ABSTRACT: An historical interpretation of the Radical Party based

on the reconstruction of the various phases of Radical

developments from 1955 to 1977.

Index:

I From The Old To The New Radicals

II The Solitude Of A Minority

III The Campaign For Divorce

IV A Party In Search Of Its Self: From The Congress Of Refoundation (1967) To The Congress Of The Relaunching (1972)

V Opposing The Regime With Civil Rights

VI For A Democratic Revolution

VII In The Country And In Parliament

("THE NEW RADICALS", The History and Sociology of a Political Movement, Arnoldo Mondadori, Publishers, October 1977)

1. THE STRUGGLE FOR REVIVAL OF THE NEW GROUP

In Autumn of 1962, after the desertion, the withdrawal, and the resignation of a large part of its members, the Radical Party was reduced to a mere emblem whose sole heir was the Radical left. The Rome group, which in the preceding three years had traced out the essential lines of the new position, had published "Sinistra Radicale" and had become a faction, took over the leadership of what little was left of the party, becoming its sole political representative and inheriting its slender material structures.

The questions that the new leadership had to face were very difficult and of different kinds: political, organisational, relations with its counterparts and with public opinion. It was not only a question of asserting a new line, but also of changing the elitist image which the name Radical decidedly and quite rightly evoked. The new group, while conserving its ideal and political relationship with the old party, nevertheless had ideas, and not only ideas, but above all a political praxis very far from and surely conflicting with those of the original leaders. The Radical Party of 1955 - 1958 originated around a group of esteemed intellectuals aided by two weeklies such as "Il Mondo" and "L'Espresso" which, although in the minority, offered them a springboard that guaranteed their making themselves heard. The new Radicals were neither esteemed intellectuals nor did they have any particular structures or circles to support them unless one excepts their experience in university politics. The old Radicals

could establish a relationship with the progressive and enlightened bourgeoisie, not because of their social standing but because of their way of conducting politics. The new Radicals, whatever their personal social extraction may have been, discerned their political center of gravity in militancy and not in debate. For many more years, from 1962 until the end of the decade, both the press and the other political circles would impose the image of the old party of enlightened bourgeoisie on the new Radicals until they managed to assert for themselves a new image more congruous with the new Radical Party and the type of action that it was pursuing.

The first inter-party communiques of the new party were made in February and March 1963 and bore the signatures of Marco Pannella or Massimo Teodori for the Secretariat. Here mention was made of "reorganising the situation of party members and of the most ample listing of party sympathisers and friends", (1) of the need to wage an "intensive self-financing campaign" and the study of the local situations where there were still party adherents. Listing the names here can give an idea of the way in which the structures and affiliations of the old party passed to the new one with almost only one element of continuity which lay in the initiative of the Rome group. Present at the roll call was a Milanese group headed by Mario and Luca Boneschi and Umberto Emiliani, while only twenty or so groups had sent representatives to a meeting in Milan at the end of 1962; among the municipal councillors who had not resigned were those from Genoa (Balestreri), Piedmont (Salza and Donadei), Pistoia (Fedi), Como (Ponci),

L'Aquila, Pescara, Varese, Civitavecchia and other smaller centers. (2) In the meantime there had been constituted a provisional National Secretariat at the end of 1962 with Marco Pannella (Rome), Luca Boneschi (Milan) and Vincenzo Luppi (Bologna). This first circular concluded with an appeal that was symptomatic of the situation: "I hope we will have the strength to begin all over again". (3) So it was explicitly a question of a new beginning.

A national meeting in the form of a "broadened national council", which was held in Bologna on March 9-10, 1963, reiterated the decisive opposition to the way the encounter between the Socialists and Catholics was being realised and indicated the need to present the Catholic question in other terms: "If the democratic Catholics really want to help create a democratic state, they must find their place on the Italian left. In fact, there is a clear line of demarcation in Italy between the forces of conservatism and the forces of progress". (4) For the coming national elections, the instructions given were no longer tied to the parties of the "democratic left" but rather to the entire range of leftist parties (from the PCI to the PRI, from the PSI to the PSDI) de fining at the same time the objective as being "the unity of the Italian left" and the "creation of the new European left". The fact that a vote for the Communists had been indicated at that time constituted the true new Radical policy. The

document ended by making reference to "the prospects for a new left free of all "frontist" aspects and of all discrimination among the components of the left itself, in respect to which the Radicals believed they could bring another original and independent contribution for the renewal of Italian and European society". (5)

In the national elections of April 28, 1963, whose main issue for the left was the acceptance or rejection of the center-left, the Radicals presented no candidates given the party's precarious condition and only recommended that "one of the four leftist parties be given the vote" - a recommendation that in reality was understood by the small groups of militants to mean a vote for the PCI as the only opposition party, or for the PSI in order to strengthen its leftist faction that at the end of the year was to become the PSIUP (Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity) at the moment the Socialists entered the government. On this occasion the provisional secretary put four questions on how they would vote to a certain number of prominent people. Among them were Elio Vittorini (a well known writer, ed.) who in the meantime had accepted the nomination to be President Of the Radical Party, as well as Pier Paolo Pasolini (poet and film-maker, ed.) Leonardo Sciascia ( the Sicilian writer, ed.) and Umb

erto Eco (semiotician and novelist, ed.). The answers were published and distributed under the title "Il voto Radicale" (The Radical Vote). (6) It had a two-fold significance: On the one hand declarations made under the Radical name were collected regarding votes going for the most part to the PCI and the PSI and a very few to the PRI; on the other hand there was the original issues being proposed in the questions. Attention was called to the opposition between the diffusion of material well-being and the leading role in society of the lower a nd middle classes. A European perspective was used and emphasis put on the need for an anti-militarist commitment as a hallmark of the new left. And the question of Church and State - in particular the opposition to the so-called liberty of the schools - was put on the order of the day.

The continuity of the old and the new parties thus became ever more tenuous both on the political and the practical levels. In the April 1963 elections some of the PR old guard did not merely approach, but were organically absorbed into the PSI - others in the PRI - which had attempted to draw "independent Radicals" into their lists, and the ex secretary Leone Cattani became an unsuccessful candidate for a senatorial seat in Rome under the PSDI banner.

The new Radicals, contrarily, prepared to commence or recommence the construction or the reconstruction of an independent political force, however small. The great difficulties that were immediately encountered resided in the subjective ambitions themselves of its group of leaders (all twenty and thirty-years old) to not subordinate the Radicals to other groups but to express their own original ideas. And so, after only a few months of having become active again, in the Summer of 1963, a new crisis presented the Radicals with the dilemma of either becoming active on the political scene or formally disbanding. A national conference was called for June 8 and 9 to reach a decision on precisely this urgent alternative: "the growth of the party or its disbanding". In the letter convening the conference it was stated:"No other serious and responsible choice is available other than one of these. <> is impossible". (7) This formulation reflected the will of the group to not accept either an existence

on the fringes of political life or as street companions of other more important political groups. For several months the new party took time to find an answer to the dilemma of how to be effectively active in the country beyond the limits of the small group of militants. They found it in the decision to begin a news service called "Agenzia Radicale" and for a few years this was the primary mode of Radical activity in the country.

