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 Refoun-

dation (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. AFTER THE RELAUNCHING A HIGHLY FRAGILE PARTY MULTIPLIES ITS INITIATIVES

At the Turin Congress of November 1972, in which the PR had been relaunched with a membership that exceeded 1,000, the analyses and strategies that were to be the basis of the Radicals' actions in coming years received a sanction. It was considered that Italy by now was being run by a veritable "regime" of a corporate character: <ualistic and social security ones, to the myriad of parasitical and corporative state agencies, by way of the same type of administrators of the various Church and State corps from the police to the judiciary, from the army to the State Council, from the Court of Auditors to the episcopal conferences, to the "orders" and "societies", real estate and financial ones, and ones that are "religious" before the law, but mercantile and capitalistic before the facts". (2) The consequences of the new "order" were such as to reduce the area of political confrontation and the democratic game in society: "The corporative atomisation, the social splintering, the mass alienation, the inciting of the sectors and structures of consumeristic robbery, the massacre of territory and of "free time", of public health and the honesty and loyalty of every state institution, structure and service... the spreading corruption... the chaos and the crises... are the necessary and rigorous expression of the interests and the activities

of the clerical-Christian Democratic and clerical-Fascist forces of the regime>>.

At the heart of the new order in the country, with its <> character, there were the Christian Democrats in whom <> (PNF, ed.). The drastic identification of the DC of the 60's and the PNF of the 30's was based for the Radicals on a structural analysis of the power network of politics, the economy, the bureaucracy and finance; on the crystallisation of the political system without no opposition that any longer considered itself an alternative form of government and power; on the restrictions of the minorities and on the possibilities of expressing dissent: << the democratic rituals themselves have become scandalously unfair and those who use and claim to believe in and defend them are blackened as traitors to the great bourgeois ideals themse

lves. There is no longer a shadow of real democracy and tension with the laity, not even in the Socialist and Liberal organisations: the class conflict, today, passes ever more within and not only through the traditional workers and proletarian parties.>> (3)

In order to resist and oppose this kind of degeneration of Italian democracy and find fundamental unifying factors among the <> (4). The referendum strategy consequently represented the concrete political instrument capable at the same time of operating in the country and activating a clash in the institutions by introducing with all the force of the Constitutional mechanism the civil rights line on the left and in the society - the only one considered to be a true alternative to corporative disintegration.

Therefore the Radicals - and this was the conscious center of the deliberations at the Turin Congress - could either succeed in setting up and realising an action for an alternative to the predominant political direction, asserting <> and qualifying <> with civil rights, or else the regime would have definitely asserted its power and oppressive character for an entire historical period.

On the basis of such assumptions, throughout 1973 the PR multiplied its struggles for asserting particular civil rights, thus accentuating its inevitable clashes with the institutions. The resistance to changes in the laws, the behavior of the State and the municipalities, and to use more democratic practices, was the reason why Radical action - whether of the direct type, or indirect legislative proposals, or simply the pressures of public opinion - inevitably came into conflict with various institutions: legislative, juridical and military.

Above all, the Radicals concerned themselves with defending divorce in this period. The referendum requested in 1971 had not been held in 1972 because of national elections and could not be called in 1973 for legal reasons, and thus its shadow hung over the political life of the country. As has already been mentioned, throughout 1973 the Radicals along with the pro-divorce LID forces (see Chapter III) put continuous pressure on the lay and leftist groups in Parliament to refrain from presenting a revised and worse law just to avoid the referendum test which was the intention of the majority and in particular of the PCI.

The Radicals took direct action on the drug question as well, opening a public campaign at the beginning of the same year with a letter to the (daily paper, ed.) "Il Messaggero" (5) followed by a public debate that lasted for several weeks. For several years the drug problem had become a question of general social interest in Italy too, both because the phenomenon was spreading and because indiscriminate application of the law in force at the time was putting thousands of youths into prison. The Radical slogan "Against the State drug and for the liberalisation of light drugs" was intended to help thousands of young people who were being subjected to wide-ranging and indiscriminate arrest for drugs when the real reason was to strike not so much at their use of light drugs but, through this, their dissent from the established values. (6)

Concretely, the Radicals proposed the passing of a new law that, based on scientific knowledge, on psychological mechanisms and those of the market, would distinguish light from hard drugs and separate the responsibility of the simple smoker from the dealer while setting up treatment for the addicted without making criminals of them. <> stated the letter sent to "Il Messaggero" <>. (7)

