ABSTRACT: The contrast between the Radical Party and the Communist Party is at its peak: the communists accuse the radicals of being practically fascists, CIA agents disguised as a left-wing party. Pannella analyses the old Stalinist habit which tends to consider those who oppose their methods from the Left as their most dangerous enemies. Against these enemies, slander and lynching are even more merciless than against the "class enemies".

(Radical News - July 1976 from "Marco Pannella - Works and Speeches - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982).

"L'Unità" (1) has compared us to the notorious propaganda of "Pace e Libertà" of Sogno and Cavallo and of the movement of Pacciardi (2). The "communist" daily continues :"so that more than a new landing we could talk about a reflux".

Therefore, we supposedly shared the positions of Sogno and Cavallo, of Pacciardi or of the corrupt CIA men. In those years, to say the truth, I was heading unitary student movements which included liberals and communists, and we has struggled to keep those movements that way. Back then, the target of such infamous, fascist accusations were companions such as Lucio Libertini of the USI, now among the first elected candidates of the PCI in Turin. Clearly, at the time it was L'Unità, not Libertini, to behave in this fascist way: these are typical cases of "transference". But the communists were no softer on Mario Pannunzio (3), Ernesto Rossi (4), my companions of that time: articles on "Rinascita" (5) compared their ideas and their expressions to the ones used by Mussolini and the Nazis.

These old habits persist, and they are also communist habits; for decades such habits have split the working class, caused millions of assassinations among the proletarians and the communists on the part of the Stalinists and Jacobins, of whom the companions from "L'Unità" often pursue the systems, and this is why we cannot remain silent now faced to these senseless attacks, to these lies: certain methods must be opposed, for a new historical defeat of the Left which we represent together.

The origin of these insults and lies is an interview published by "Liberation" in Paris. I haven't read the interview, so I can't tell how accurate it is, just as I haven't read the ANSA dispatch, which "L'Unità" refers to. But I can confirm straight away that I consider the vast majority of the communist companions and the Party as a whole as morally and individually irreproachable. On the other hand, I think the "Togliatti line" (6), so worn out as to be in vain revived, is deeply wrong, historically unsuccessful, fundamentally interclass, not at all socialist but generically democratic and Jacobin. I believe the PCI's strategy over the last thirty years has been a progressivist bourgeois type of strategy, like the culture of that which Pasolini (7) called the "Marxist bourgeoisie" which runs it. It is useless denying that the PCI's leadership as a whole is represented by bourgeois, middle and upper class leaders, with the exceptions which confirm the rule. Equally obvious is the fact that 90% of the PCF's

leaders come from the working class or the proletariat. The fact that this country has been ruled for over thirty years more by an assembly regime than by formal governments is a further truth; that even in years of apparent, harsher conflict between majority and parliamentary minority, Italy was ruled by hundreds of corporative laws, silently passed by Christian Democratic and Communist majorities with all the other parties following was documented for years by unquestioned publications of the Mulino publishing house, and is confirmed by parliamentary records. The fact that the PCI tolerated, for thirty years, a state of outlawing, while the Constitution was violated or ignored, and did so knowingly, on the basis of an explicit political line, is another fact.

The opportunism and minimalism of this position is nothing but the corruption of a left-wing line, in the sense in which a body decays and deteriorates. I am convinced of this and I have said it and repeated it. This is why, according to L'Unità I should not only be a comrade of Cavallo, but I should even have been so. The violence of falsehood is rising, the "tolerance" of certain communists, as usual, is reserved only to the historical enemies of democracy and socialism: the DC, the Vatican, and too many other powerful parts.

When it comes to companions, people who struggle according their conscience and without exceptions, without subordinations or problems, without coward and sterile obediences, then lynching is always used.

Paese Sera (8), the newspaper which shared the billions of illegal funds of the ENI (9) and of the AGIP (10) with Nelson Page's The Mirror, censoring (together with L'Unità) even certain labour struggles of that period, the other day, a few hours before the vote, stated that we had spent a lot of money in the electoral campaign, and implied that this money (nonexistent and which no one knows anything of) came from "anticommunist" sources. Today, L'Unità accuses us of being fascist troublemakers, corrupt like Cavallo.

Fine: we answer with the request to abrogate the fascist codes now: the "Rocco and Reale" laws now: to fully investigate the scandals of the SID (11) and of the State, now. After thirty years that the PCI has been waiting, no time can be lost. Also because we, who have been struggling for twenty years without exceptions, for a government of the Left and therefore of the PCI above all, would like to avoid certain fascist attitudes to shift from the pages of L'Unità to the seats of government.

One does at the government what one has done at the opposition; and too many communists know, from first hand experience, as we know, that the line of the historical compromise (12) and the will of the leaders of the PCI has too often been upheld with violence, versus any internal dissent. Therefore, also for this let us abrogate the fascist laws, and defend the constitutional and civil rights of everyone, in our parties and in our Left as well.

Translator's notes

(1) L'Unità: daily newspaper of the Italian Communist Party established in Turin in 1924.

(2) Randolfo Pacciardi (1899): Secretary of the Republican Party (1946-48), Minister of Defence ('48-53), he left the party in 1964 to establish the Movement for the new republic.

(3) Mario Pannunzio (1910-1968): Editor of the newspaper "Risorgimento Liberale" (1943-47) and of the weekly "Il Mondo" (1949-66).

(4) Ernesto Rossi (1897-1967): Italian journalist and politician.

Leader of Giustizia e Libertà (1929), he was arrested in 1930 for his antifascist activity. After the was he promoted the European Federalist Movement and was one of the founders of the Radical Party. His best known work is "I padroni del vapore" (1955).

(5) Rinascita: political and cultural weekly magazine established in 1944.

(6) Palmiro Togliatti (1893-1964): Italian politician. Among the founders of "Ordine Nuovo", he cooperated with Gramsci in opposing the extremist theses of Bordiga. Secretary of the Italian Communist Party from 1927 to his death, he lived abroad for long periods, in Moscow as member of the secretariat of the Comintern, in Spain during the civil war. Back in Italy in 1944, he launched the Communist Party's national policy by supporting the other antifascist forces, by recognizing the role of the Catholics and by participating in several government from 1944 to 1947. After the elections of 1948, he was head of the left-wing opposition. Mastermind of the "Italian way to socialism", Togliatti laid down the premises of the Italian Communist Party's independence from the U.S.S.R.

(7) Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975): Italian writer and film director. Author of verse, novels on the underprivileged in Rome, "Ragazzi di Vita" (1955) Una vita violenta (1959), theatre texts, essays. In his films he described the miserable life in the peripheral neighbourhoods around Rome: "Accattone" (1961), "Mamma Roma" (1962), "La ricotta" (1963). He also provided an interpretation of the Gospel with "Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964).

(8) Paese Sera: daily newspaper established in Rome in 1950.

(9) ENI: National Hydrocarbon Corporation.

(10) AGIP: National Hydrocarbons Authority.

(11) SID: Italian Intelligence Service established in 1966. Dissolved in 1977, it was replaced by the SISMI.

(12) Historical compromise: political strategy outlined in 1973 by Enrico Berlinguer and based on the cooperation among communists, catholics and socialists.