2. THE <> AND ITS BATTLES: ENI, SOCIAL ASSISTANCE, SCHOOLS

The fact that the central Roman group of the PR, several months after having taken over complete responsibility for the new line, should still have decided to dedicate the major part of its energies to the conception and the publication of an ample daily news agency has a significance that can explain much about the political orientation of the new Radicals.

A small group of politicians has the possibility of choosing many roads for asserting and realising its positions. If its struggle is primarily on a theoretical level, it will avail itself of such tools as written essays and defining a platform of principles. And this indubitably is what was being done in Italy and Europe during the first half of the 60's by the heretical Marxist groups who found the road for their own self-realisation in the rediscovery, reinterpretation or re-evaluation of texts.

If a group finds in certain social factors the structural contradictions of a specific historical moment, it will try to study is mechanisms and develop specific political actions. This was the attitude, for example, taken between 1961 and 1964 by the groups that formed around Raniero Panzieri and created the "Quaderni Rossi" curiously contemporaneous with the new Radical departure. In evaluating these facts, one should remember that however diverse were these two experiences in their political culture and ways of taking action, they were parallel but different expressions of the same need to make discoveries outside the institutional channels of the left, and who refused the general course of social and political integration taking place in those years in order to provide concrete and real testimony to the values of Socialism and liberty.

And if, finally, a group has faith in its party as a tool, once it has proclaimed its ideological beliefs it begins to occupy itself with organising and recruiting and creating micro-structures - that which the Italian Marxist-Leninists and their European comrades did after the outbreak of the Chinese-Russian conflict. Running a news agency, however, was a choice consonant with the objectives of the new Radicals and the means to achieve them. These were primarily concerned with the politics of daily life and concrete cases rather than the battle of ideas. A news agency, more than a daily or a periodical, ought constantly to be identifying problems, positions and methods to adopt and through which to express a general political position rather than the systematic explication of that system itself. And with that pressing and agile means of communication they would be able to reach their counterparts in dialogue regarding that phase of Radical activities. They were not trying to reach public opinion

in general nor even a restricted group of militants and sympathisers but rather the political leaders (of the left) with whom they had to keep in touch as well as journalists who would be in a position to send on the RAdical message through the mass media. The main problem facing the PR at that time was to escape from isolation and make their arguments and the nature of their activities known, without sectarian exclusions and statements of belief.

Furthermore a news agency corresponded to the subjective attitudes of people who had never particularly practised a political-theoretical or political-cultural activity, but who had always been immersed in the live action of political and university organisations and their associations. It was a challenge to have kept the party on its feet in those times: it was reduced to a score or two of people having been abandoned by all the others, but it still wanted to call itself a party. For that very reason it took on a singular and provocative flavor that must be included in the pre 1968 historical climate when the fact of proclaiming oneself a "party" on the basis of such unusual positions could seem ridiculous but fascinating and forceful at the same time. But that "party" could not count on having any development in the first three years of its new course, and so its positions and battles all passed through the news agency that functioned at once as a publicity medium and rallying point for any eventual p

olitical interest in the campaigns it conducted.

Among the first political campaigns for which "AR" (Agenzia Radicale) was utilised, was the one directed at the ENI (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi or the National Hydrocarbons Agency, ed.), at its economic policies and its role in the Italian situation

in those years. Beginning in December 1963 and until 1966 it furnished information and data that was unknown to public opinion and the majority of politicians themselves other than those at top levels. On the basis of this information a negative analysis of ENI's activities began to take shape with regard to its economic decisions as well as for its interconnections with the political power of one of the major power centers of the moment.

The Radical accusations, documented by the agency's continual publication of new elements (8), regarded a series of questions about the huge ENI: first of all, emphasis was put on the nature of "state capitalism with strong corporative elements, that...is an essential link in the technocratic, neo-capitalist, and tending to authoritarian construction" that the left defended and that instead turned out to be objectively organic to a new type of right-wing regime. Furthermore there was documentation of "the ENI's integration in the Doroteo regime" (9) with the connections between the then President of the Republic Antonio Segni (DC) (who was at the center of the coup d'etat affair of the Summer of 1964) and the secret services of the SIFAR (Servizio Informazione Forze Armate) headed by generals Allavena and De Lorenzo and ENI vice president Eugenio Cefis.

The Agency took another line of attack on the nature of the power group running ENI "that used its men and press media (of every kind) to control public planning agencies, organisations and parties of both the left and the right, that has the power to approve the passing of laws and regulations, that makes and unmakes ministers, that claims the right to determine...the election of the Head of State, that has very close relations with the top-level clergy, the police and the army". In particular the agency documented ENI's corruption of the press of every political color by handing out 20 billion lire in a few years.

The "AR" therefore accused the ENI group of a new policy directed at "liquidating the entire plan of installations in Central Europe in favour of a policy of subordination to agreements with the international petroleum cartel", thus inverting the international strategy for competition with the "Seven Sisters", and on the domestic level of "having established an equilibrium, often in agreement with economic groups of Confindustria" (the Italian industrialists confederation, ed.). And finally, within this picture, the ENI directors were made responsible for having neutralised "every form of political, parliamentary, governmental, union or administrative control", with particular emphasis on the unions due to political agreements made with some union leaders who had been bought off.

This campaign, whose political import was communicated in advance to the some of the leaders of the big leftist parties in the hope of involving more powerful forces than those at the disposition of the Radicals,ended on the contrary by being the main factor in arousing hostility towards the new group among the leaders of the PCI and the PSI (10) and in provoking its political isolation.

The Radicals had touched on a spot with that action that the left could not and would not attack - for the practical reasons of the involvement of the leftist parties themselves in supporting the center of power, as well as for the more theoretical reasons of not wanting to put into question the -concrete meaning of the public economy above and beyond its ideological aspects.

Despite the opening of an enquiry by the Rome district attorney's office (11) and the support of the Radicals from some union elements within the ENI, the campaign led to nothing because of the silence and the unsparing defence of the state agency by the political forces and the press.

By focusing the investigation on a specific structure along the lines typically used by Ernesto Rossi and Gaetano Salvemini, the Radicals succeeded in the first half of the 60's in centering attention on one of the agencies crucial to the new economical and political power structure and its reciprocal connections in the country. One of the sacred idols of the entire left had not been spared for reasons of doctrine (ENI, enemy of private capitalism and hence to be defended at all costs). And this timely and unprejudiced analysis of the politico-structural terms of the question allowed for identifying the degenerative role of the "boss clique" which many on the left would only come to notice ten years later. At that time state owned companies would be identified as one of the principal factors in the crisis of the economic system, its correct relationship with the democratic life of the country and one of the reasons for the degeneration of Italian institutions in the 60's. The Radicals' empirical a

nd ideologically unprejudiced method had been prescient.

The other "AR" press campaign conducted, beginning in June 1965, was on the issues of social security and assistance with particular emphasis on the interconnections in the city of Rome between political power and the administration of assistance organisations. In a document summarising the question "AR" wrote in 1967: "The clerical and ecclesiastical world in its temporal activities enjoys - and knows that it enjoys - absolute impunity [...] Through corruption and sometimes criminal methods, it has been able in twenty years really and truly <> essential sectors of the country's life from the Ministry of Public Instruction to the police apparatus, from the military to social security which today constitutes the <> of the regime [...] We have reached the point where wanting to defend the State from the Church is nonsense: in essential sectors the Church is the State". (12) The Radicals had identified a structural corner-stone of political power, especially in Rome, in the extensi

ve world of social assistance.