The campaign was based on precise analyses of the new law proposed by the Council of Ministers which was judged to be distinctly negative (8), on the unmasking of the way anti-drug information was abused by a part of the righteous-minded press and the police to create a witch-hunting atmosphere (with the PR, the Stampa Alternativa (Alternative Press, ed.) and others making an accusation against the director of the Rome City Health Department for propagating false and tendentious information) (9), and on the thorough study of the scientific, psychological and juridical aspects of the question. The need of an articulate and realistic position corresponded as well to the urgency of confronting the spreading use of heroin which the Radicals had several times decisively denounced as the true danger of the moment. A conference on "Liberty and Drugs" was organised by the PR and Stampa Alternativa to study the problem and offer solutions. It was held in June 1973 with the contribution of reports by Daniele Bo

vet, Adriano Buzzati-Traverso, Giancarlo Arnao, Guido Blumir and Luigi Cancrini. (10)

That year's campaign contributed to blocking the progress of the repressive bill under consideration and was to be taken up again later. In the letter to the Rome daily, Marco Pannella had given advance notice that civil disobedience would be invoked if necessary. <>. (11) The Radical leader did as he said on July 2, 1975 (and was consequently arrested) thus provoking faster action in Parliament and the passing of a new law in December of the same year.

The issue of sexual liberation had already merited the attention of the Radicals with conferences and encounters in the second half of the '60s. When the FUORI (United Italian Homosexual Revolutionary Front) group was formed in April 1972 to contest the thesis of the Italian Society of Sexology in their San Remo conference, it seemed logical that a movement which called itself "homosexual liberation" should have points of agreement with those, like the Radicals, whose political tendency was to present problems concerning the personal sphere and to support the rights to be different and to be a minority in all fields.

Thus, throughout three years of activity, the various FUORI groups that had been established in the major Italian cities found themselves not only side by side with the Radicals, but finding their natural points of reference among them and absorbing the more general libertarian issues while at the same time sensitizing the Radical militants to the specific problems of the oppression of sexual minorities.

While for the other groups born from a single issue the Radical's participation took the form of identifying specific objectives to be reached that could be translated into proposals for legislative reform, for the homosexuals their activity on their own and in the party looked more like a cultural revolution and a campaign to put into question attitudes and standards of behavior rather than action to change specific institutions or actual laws. <> declared Angelo Pezzana, founder and guiding light of FUORI at the end of 1974, <>. (12) Thus while the PR widened its own presences and influences, it also changed within itself from contac

t with particular realities such as that of the homosexuals; and in this specific case it ended by offering an unvarnished image of itself and thus an example of the kind of society it was proposing to the country and to the left.

For conscientious objectors too, notwithstanding the law passed at the end of 1972, the clash with the military institutions continued. Far from being interrupted the trials and condemnations of objectors intensified, among them that of the LOC Secretary Roberto Cicciomessere, sentenced in April 1973 by the La Spezia military court to many months in prison. The LOC thus had to confront this situation and at the same time aim at a rapid modification of the law with the creation of an effective demilitarised civil service, self managed and offering the objectors the possibility of choosing the agencies for which they desired to work. (13)

Once again by means of many street demonstrations, actions in the halls of justice and the legislature, the Radical action to support the conscientious objectors proved how difficult it was to change laws, norms and behavior patterns. And it verified, precisely in the case of the objectors, the hard resistance of the institutions to the introduction of democratic processes.

All these actions, together with the innumerable acts of civil disobedience in regard to laws considered unjust, are testimony to how the PR, despite its refounding and transformation in Turin, still remained a very small minority on the margins of the political system and working outside Parliament. The party had reached the number of 1,300 registered members in November 1972 (with another 1,100 supporters) and several months later (January 1973) with 13 branches and then (March 1973) 21. Its budget of about 15 million lire in 1972 grew to about 33 million in 1973 and then to 60 million in 1974. It grew from a single Roman group to a scattering of embryonic groups spread throughout the country mostly in Central and Northern Italy. The growth had spread and multiplied the specific initiatives, all under the common denominator of civil rights politics, but without yet coming together into a unified project of broad scope. In the background still remained the referendum project which was the measure of t

he party's capacity to broaden politically and to mobilise forces.

In July 1973 an extraordinary congress was convened in Rome to put the referendum campaign into operation and to create a front of democratic political groups as the launching pad for the referendum. Some months later, in September, a Radical daily called "Liberazione" (Liberation, ed.) began to publish with the precise aim of preparing the ground and supporting the political and organisational effort of collecting the signatures beginning in Spring 1974.

