism massively and completely practiced against the Radical Party and the League for Divorce on the part of all the other political forces especially on the eve of the referendum.

It is even more doubtful that we will manage, at this point, to achieve that general, immensely important objective for the political future of this country, for which a great number of Radical militants have worked for in the party, that is, the success of the project to convene the eight anti-regime referendums next Spring.

Clearly, we are aware of the almost insurmountable difficulties. In Summer, in August and during three weeks of September - collecting 500,000 attested signatures is by far more difficult than trying to do so, as we tried to, in Spring and throughout a political campaign which enhanced democratic awareness and multiplied the occasions for meetings and street demonstrations.

It would be deceptive at this point to count on the mobilization of the Leninist groups. With the exception of "Avanguardia Operaia", which has at least proclaimed its consensus and which has taken some practical steps, no other communist group has given an ounce of attention to this perspective and to this campaign.

On the contrary, we are doing the most to make it impossible for militants and supporters to ignore the initiative, and to urge them to express a political opinion on the negative attitude held by the leadership.

AS ALREADY ON MAY 13, CIVIL RIGHTS, REFERENDUMS, NONVIOLENT INITIATIVES, "COST-FREE" REFORMS, HAVE A UNIFYING POTENTIAL, ENABLE A CONFRONTATION/CONFLICT WITH THE CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND WITH THE CLASS OPPONENT

But, on the other hand, the ongoing action can indirectly provide other political solutions, other organizational structures and operative instruments. If accepted, our request to have pages of free advertisement on all major national dailies as a way of amends for the unconstitutional censorship, in contrast with the readers' commitments, would represent a move of great force for the resumption of the initiative. Moreover, we should get the parliamentary committee of supervision on the RAI to give us an immediate authorization for a series of reports and debates on each of the referendums, and features on the long and dramatic nonviolent action of the collective fast. In the past the Radical Party has probably underestimated the possibility of finding adhesions for at least one or more referendums in the unions and in the socialist area.

The objectives with which we opened this series of remarks and notes for the debate in the Radical Party and for its political initiative are not obsolete, alien, irrelevant or marginal for a democratic class-conscious initiative, and create new perspectives for the civil rights movement, for the Left and for democracy in this country.

Translator's notes

(1) Lelio Basso (1903-1978): Politician. Anti-fascist, secretary of the Socialist Party (1948-49), in 1964 he joined the (Italian Socialist Party for the Union of all Workers (PSIUP), which he was president of.

(2) Il Manifesto: political movement based on the homonymous magazine established in 1969 by exponents of the Communist Party (A. Natoli, R. Rossanda, L. Pinto, L. Magri), who were later expelled by the party. In 1971 the monthly magazine became a daily newspaper and for some years was the organ of the Party for the Union of Proletarians (PDUP). It later became an independent daily.

(3) Enrico Berlinguer (1922-1984): Italian politician. Secretary of the Communist Youth Federation (1949-56), member of Parliament since 1968, secretary general of the Communist Party from 1979 to 1984.

(4) Luciano Lama (1921): Union representative. Communist, secretary general of the Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL) since 1970.

(5) Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937): Italian thinker and politician. Active in the socialist movement in Turin since 1931, organizer of the weekly magazine "L'Ordine Nuovo" (1919), he was among the founders of the Italian Communist Party (1921). He obtained the secretariat of the party in 1924, established the newspaper "L'Unità" (1924) and strengthened his position at the Congress of Lion (1926). He advocated an alliance between the industrial proletariat of the North and the poor farmers of the South. Arrested by the fascist government in 1926, he was imprisoned in Turi and then hospitalized (1933) in Formia and Rome, wehere he died of disease. An account of that period is contained in his 'Letters from the prison' (1947).

(6) Alessandro Perrone (1920-1980): editor and owner of "Il Messaggero" (1952-74), editor of "Il Secolo XIX" until 1978.

(7) Cristoforo Benigno Crespi (1833-1920): manufacturer. Among the pioneers of cotton industry. His son Silvio Benigno (1868-1944) was president of the Banca Commerciale Italiana (1919-30). Mario (1879-1962), cousin of the above, was the manager of the company that published "Il Corriere della Sera" until his death.

(8) Agnelli: family of manufacturers. Giovanni (1866-1945) was the founder of the FIAT automobile company. Giovanni, known as Gianni (1921), nephew of the above, is the president of the FIAT company since 1966 and of the Italian Manufacturers' Association from 1974 to 1976. Umberto (1934), brother of Gianni is managing director (1970-76; 1979-80) and vice president (since 1976) of FIAT; senator from 1976 to 1979.

(9) L'Espresso: cultural, political and financial weekly magazine, established in 1955 in Rome.

(10) Lotta Continua: extreme Left political movement established in 1969 in Turin; in 1971 it created the homonymous newspaper.

(11) Il Secolo: daily newspaper established 1866 by E. Sonzogno. In 1927 it merged with "La Sera".