It was emphasised how the most powerful Christian Democratic personalities - the mayors Urbano Cioccetti and after him Amerigo Petrucci; Clelio Delida who became a deputy and the local director Ettore Ponti - all passed through an obligatory period as administrators of public assistance which gave them the chance to "conquer the highest positions of power in the city".

For this campaign too, which lasted from June 1965 through all of 1957, "AR" published a mass of analytic material that brought to light the structural connections between the various aspects and the various figures of the assistance issue, whether it was a question of the abuse of lay agencies such as the EFEAS, or of organisations such as the Ospedali Riuniti di Roma (United Rome Hospitals, ed.), or of the innumerable ecclesiastical agencies that proliferated around the assistance "grab bag", or of their connections with the great social security institutes such as INPS (Istituto Nazionale di Previdenza Sociale).

In particular, the "AR" indicated the Rome ONMI (Opera Nazionale Maternità Infanzia - a Catholic maternal assistance organisation, ed.) as the mechanism that transformed a public agency into "an an election machine and instrument of power" by means of a series of rules that became prototypes: "1) The use of so-called "one-time subsidies", inflating them to buy votes; 2) swindling the ONMI of considerable sums for conceding through private transactions contracts for supplies to companies owned by Christian Democratic party figures and members... in agreement with Amerigo Petrucci; 3) the inflating of the religious agencies with their official recognition as assistance agencies; 4) the omission of checks on the forms of assistance and on the use of assets; 5) the increase of the prestige of DC leaders in the view of top Vatican clerics and the Roman Curia". (13)

The campaign issued in June 1966 in an accusation made by the PR to the Rome District Attorney's Office, on the basis of which Mayor Petrucci was formally accused and also put in prison. This action also had reverberations in the left-wing press - "L'Espresso", "L'Astrolabio", "Il Paese", as well as "ABC" which at that time had approached Radical actions - that for the first time since the start of the new direction gave space to news of Radical activities and had the effect of arousing public opinion and mobilising some elements on the left (for example, by interogating Rome municipal councillors) to the reasons for the financial difficulties of the social security system.

In the Italian social security and assistance system, the Radicals had identified another structural aspect of clerical power, and brought to its analysis an original leftist sensibility and attention for realities. They had written explicitly at the beginning of the campaign in "AR" press releases: "the sociological, cultural and political basis on

which this situation could be constructed are clear. And the Radicals have always watched them with exceptional lucidity and awareness that was possibly unique on the left, because they have a total and realistic view of the Italian Catholic world, of its one and only party, of its tenuous and treacherous relations with all true religiosity in all of its components". (13)

3. UNITY AND AUTONOMY: THE CONFLICT WITH THE OLD LEFT TAKES SHAPE

From the start, the hallmark of the new Radicals politics was their insistence on autonomy. The news agency that first came out daily and then periodically (from 1964 to 1967), was one of the primary tools of direct political action but not the only one. Anything could be used to give substance to an independent party, to re-affirm or re-create a position that had, it is true, existed in the traditions of the Italian liberal and Socialist left, but had exhausted itself. In the first half of the 60's it was revived by the Radical group. This was and would remain the particular quality of the new Radicals in comparison with many other groups that yet might have appeared to occupy similar political positions: that is to say, the determined subjective will to constitute to all effects a "political side".

This direction was expressed with concise precision and historical awareness of its relationship to tradition in an editorial in "AR" of August 1964. Here, almost as in a manifesto, the entire meaning of the political development of the new Radicals is contained in a nut-shell: "An entire generation of Actionists, democrats, and Radicals has never wanted to, never effectively tried to and never succeeded in giving substance and political power to its opposition role. And whenever it tried to, it rapidly abandoned the attempt, as was the case for the Action Party first, the Popular Unity Party next, and the Radicals of "Il Mondo" and "L'Espresso" last. Hence the constant ostracism, hence the more accusatory and negative rather than constructive attitude, hence the recurring temptation to feel like the <> without being a political part of the left. What makes us different from this generation of democrats is precisely the fact that we have become a "political side" and hav

e revived with continuity the attempt to break with that long conservative tradition of our country which the Action Party attempted immediately after the war and was interrupted and condemned to failure by the diverse choices made by the left in its totality".

The autonomy of this political position, which from that time on could call itself the new left because of the international resonance it found, along with its desire for unity and to operate in united organisations, was characteristic of the Radical initiatives of those years. its relationship with the establisahed parties of the left - PCI, PSI and PSIUP - modelled itself precisely on that basis: thus the Radical group was awkward and anomalous with respect to the prevailing habits of the left to sacrifice its individual characteristics on the altar of unity whenever these came into conflict with the bigger parties, and particularly with the PCI. This is what happened in every case where the Radical Party participated in or organised united groups.

In 1962 the "Comitato per il Disarmo Atomico e Convenzionale dell'Area Europea" (CDACAE or Committee for Atomic and Conventional Disarmament in the European Area, ed.) was formed, that adhered to the pacifist international founded at Oxford in January 1963 (International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace) and aligned itself with the groups already active in Western Europe and the United States. Through this connection the Radicals participated in the Consulta Italiana della Pace (Italian Council for Peace) and realised a series of concrete actions such as the Rome peace march in 1963 and another for Vietnam in April 1965. In both these cases as in a series of minor episodes, the Radicals of CDACAE clashed with the positions of the "Movimento della Pace" (Peace Movement) which represented the Communists and para-communists in favor of a general peace that would never conflict with international politics and the positions on international balance supported by the Soviet Union.

While the "peace partisans" (thus the members of the Peace Movement called themselves) brought the Communist line into the united organisation that was the Consulta, as it had been affirmed in Italy and internationally, the Radicals proposed a stand on disarmament that held for both blocks and, in particular, a firm opposition to rearmament and armies, either atomic or conventional, in all regions of the world.

The Radical line in Italy was polemical, not only in regard to the Communist's so-called peace action, but was also different from the position of the neutralists inasmuch as it was centred more on the consequences for the national structures of military questions rather than on the role neutrality would play on the international scene. The target of Radical anti-militarism and its basic concern was the militarisation of civilian life and its consequences for internal structures rather than the rejection on an international level of atomic proliferation whether promoted by the capitalist or the socialist countries. (16) Such positions and practices were in conflict with both the Communist and pro-Communist groups and the non-political and humanitarian groups that accepted a unitarian praxis based on generic platforms.

By pacifism and anti-militarism the Radicals thus distinguished themselves neatly from the practices and positions of the rest of the left. "Internationalism cannot help but be also a fight against the national state also and precisely because of the forms it necessarily assumes", affirmed the "AR" in February 1966. "Armies, police, non-independent law courts... armaments industries, are the <> historically assumed in common by both <> and <> states... The fight for peace is the fight against militarism, the fight for the conversion, here and now, of military structures into structures of civilian service and production. Strange that Socialist <> cease to become <> in this field alone, only in the face of struggle". (17) Statements of this kind were also punctually accompanied by initiatives connected to what disarmament policies were realistically experiencing in Europe. When the Social Democratic Senator Hans Thirring in Austria presented a project for dis

armament and demilitarisation in an area of Central Europe, the Radicals disarmament committee promoted support for it and succeeded in getting the adhesion of four hundred Italian municipal councils for it. (18)

With these issues that had been identified since 1961 as crucial for the creation of an original political position, the new Radicals were able to begin experimenting with direct and non-violent methods as well that were consistent with the anti-militarist line. If in the united organisations such as the Consulta, the Radical desire for dynamic initiatives was frustrated by the logic of balances that were dominant there, the contrary was true for single direct actions made by small groups where they began to bring to public attention the Radical presence, singular in its objectives as in its methods of practicing politics. On November 4, 1965, for the celebration of Armed Forces Day, two students, Lorenzo and Andrea Strik Lievers, distributed in Milan leaflets printed by the MIlanese section of the PR of a non-violent and pacifist tone in which the request was advanced to substitute military service with an alternative civilian service. (19) A few months later the two youths were arrested and thus beca

me the first victims of non-violent Radical direct action against militarism, even though they were later acquitted by the court.