The Radicals debated a central problem: how to create the conditions for starting up a project of such broad import as the packet of referendums established by the Turin Congress. It was a question of proposing to the country eight referendums all together to abrogate as many laws. Despite their growth, the Radicals' energies remained very limited and insufficient for the work at hand.

Giulio Ercolessi, who became national secretary at the Verona Congress of November 1973, was not only a very young twenty years old, but also the first of the new generation to take on national responsibility from the old group of new Radicals. He wrote that notwithstanding the possibilities that there were for the lay and libertarian movement to grow and assert itself, the Radicals were not in a condition to <>. (14)

Pannella, for his part, announced his resignation from the PR at the same congress with the following motivation: <>. (15) This act of the old leader of the new Radicals could be interpreted in a double and connected meaning which was later confirmed by subsequent acts. On the one hand he intended to permit and favor the growth of a group of leaders endowed with independent initiative, and on the other hand to broaden the sphere of action of lay and libertarian politics working - in as far as it concerned him personally, bound by limits of the PR that he considered restricted - by attracting new energy to

himself, precisely as he was doing with the daily "Liberazione" (16), a publishing undertaking that however only managed to keep alive for a few months due to the failure of its self-financing campaign.

But neither the goal of the party to live up to the circumstances, nor the aim of Pannella to inspire a larger movement around the eight-referendums project, produced any results in the first six months of 1974. The Radicals had wanted the divorce referendum to take place, but they were essentially excluded from the election campaign. The outcome of that popular test confirmed the Radicals' theory thus assuring a success of historical importance for their policies, but the attempt to connect up that victory with the bigger referendum packet did not succeed. The Radical Party as such did not benefit from a favorable response of the country to what it desired so ardently and with such determination - the clash between two forces - nor did it gain more political energy or a strengthening of its own organisation. Therefore right after May 12, 1974 the very results of the referendum contributed to push the PR into isolation at the moment when it appeared evident how dangerous Radical politics were for the ba

lance achieved by the political groups.

Within the party too a crisis developed due to the isolation from without and consequently to the inner dissent and organisational inadequacies. Those who had taken the eight-referendum project as literally a question of life and death for the entire existence of the Radicals and the democratic hopes of the country, fell into a crisis. Roberto Cicciomessere almost abandoned the party to dedicate himself exclusively to the LOC while Giulio Ercolessi resigned as party secretary creating a vacuum in the executive. In this situation Marco Pannella took action using all his personal resources and political capacity with an unlimited hunger strike and a mobilisation around it.

2. THE EIGHT REFERENDUMS AND THE DIVORCE REFERENDUM

The decision to propose the abrogation of eight laws with as many referendums had been taken by the Turin Congress of 1972, then worked out in detail and made operative at two subsequent national Radical sessions during 1973. Two of the referendums regarded the 1929 Concordat between Italy and the Holy See; two regarded anti-military issues (the peace-time military code and the military judicial order); two the freedom of information (the journalists order and the laws regulating the press); one the freedom to broadcast, and the last political and union crimes of opinion contained in the penal code under the norms regarding abortion.

The project formulated in this way had a complex strategic sense for the PR. (17) There had been a perpetuation of laws of Fascist origin that after twenty five years of democratic life had never been changed; and at the same time new Christian Democratic norms of corporative inspiration (the journalists order, laws regulating the press) had been established. Faced with this situation the Radicals intended to present a complex reform proposal that would use the abrogations for leverage and thus force the formulation of new norms. The subjects were significant because each touched an area where it was considered necessary to expand civil rights: the Church and State relationship, the military complex, the information media, justice. The formulation that went together with the packet of proposals was in itself eloquent of their intentions: "For an authentically constitutional republic" rather than inert appeals to the Constitution that had never had legislative consequences.

The way of the referendums, that is of direct recourse to a popular vote, furthermore took on a value that transcended the single laws to be abrogated. It pointed out a tool for the participation and the deliberation (even if only in a negative way) through which the citizens of differing political affiliations and ideologies could converge and form a majority alliance. It was not only a question of implicitly criticising and stimulating the parties which had not succeeded in effectively setting reform processes in motion, but also of a way of expression and therefore of aggregation that could pronounce its clear opinions outside the pacts and balances that had been the party-parliamentary game played for so long in a pluralistic system like the Italian one.

Civil rights were intended to be the suitable terrain for new aggregations destined, according to the Radicals, to bring about majority alliances and victories. Hence the other strategic dimension of the referendum subsumed in the formulation "For a democratic class alternative". By means of a vote polarised between two choices alone, "yes" and "no", there would necessarily be a bipolarisation of the political clash and so compel a rearrangement of the ranks into a progressive side and a conservative side led by the DC which they considered the country's true historical right wing.

A final Radical intention contained in the referendum strategy regarded the function that minorities could have in putting into motion political processes that concerned the entire population without bottling themselves up in the minority politics of a small group. <> one could read in the small introductory volume of the "Eight Referendums Against the Regime", <n the country and the institutions>>. (18)

The Radicals put faith in the ability of the eight referendums to break the static equilibrium of the political system and change it to the advantage of the forces of the left. In fact this had been the effect of the referendum on divorce which was called after every attempt had been made between October 1973 and February 1974 to avoid this much-feared test.

Therefore in Spring 1974 the proposal of the packet for an authentically constitutional republic was interwoven with the campaign in defence of divorce. More than that, this latter was the heart of the political clash in the country, not only for the Radicals but for all the other political groups. The response on May 13 (almost 60% against abrogation of the divorce law), which not even the lay and leftist forces had expected - at least not to such a degree - explicitly proved the Radical thesis to be correct. It confirmed the existence that they had intuitively felt of a wide popular majority for that specific reform, and they obtained precisely by a referendum on civil rights a shift of the vote from the moderate camp to the progressive one with an anti-conservative and anti-Christian Democratic effect that shattered the 25-year-long Catholic and Christian Democratic hegemony. It also proved the Radical thesis that clericalism was no longer a widely felt sentiment of the people but the cement of the p

ower structure. The referendum campaign had not brought the much-feared "religious war" into the streets, but only a specific civil confrontation and a general political one.

It was certainly true that the victory had been obtained with a massive commitment at the moment of the voting by the traditional leftist forces, and in particular the PCI. But two political elements that were at the root of the divorce victory had to be attributed to the Radicals: to have from the beginning set up divorce as an issue that subsequently also had general political importance; and to have then exerted pressure so that the trial of strength that the Catholic conservatives wanted was fought on the proving grounds of a popular vote and not a prefabricated compromise among the parties.

Subsequently it would be seen in other elections between 1975 and 1976, which brought a clear shift to the left, that the referendum had represented a break in the balance of political forces that had been practically immobile ever since 1948. And that it had probably been the simple options of the vote that had allowed for such a radical shift. This verification of the facts also gave substance to the Radical thesis which maintained that civil rights and institutional politics could be a rallying point for an alternative majority to the DC more than economic questions could be.

If these were the results of the referendum and the theoretical evaluations that could be given to it, it was not the interpretation made by the left in their subsequent daily political choices. Communists and Socialists hurried to offer the DC the possibility of considering May 13 as having been a mere parenthesis and hence permitted them to reconstitute the old power relationships. The Radicals were more isolated than ever and the collection of signatures for the eight referendums, which had been started in March, then suspended during the divorce campaign and taken up again in June without much conviction, was definitively closed in September. About 175,000 signatures had been collected and the failure of the campaign was attributed by the committee to a combination of factors: TV censorship, the lack of commitment by the extra-parliamentary groups (Lotta Continua, PDUP-Manifesto) which had originally adhered, the hostility of the left and institutional difficulties: <thus was not seized>> stated the committee's closing communiqué. <>. (19)

3. THE HOT SUMMER OF 1974:

THE INFORMATION BATTLE PUTS PANNELLA TV

The results of May 13 had created the basis for increasing the credibility of the Radical battles, but the political situation caused by the orientation of the biggest leftist forces as well as the strength of the PR impeded the realisation of the proposed referendum and, more generally, the growth of the minority group. The greatest problem was the closure of the state radio and TV network to all but the parties represented in Parliament. In order to acquire this right, a large group of militants began a hunger strike on April 15, one month before the referendum, to support the demands that the LID and the PR had presented to the Head of State. Marco Pannella joined this hunger strike on May 3.

Even after the referendum, the demands for access of the minorities (to the information media, ed.) in order <> continued. These obtained no results and so Pannella's long hunger strike continued and was joined by others, for shorter periods, by Radical groups in Rome and elsewhere in Italy. (20)

Weeks passed without results for the acquisition of rights to information, but the civil disobedience actions intensified and became more critical with the addition of a second demand which was the consultation of the President of the Republic with minority groups. The action, which was centred on the person of Marco Pannella, was accompanied by an intensive political rallying round the analyses of the regime's strangulation of the minorities' expressions of liberty and dissent.