Direct actions, leaflets, sit-ins became the usual methods of political action in those years which found a particularly imaginative moment on May 24, 1967 when the Rome section held a demonstration in the Altar of the Fatherland together with a teach-in on the problems of militarism and the placing of a wreath inscribed: "Radical Party - 1917, 1967: in Vietnam they are continuing to kill you". The demonstration intended to claim the civil right to consider the traditionally official places as the heritage of all citizens and hence the right to give their political and civil symbolism a democratic interpretation. In the summer of the same year after a series of demonstrations, an anti-militarist peace march began in the north-east as an attempt to mobilise and unify the grass roots - which then became a traditional annual event of Italian anti-militarism.

In the schools too, where there was a little activity in the same period, the Radicals' actions for unity and autonomy became a source of friction with the rest of the left. In the Associazione Laica per la Difesa e lo Sviluppo della Scuola Pubblica, ADESSPI, (Lay Association for the Defence and the Development of the Schools, ed.), whose Rome branch received impetus from the Radicals beginning in 1963, their political dynamism conflicted with the practices of the lay and leftist parties' school bureaus who were more concerned with summit balances of power rather than with the life and activities of an independent grass roots association. During a season in Rome the Radicals promoted a "School and Peace" conference (1963), a "March for the Schools" with recourse to direct action (1964), and other manifestations in the "borgate" (slum areas on the outskirts of the cities, ed.) and the city center, with an information campaign on the abuses and inadequacies in the public schools. In the same way, when in

1964 the group promoted a "National Union of the Public Schools", (21) which was joined by several hundred teachers of various leftist orientations, the central CGIL (Communist labor union, ed.), to which the project made reference, did not encourage it but, instead, started an opposing CGIL school union, an emanation of the union summits which reproduced their own internal structure with its division into party factions typical of the traditional unitarian movements of the left. (22)

"The Committee for the Unity of the Italian Left" (CUSI), which the Radicals promoted in 1965 as a reply to the debate going on at the time, is another example of the contraposition between the concept of unitarian movements that grow up around and autonomous structure in which dissent and unity may possibly confront each other, and the concept of "clearing houses" of parties that send their own delegates to one or another common institutional seat. The CUSI, that intended to be a "pressure group and tool for verification and debate in a unitarian perspective" (23), on the basis of an evaluation according to which "beyond the traditional motives for division in the working class, there exists an immense and still partially unexplored field of research, collaboration and common action ", never succeeded in acting politically, paralysed as it was by the preoccupation with power balances among the various party components and their own political rhythms.

In direct relations with the forces of the left too, the new Radicals met no smaller difficulties than the ones encountered in the unitarian organisations. Immediately after the party began its new course, the PCI greeted benevolently the shift to the left of the new Radicals in respect to the old group, so much so, that during the 1963 elections there was talk of possibly inserting the Radicals into a packet of leftist independents with the publisher Giulio Einaudi at their head. This operation which didn't interest the Radicals never took place. However as it gradually became clear that the unitarian impulse of the Radicals was accompanied by initiatives new in content as well as method, and that the new party was not one "...that resigned itself to being recognised as an interlocutor and ally when there was a consensus, and to being ignored or considered non-existent when dissent existed", (24) the PCI took a hard position against it in its official organs. So it was in the case of the campaign again

st ENI from 1963 onwards. So it was for the anti-militarist campaign which conflicted with the generic pacifism of the Peace Movement up to an attack on the PR leader Marco Pannella who had conceded an interview on relations with the Communists and on PCI politics to the weekly "Nuova Repubblica" (New Republic). (25)

In regard to the PSIUP, the party formed at the start of 1964 by the part of the Socialist left that was opposed to the center-left, relations with the Radicals had a double motive up until the 1968 elections. On the one hand there was a rapprochement for reasons of political topography of parties that were equally opposed to the DC and the center-left; and on the other hand there was conflict between the differing policies of those who were inspired by the ideological lines and political practices typical of the maximalist and front-creating traditions of the Socialist left as opposed to those who were attempting to propose a thematic renewal of the entire left.

In the 1964 municipal elections, the PR supported the PSIUP on the basis that it seemed to be "the party on the left that more than any other affirmed the will to oppose frontally the Catholics and the conservatives" (26) in spite of the fact that the deliberations of the leaders had pointed out that "the creation of fronts unfortunately continued to be the hallmark of Communist behavior in relation to other democratic and Socialist groups, whether the PSIUP, the Socialist left, the Radicals, or the mass unitarian organisations, who were always compelled to march to the beat of Communist evolution and not to that of the new objective realities that they were facing". (27) The indication of a preference for the PSIUP did not prevent the new Radicals from firmly supporting Giuseppe Saragat's (PSDI) candidacy for President of the Republic in 1964 (and even at first attempting to form a committee for it) against Amintore Fanfani (DC) who found the PSIUP and the Ingrao wing (Pietro Ingrao, PCI) of the PCI in

the front ranks of his left wing support.

With Saragat elected, the Radicals saw it as the result of an alliance of the lay and Socialist parties as an alternative to the Catholics and the sign of the Social Democratic movement's broad following among the mass of European workers to whom the Radicals already then proposed the necessity of "a real contact, polemical, critical, but serious... if one hopes for true progress along the road to unity and a Socialist alternative". (28)

In the following municipal elections of 1966 which included several large cities, the PSIUP and the PR held difficult negotiations and finally stipulated a national alliance for a combined list in Rome, Genoa and some smaller centers, still because of their mutual opposition to the DC and the Radicals' recognition of the justice of the Social Proletarians' resistance to the positions assumed by the PSI in the government. "We certainly have not kept quiet about the disagreements and differences: we have only decided to administer in this way, by a unitarian and political direction, our differences as comrades in struggle and our general responsibility for the problems of the left" (29) wrote Pannella the day after the agreement, once again not suppressing the differences: "The comrades of the PSIUP know our doubts about an organisational choice that seems to implicate traditional structures with a definite bureaucratic tendency...; they know our deliberate deafness with regard to ideological classificati

ons which refer to the complex crisis of the European left; they know our conviction about the absolute inadequacy of the changes going on in the Soviet society in respect to Socialist motivation; and, lastly, they know just how much the PR is marked by anti-militarism and unilateral pacifism, by lay anti-clericalism, by Gobettian classism (Piero Gobetti, ideologist of Liberal Socialism, ed.), the non-moralistic respect for the Western democratic and workers' movement, European federalist convictions, and struggles such as the one for divorce". (30)

The PSIUP - PR list for Rome, thanks to the Radicals, merited several public declarations of adhesion from, among others, the old ex Liberal and Radical member of parliament Bruno Villabruna and Ernesto Rossi (31) a few months before his death in February 1967. It had positive results for the Radicals in the municipal and provincial lists.

Such a partial success for the new party in its first election test was won despite the fact that the PSIUP itself did everything possible during the campaign to not make the support of the Radicals effective. This was another clear indication of the difficulty for a dynamic new group such as the Radicals to act together with structures of the traditional left that preserved, in their behavior even more than in their line, the old way of practising politics which would suffer a definitive crisis in 1968.

4. THE RADICALS FACE PROPOSALS FOR THE UNIFICATION OF THE LEFT

At the very time when the new PR was trying to give political form to an original position that was in conflict with the established left's habits, the latter was testing its strength against the center-left from positions within the government or the opposition. The new formula with the Socialists in the government took place immediately following the national elections of Spring 1963, and within a few years it had provoked a series of reactions of the left: a split in the PSI and the birth of the PSIUP; another splitting off from the autonomist Socialist majority by the party's Lombard wing that was contrary to the continuation of the experiment of participating in the government alliance; an institutional crisis in the Summer of 1964 regarding the President of the Republic and the secret services; the bogging down of all the programs for reform proposed by the most dynamic wing of the center-left; and the progressive rapprochement of the PSI and PSDI in their mutual work in the government until they

naturally reached Socialist unification between 1965 and 1966.

In that first half of the 60's the Italian left, which had got up momentum after the long lull of the 50's and the cold war, was marking up failures both on the Socialist side that had thought to find a solution to the problems of modernisation and transformation of the country in the government collaboration with the DC, and on the Communist side whose international Soviet connections were on the wane since the PCI did not seem able to get out of its static position.

At least moderate reforms were made necessary by the historical effects of the development of Italian capitalism during the 50's which had founded itself on the Socialist and lay democratic forces of a European type. But anyone who had placed hopes in such reforms was doomed to lose faith progressively in the face of the events that were constantly dominated and controlled by the conservative will of the DC.

The turn of events in the Summer of 1964, when the Christian Democrats surrounding President Segni forced the abandoning of any kind of reform program and the Socialists, weakened by splits on the left, consequently had to resign themselves to it, marked the end of all hopes and illusions about a new course. The center-left thus became a kind of forced move and so too the Socialists became imprisoned in it while continuing unsuccessfully in the attempt to modify the political course from the inside. The spirit of the letter sent by Pietro Nenni(PSI)to the PSI Congress of November 1965 provides the authoritative text on the situation. In it the old leader explained the inevitability of this formula to which the only alternative in sight was an authoritarian solution of the right - and so the need by now of unification with the PSDI on moderate lines. Nenni tried to ennoble that theoretical operation by endowing it with the meaning of a broad mobilisation: "The unification makes sense if it revives the So

cialist movement, if it mobilises the spirit and the strength of the entire country, if it aims at claiming power to transform Italian society in a Socialist direction, in the ways and forms that are appropriate to it". (33)

But it was only a rhetorical exhortation that found no echo in any practical action. In making himself the spokesman for the mutual sentiments of many of those who had voted PSI in 1963 as well as those circles that were by no means opposed to the experiment, Enresto Rossi replied in his usual caustic way: "Socialist revival... mobilsation of spirits... transformation of Italian society... vacuum-packed fried air. Evidently not even the leader of the PSI is aware of how fed up, how fed up to the gills are all Italians with the senseless words the leaders of the political parties have been filling them with for twenty yearsa in the attempt to rouse their sentiments. If he thinks that by repeating slogans like these... that they can convince democratic Socialist opinion outside the party, that has fled the party, that is the only opinion that can give strength and freshness to the action, he can save himself the trouble of writing. We don't know what to do with beautiful words. Facts are needed. And the f

acts are such that they do not allow us to give credibility to the Socialists in the government". (34)

Thus the unification of the Socialists that took place between July and October 1966 was not the culmination of a process that involved public opinion, but a mere operation at the top levels of the two parties, PSI and PSDI, that were juxtaposed in the PSU (United Socialist Party that lasted from 1965-69, ed.) There was not even created in Italy a large Social Democratic force of the European type with the strategic ambition to pass over to a collaboration with the DC, which was the direction taken in these years in the German Social Democratic Party of Willy Brandt (in Germany: grand coalition SPD-CDU-CSU, [Socialists and Christian Democrats, ed.] December 1966; SPD-FDP [liberal groups, ed.] under Brandt's leadership, October 1969); it was simply a question of an operation of two parties sharing an inert presence in the government without being based on any unifying social fact and without putting into motion any dynamic political developments.

The new Radicals kept out of this procedure even though it could have concerned them since they considered themselves a party of Socialist extraction, practice and non-Leninist, democratic tradition. They did not involve themselves for two reasons differing from the PSIUP's doctrinaire type of opposition. In the first place there was the political position of the new force that was born of the mutual collaboration with the DC, while fundamental to the Radical viewpoint was the need of forming an alternative force to the DC left as the only possibility for a democratic transformation in the country. In the second place, the unification was accomplished with those bureaucratic methods of agreements between party apparatuses that the Radicals had rejected and that they considered one of the factors for the sclerosis of the left which was incapable of uniting and generating social movements to support a reformist strategy. Thus, with unification, their roads separated despite the existence of elements of co

llaboration between the Socialists and Radicals in those sectors in which, inside and outside the center-left, some Socialists were trying to act for reforms.

In an article that appeared in "Corrispondenza Socialista" (Socialist Correspondence) in December 1966, Pannella, in the name of the PR's leadership, explained the reasons for the PR's remaining out of the unification. He emphasised the problem of the method of direct political action that the Radicals had used before '68 (when the agitation of the students movement began, ed.). "And in conclusion, the politics itself that emerges for the first time for millions of people, with all of its importance, all of its intelligibility, all of its independence and strength, good or bad. There is here, in general, a new phenomenon of <> that tries to and demands to express itself in institutional forms that are not to be found in this State, and that perhaps are even less to be found in traditional parties as they were and continued to be structured. And the point is this, that without the <> of the citizen in public life there is no <>, there is no <> force; one

has at most followers and subjects, occasional encounters...; and in the long run rebelliousness and revolution". (35)

In the face of what was going on in Italy, the Radicals looked to Europe to gather indications and tendencies about the future. They already had given particular attention to France where an alliance had formed for the presidential elections of 1965 between Social Democrats and Communists with Francois Mitterrand as their common candidate. And their news agency picked up an interview with Guy Mollet in which the Social Democratic leader declared that the rupture between the Communists and Socialists had been overcome by the end of Stalinism.

The Radicals threw up to the united Italian Socialists of the same period that they were not even capable of doing those things that the despised Social Democrats achieved, and did not know how to further the same reforms that Minister of Health Mariotti, Minister of Urban Planning and Deputy Loris Fortuna for divorce had tried to put through. "This is why", Pannella wrote, "we as Radicals have not allowed ourselves to be conditioned in our attitude towards unification by the opinions expressed by the PSIUP and, in part, by the PCI... Because we knew that the two parties that were uniting had always been Social Democrats, if only imperfectly... Because in Italian society if the Social Democratic model is mechanically imitated... it is still, for all that, revolutionary in comparison to the regime that is governing us and it brings with it a break with populism and electoral authoritarianism... Because the very way in which one wanted to create it - so bureaucratically, prefabricating both its program,

which is an absolute vacuum of a program, typically slight-of-hand in style - as well as the leadership - makes vain and superfluous the Church-based anti-unitarian claims in support of the center-left... Because the PSIUP may be right on the one hand, as those suspicious of the party system and the moderates may be right on the other hand, in believing that the larger part of the PSDI and PSI leadership formed in these years... cannot get much further with their unification than perhaps extorting greater contractual demands from the DC by the political patronage system...". (36)

Socialists and Social Democrats tried with this juxta- position to overcome the crisis of immobility which the center-left had transferred to the progressive forces. For their part, the Communists from the end of 1964 to the first months of 1966 discussed the so-called "single party of the working classes", almost as if they wanted to speculate on counterpoising a unity proposal on the left to the unity proposal on the right and so come out of their isolation. The hon. Giorgio Amendola (PCI) had audaciously launched in "Rinascita" (a Communist periodical, ed.) of October 1964 a kind of appeal for unification among Communists, Socialists, and Social Democrats, given the fact that "neither of the two solutions proposed in the last fifty years, the Social Democratic one and the Communist one, had so far shown itself to be valid for the purpose of a Socialist transformation of society". (37) The appeal for a discussion was favorably received by the Radicals who shared the diagnosis of the inadequacy of the

political proposals of the historical left.

But in reality, Amendola's proposal, so radical in its terms, immediately retreated leaving the field clear for a Communist call "for a new democratic majority", a formula behind which was hiding the conflict underway between those who, like Pietro Ingrao, were in favor of a broad internal democratisation of the party and a unification of the masses on the basis of the collaboration between the Communist and Catholic social forces (hence, a kind of dialogue with the Catholics) (38), and those who, like Giorgio Amendola, looked favorably on a unification project or confederation with the Socialists and the fringes of the lay leftists to function as a counterweight to the block hinging on the DC.

Neither could the Radicals be interested in the results of this debate raised by the PCI and taken up again by the PSIUP which at its first congress (December 1965) supported the need of an encounter among the forces of the Marxist left - PCI, PSIUP and the PSI left - on the anti-capitalist terrain of Socialist transformation. The Radicals saw in it only the old alchemical practices rather than new methods of struggle for the goals of the unity and restructuring of the left. In a resolution made by the administration of the PR in September 1965, reiterating their interest in the debate for unification and the unity of the left, they made the observation that these proposals could acquire significance only if they were not mere pictures of the existing condition, but based themselves on factors leading to a new policy of a power alternative to the Christian Democratic regime which also implied the transformation of the party apparatuses themselves. The document concluded: The Social Democratic unifica

tion, confirming the character of the present policies of the PSDI and the PSI, which by now is not even aimed at reform but is purely renunciatory, does not even take on the task of strengthening any possible progressive components within the government ranks. On the other hand, the proposal for unification directed only at the PSI and the PSIUP with a few PSI minorities, presents itself as an obvious rival project and in a certain sense a mechanical imitation of the Social Democratic unification, and does not clearly present either a reformist type of objective such as a broadening to the left of the present government formula, nor an objectively revolutionary goal such as an intransigent alternative to the Christian Democratic regime". (39)

In another declaration of the same period, the singularity of the Radical experiment was asserted even more vigorously and hence its distance from the terms in which the unification debate had been stated. "We shake off with difficulty the inheritance of the ostensible bourgeois <> who today are frightened for having been led into Radical temptations, no less than the suffocating <> of the <> who in reality are a squalid category of front-creating "dependents"... In as far as we are concerned, we must come to terms with our real points of origin, which are those of an extremely small party. But the structures and the methods which we have made for ourselves are such as to show that we do not intend to remain satisfied with this condition which so easily leads to sectarianism and irresponsible abstractions". (40) This was, once

again, the explicit reconfirmation of the subjective will to

construct an independent political course without conceding

anything to the facile tendencies prevailing at the moment.

5. THE ISOLATION OF A "DIFFERENT" POLITICAL CULTURE. TOWARDS THE

CONGRESS OF THE REFOUNDATION (1964 - 1967)

Between 1964 and 1966 the novelty of the new Radicals' position began to be recognised, at least by a part of the political leadership. The notion that the new PR was characterised by a policy of active anti-clericalism rather than inert "laymanship"; by a pacifism and anti-militarism in the line of Western radicalism; and by the fight for civil rights. And their political method was one of struggle, of concentration on specific issues often accompanied by direct, non-violent action.

These were features that created hostility to the small group of militants on the part of most of the traditional left party apparatuses - Communists, Socialists, and also Social Proletarians - inasmuch as they felt that the political culture of the new Radicals had something profoundly different about it and extraneous to their own traditions and habits. Just as much incomprehension was shown by the press and the prevailing intellectual and journalistic circles inasmuch as the Radicals' attitudes, political style and ways of acting, and their new ideas and aims showed themselves to be far from any legitimating tradition among current political practices. Being so much on the outside weighed heavily during the years of the Radical reconstruction, and it continued to weigh subsequently causing the Radicals to expend constant energy in order to break down their isolation.

The culture of the new Radicals combine elements all foreign to the political culture existing in the country; a subjectivity of political action that if it had any antecedents at all were in a certain democratic-Risorgimento tradition revived in the anti-Fascism of Carlo Rosselli, "Giustizia e Libertà", and the Action Party; a method of acting on the political scene based on small groups firmly decided to involve larger sections of the citizenry that had its parallels in the Anglo-Saxon tradition where faith in the voluntary action of citizens including the use of civil disobedience had struck deep roots; attention to the empirical investigation of nodes considered crucial with a method that could be called political induction rather than being deduced from the great schematic ideologies which was also related more to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of radical empiricism than to the French-derived variety or the great theoretical schemes of prevailing in our native Socialism. The new Radicals, therefore, eve

n before dealing with their political isolation, had first to come to terms with the isolation of their political culture which for the most part became transparent through its actions rather than being explicitly stated. They refused, even in a provoking way, to enter into the politico-cultural debate, to publish reviews for example, and to theorise about what they were doing. All of this had no parallel even among those minorities that at the time were trying to assert new issues and heterodox political positions. These generally originated in the "battle of ideas" and the theoretical-ideological legitimation of the political proposals.

For the rest, the circles that expressed the Italian laity and progressives in the press and in culture aside from politics, felt to be foreign the kind of political activism that aimed at all costs at forming a partisan position, even if the points of departure were the same values of the laity. This is why it was precisely those large and prestigious publications that had been Radical ("Il Mondo" and "L'Espresso") tended to ignore the new experience, to consider the Radical political expression as exhausted and to deny any legitimacy at all to the new group. The Communists, for their part, could accept nothing but unitarian positions on the left and not such strongly different qualities.

The culture of the new left, which in those days began to show up in the pages of magazines, did not recognise in the Radicals valid partners in dialogue since the former moved prevalently along the lines of theoretical reflection and of attention to the workers movement or its theories.

The new Radicals, whose behavior presented them in the guise of radical reformers with a revolutionary style, were thus isolated with respect to both the systematic analyses of the new revolutionaries as well as the accommodating habits of the new reformers. That is why in those first fifteen years of the new party's life the isolation was manifested by the most meagre attention of the press to the Radicals actions and proposals, underestimating even the little weight that these could have objectively as the expression of an extremely small group. The Radicals were aware of the situation and wrote about themselves in May 1966: "We are not able to make prognoses about what will come of our initiatives, nor do we claim that our experience is of particular value. We are in continually in great difficulty and everyday we risk defeat along with success". (41) And in view

of the growing conflict with the left, they analysed their position thus: "In recent months we have become aware that our adversaries have perhaps guessed at the growth of a rigorous new position and are becoming harder... We are passing from a conspiracy of silence to open conflict". (42) And again they made explicit the sense of a necessary preliminary battle: "A great part of our efforts is concentrated on opening some breaches in this wall of silence and on keeping them open". (43)

From 1964-66 the party as such did not expand its small organisation beyond its political initiatives and the publication of "Agenzia Radicale" to assure its presence on the political scene. Composed of not more than a hundred or so members and often represented by a single person in a few cities; with a 1965 budget that amounted to a total of 8 million lire, all acquired through self-financing and only 25% coming from outside sources, (44) the party took on the task for 1965 of giving itself a new formal structure as well as new political contents. In fact, after the 1963 election, the little that was left of the old party had dissolved itself or been dissolved. The idea of the Rome group was not to set up a small party (that is: membership cards, exclusiveness, proselytism, definition of a program), but rather to make an appeal to the "people" to support and participate in Radical battles. It was, as has been said, a culture foreign to the traditions of the country and difficult to take in, even by

those who were able to feel close to the Radical aims. The only group that came near to the party in this period was that Milanese one (Lorenzo Strik Lievers, Carlo Oliva) which nevertheless had its roots in a different kind of experience: that is, it was a lay leftist student group rallying round the papers "Libero Critica" (Free Criticism, published from 1959-1961, and then again in 1964 as a pro-Radical sheet) and "Centro Salvemini" (1959-1961 and 1964-1965). The different origins of the Milanese and the Romans showed up in their different concepts of the party corresponding to different political cultures. If for the Romans the party was to be a force fighting for civil rights, for the Milanese the Radical Party ought to be the lay and libertarian vanguard of the new left, almost the counterpart of what the PSIUP was to the Socialists.

The remaining problem, however, was the refounding of the party. The national secretary, that was supposed to convene the national congress for a new constituent assembly, resigned because it did not manage to do it for November 1965. In 1966 a collegial secretariat of three was succeeded by a single secretary, Marco Pannella, for ordinary administration, and at the same time a national commission was designated to prepare the Congress with the task of putting the party's new ideas in order as they were emerging in those years and to formulate a new type of statute for it. (45)

From September 1966 to May 1967, the commission labored intensively to work out a formula valid for the hundred or so militants in or around the party. In fact, if the registered members, on the one hand, were almost unchanged, on the other the PR had begun to be a point of reference for several specific circles that recognised the things it was fighting for. The anti-militarists and pacifists of different extractions found a rallying point in the Radical initiatives, whether they came from old anarchist circles or were young, new libertarian hippies.

These latter, who had also made their appearance in Italy, and especially in Milan through the Situationist and "Green Wave" groups, (46) saw in the Radical Party's policies something with which they had an affinity and to which they could link up. They were welcomed in the Radical headquarters in Rome and Milan until, in 1968, the various cultural revolution movements took shape - flower children, hippies, "capelloni" (long-haired youths, ed.) - along with the anarchists and libertarians revitalised by the Radicals' proposals for direct anti-militarist and anti-authoritarian action. At the same time a new group began to emerge, the divorcists, composed for the most part by lower middle class people with little political commitment who identified with the Radical's divorce initiative at the end of 1965 with the decisive contribution of the weekly "ABC" in support of the bill presented in Parliament by the Socialist Loris Fortuna.

These social realities, all foreign to the traditional politics of the parties, were the first signs of new social groups receptive to Radical proposals and mobilised by them. In September 1966, in the first number of the bulletin for the preparation of the Congress, the difference of the Radicals was emphasised and the reasons for its separation from the traditional left: "If we look ahead to the near future, we see an increasing risk of further impoverishment of the left under the hegemony of two bureaucracies (that of the new unified Socialist Party and that of the PCI) competing among themselves but equally conservative, equally incapable of guaranteeing the country an alternative. If we look around, at those small political minorities that along with us ought to represent the dynamic component of the left, we see ever more splintering, dispersal, and discouragement, also on the part of those who had put down our choices as overweening and doomed to failure in the face of other more <> and

<> choices which however they themselves are forced to disown". (47) And in making explicit the role of the new Radicals, they delineated the reasons for censure with regard to the old groups and those of opening up to the emerging ones: "We have succeeded up to now in stopping and inverting a process that, in the intentions of the new class of leaders that has abandoned us, ought to have ended with the dissolution of the party; in assuring its continuity we have done something new and different there where we have been able to be present and active; we have refused to be split up by a political "summit" and we know we can build, today, an independent grass roots organisation based on the best motives for ferment and the new demands of the Italian left". (48)

While the Radicals were getting ready for the congress of reconstruction surrounded by the nucleuses of new social milieus, they explicitly stated their awareness of having reacted to "the failure of an entire class of lay leaders". (49) And it is not superfluous to note the significant coincidence for which in that same period the glorious name of "Il Mondo" was ceasing publication headed by Mario Pannunzio, who had certainly represented the noblest part of that class of lay leaders, but also the part that had most typified the parabola and the descending cycle of traditional lay politics.

In its farewell address to its readers, "Il Mondo" bitterly wrote: "The opinions of parties, of groups, of uninterested men, seem a kind of useless game of restless people... In Italy lack of interest for public affairs and for cultural and moral debate always finds a place for shelter and flight.. many times in these long years we have asked ourselves how it was that factions of liberal and democratic inspiration, faithful to a tradition of great nobility of thought.... have found so small an audience in our country and at the same time so much unanimous, aggressive hostility as to make them like an isolated patrol along the frontier, almost separate from the vital context of the nation". (50)

The preparatory work of the congress consisted of four central themes which corresponded to four actions and studies that had developed at the beginning of the 60's. The first regarded "lay society and civil rights" in which proposals for judicial, school, and divorce reforms were worked out along with problems of the family, of women and of conscientious objectors. The second concerned "State institutions and structures". The third, which was occupied with "lay society and international relations", concerned itself with the way in which an "international perspective" could be reached by "overcoming the national structures of the left which were a hoax and a tool for integration within the system", (51) by connections with other non-national opposition forces in other countries, by rejection of the myth of national solidarity and its leftist variation in popular fronts, as well as in the pacifist struggle and for European federation. The fourth group took the "lay party" for its subject and the way i

n which it could become a party antithetical to the Social Democratic-bureaucratic and Leninist-avante-gardist models by achieving its Socialist libertarian ideas and its federative formal statutory structures.

On May 12, 1967, a new Radical congress opened in Bologna that was called "No.3" (the first two had been held by the first party in 1958 and 1961) with the motto "The Radical Party For A Lay Alternative" which further specified "all the workers for a lay and pacifist civilisation, for a Europe freed from military, monopolistic, authoritarian and clerical structures". A hundred or so members together with guests and observers from other forces and groups participated in the meeting. The congress underscored the idea of "the need for a political struggle centered on battles adequate to the Radicals' motivations and the goals", and at the same time the need of discussing the "problem of which occasions for battle to choose and to provoke". (52) The third congress, in approving a new statute, thus marked the point of arrival of a phase of refoundation that for the moment concluded not only with the official approval of new ideas and proposals, but also with the instructions for new formal and statutory stru

ctures that wanted to be the experimental indication of a different way of being a political force.

--------------------------------

NOTES

1) Cf. PR circular, central headquarters, of March 12, 1963; PR circular, central headquarters, of April 27, 1963 signed "For the National Secretary" (Massimo Teodori); mimeographed circular, central headquarters, of May 30, 1963 signed "For the National Secretary" (Massimo Teodori); mimeographed circular of June 3, 1963 signed "For the National Secretary (Marco Pannella).

2) Cf. mimeographed circular of February 1963 addressed "To all the PR members, sympathisers and friends" signed "For the National Secretary" (Marco Pannella).

3) Ibidem.

4) Cf. circular of March 12, 1963.

5) Ibidem.

6) "Il voto Radicale" edited by Elio Vittorini, Marco Pannella and Luca Boneschi; replies by E. Vittorini, P.P. Pasolini, G. Gozzi, N. Risi, F. Leonetti, A. Rendi, E.N. Rogers,

A. Sorrentino, R. Roversi, M. Cagli, M. Mila, S. Ceccato,

A. Gaggero, M. Monteverdi, L. Sciascia, U. Eco, D. Baroncelli,

M. Boneschi.

7) Cf. mimeographed circular of June 3, 1963 signed "For the Secretary (Marco Pannella).

8) Cf. the collection of "Agenzia Radicale" beginning with no.1, July 15, 1963. The passages quoted here are taken from the synthesis made in "Libro bianco su il PR e le altre organizzazioni della sinistra", proof sheets, edited by

A. Bandinelli, S. Pergameno, and M. Teodori, October 1967, Edizioni Radicali, pp 35-42.

9) A DC faction that took its name from the Convent of Santa Dorotea where it held its first meeting.

10) Ibidem.

11) The opening of judicial proceedings against the top level directors of ENI were started by the Rome Public Prosecutors Saviotti and Bruno in May 1964.

12) "La peste clericale" "Agenzia Radicale", August 10, 1967, special number "1967 - Anno Clericale".

13) From the PR national secretary's declaration to the Rome Prosecutor General, June 1966, reprinted in "Libro bianco", cit., p.55.

14) "Agenzia Radicale", No. 113 of June 12, 1965.

15) "Agenzia Radicale" note, August 23, 1964.

16) Cf. "Libro bianco", cit. pp. 30-31.

17) "Agenzia Radicale", note, February 26, 1966.

18) The Committee For Atomic And Conventional Disarmament In The European Area, "Appeal For A Peace Initiative", 1964; afterwards in "Libro bianco", cit. pp. 44-46.

19) The press took up the episode which was rather unusual even in the history of repression. Cf. for example, "Il Giorno" of Nov.1, 1966 and "Il Corriere della Sera" of March 23, 1966 .

20) Cf. "Libro bianco", cit. p.31

21) Cf. "Documento costitutivo del Comitato promotore del Sindacato Nazionale della Scuola Pubblica", supplement of the December 1965 issue of "Libera Critica", Milan, managing editor Lorenzo Strik Lievers.

22) Cf. "Libro Bianco", cit. p.47

23) Cf. On CUSI, cf. "Libro bianco", cit. p.51-52.

24) Cf. Memorandum, "Il Partito Radicale", mimeographed, drawn up collectively in May 1966 for introducing the party to the "War Resisters' International" an international anti-militarist organisation to which the PR applied for membership.

25) Cf. "Il PCI elemento del sistema", interview with Dr. Marco Pannella, National Secretary of the PR, edited by Giano Accame, in "Nuova Repubblica", No.20 of July 31, 1966; "Un Pannella demistificato", in "l'Unità" of August 24, 1966.

26) Appeal by the leaders of the PR published in a special number of "Agenzia Radicale", No. 103 of Nov. 16, 1964 and signed by Marco Pannella (Nat. Sec.), L. Balestri (admin.), G. Spadaccia (admin.), M. Teodori (admin.), G. Rendi (admin.), A.Bandinelli (foreign office), A. Rendi (press office), A. Sabatini (school office), and E. Mancuso (union office).

27) Ibidem.

28) "Agenzia Radicale", Dec. 27, 1964, afterwards in "Libro bianco", cit. p.86.

29) Marco Pannella, "No al <> lotta", in "AR" No. 121, May 31, 1966.

30) Ibidem.

31) Ernesto Rossi: "Al PR un voto anticlericale", in "AR", May 31, 1966.

32) In the Rome municipal elections, the leading candidate, Vecchietti (PSIUP), won 4,185 votes; the second, Maffioletti (PSIUP), won 1,237; the third, Pannella (PR), won 1,125. The Radicals brought 6,000 - 7,000 votes to the combined list. After the election the Radicals sent the PSIUP a letter in which they analysed the behavior of that party (June 20, 1966 signed by the Rome section of the PR, Massimo Teodori, afterwards in "Libro bianco", cit. pp.81-83).

33) Passages from the letter reprinted in "Il record del immobilismo" by Ernesto Rossi, from "L'Astrolabio" year III, No.15, pp.505-512.

34) Ibidem.

35) Marco Pannella, "I problemi della sinistra italiana", in "Corrispondenza Socialista", year VII, No.10, October 1966, pp.505-512.

36) Ibidem.

37) Giorgio Amendola, "Rinascita", Nov. 28, 1964.

38) Cf. interview with Pietro Ingrao in "Rinascita", Sept. 26, 1964.

39) Political resolution of the PR administration, mimeographed on Sept. 2, 1965.

40) Declaration made by Marco Pannella to the "Agenzia Montecitorio", Sept. 25, 1965.

41) Memorandum for the "War Resisters' International", "Il Partito Radicale", cit.

42) Ibidem.

43) Ibidem.

44) Mimeographed memorandum signed "The Treasurer of the PR", Andrea Torelli, Dec. 12, 1965.

45) The National Council of the PR, meeting on July 3, 1966,

nominated a commission to prepare the IIIrd National Congress,

composed of Nina Fiore, Angiolo Bandinelli, Luigi Del Gatto,

Roberto Pieraccini, Carlo Oliva, Piero Pozzoli, Claudio Lelli, Andrea Torelli, Gianfranco Spadaccia, with Sergio Stanzani presiding.

46) "Situationist" and "Green Wave" groups - anarchist inspired dissenting groups in the 60's that proposed creating new and uncodified situations in urban life to fight against the values of consumerism.

47) "Verso il congresso" in "Informazione per il terzo congresso" supplement of "AR", mimeographed, No. 1, Sept. 22, 1966.

48) Ibidem.

49) Ibidem.

50) "Ai lettori", in "Il Mondo" year XVIII, No. 10, March 8, 1966.

51) "Prospettive di lavoro del centro di iniziativa sulla società laica e i rapporti internazionali", directed by Carlo Oliva, in "Informazioni per il terzo congresso", mimeographed, No.2, Oct. 21, 1966.

52) Print-out, "Terzo Congresso del PR", edited by the commission for the preparation of the third congress. See also "AR", No. 130, April 6, 1967.