A document bearing the approval of the PR, the LID and civil rights groups at the beginning of July expressed this view in a hard and aggressive manner: <emocratic and constitutional morality and legality>>. (21)

By mid July Pannella's hunger strike, which had by then exceeded sixty days, had become something so exceptional that it could no longer be ignored by the press, the cultural and political spheres or even the heads of the institutions themselves. Among the press, the weekly "Il Mondo" published a long interview of Pier Paolo Pasolini's with Pannella (22) and immediately afterwards the "Corriere della Sera" opened a debate on the "case" that continued for a month. (23) Weeklies and dailies picked up the debate and gave space to the news. On July 18 the President of the Republic at last received the Radical leader to show him his personal attention for the value of his action while still not recognising the right of minorities to be consulted; and on the same day Pannella made his first appearance alone on television. (24)

The <> took on greater proportions and more and more people spoke out. Intellectuals like Alberto Moravia and Leonardo Sciascia (well known writers, ed.) (25) took positions. Dom Franzoni (the prior of St. Paul's Basilica active in peace work) wrote a letter. (26) Political figures (Lombardi, Terracini, Mancini, Parri, Branca) and cultural ones (Fortini, Elena Croce, Franco Rosi, Nicola Matteuci) wrote or participated in some way to show solidarity with the civil rights action. Pannella broke his fast on July 18 and began it again on the 25th of the same month for another sixteen days to achieve a whole range of objectives. In these same days the lay and libertarian militants in Rome began the <> action to broaden the debate and the mobilisation for the same objectives: the vote for eighteen-year-olds and the new familly law within a year; an immediate parliamentary debate on abortion; recognition of minority rights by the President of the Republic; restoration of democ

ratic information on the RAI-TV; restoration of honest information on civil rights in the daily press; opposition to the corruption of the democratic game by public and private bosses; respect for the law actuating the right to initiate popular refernedums; action on creating a law to strike at illegal exporters of capital; against parliamentary jurisdiction of trials for corrupt loans. (27) On September 20 the action for information resulted in a march on the RAI and the occupation of some offices that ended with the obtaining of three quarter-hour TV debates for the civil rights movements after six months of pressure. (28)

The hunger strike weapon (revolutionary /non-violent) in relationship to the goals (democratic/minimalist) made it the strong point of the battle. The demands were all of an elementary democratic type: the respect of minority rights, the prodding of the political groups out of their inertia and into doing the things that the great majority of them had always declared they would do. As before with the conscientious objectors, the aim did not regard the contents but the time element; and the hunger strike as such was not directed against the Parliament or the parties, so it was not a kind of blackmailing of Parliament, but on the contrary a stimulus for them to find the energy to do what they said they wanted to do, but for which they never found the time or the necessary discipline. To be sure, the method was subversive in regard to the <> based on postponement, but it was a contribution to the revitalisation of Parliament and the parties, to putting them on t

he wave length of the country's sentiments. This, combined with the dramatic nature of the means and with the scandalous fact that a strike of this sort was necessary to reach such goals, is what made it so explosive. Hence too the personal and Radical group strength, by means of an apparently so individualistic device, succeeded on this occasion too in opening a dialogue with the political groups and, in particular, with the Communists who were the most refractory in giving way to external pressures.

The main protagonist of the long, intense, dramatic action lasting from May to September was Marco Pannella, who succeeded in mobilising around himself the energy of Radical militants. The work of these latter, in turn, had allowed the leader to multiply press campaigns, pressures and direct actions. This relationship between the two parts of the Radical political equation - the leader who acquires charisma for his exceptional ability at mobilisation, and the militants - became stronger in that <> precisely as a result of that reciprocal need and their complementary qualities. Furthermore civil disobedience and hunger strikes were individual tools (and thus taken to their ultimate consequences) to compensate for the inadequacies of the Radicals' political body in dealing with isolation and in the face of the political desire to propose forcefully its own minority positions.

The debate provoked at the time regarded at once the goals proposed by the Radicals, their methods of action, and the person of Pannella who represented them in a manner not only symbolic. In that manner the political culture of the new Radicals went through the first sifting of an open debate after more than a decade of life on the sidelines due to the fact that it was so different and foteign to the main political currents and the politico-cultural hegemony in Italian civil and political society.

Pier Paolo Pasolini (the famous poet and filmmaker, ed.), opening the debate on the "Pannella Case" in the columns of the "Corriere della Sera", emphasized several singular aspects of the Radicals: non-violence as a moral fact and the rejection of power as one of political reaalism in the context of the Italian situation (<>). Also the lucid understanding of things and facts due to the application of metapolitical principles that allowed for the overcoming of the prejudices and compromises of political life, which is the origin of the scandal. (29)

The validity of thus introducing into politics elements that usually were not included in it was contested by the Republican Adolfo Battaglia who judged the means for actions of (personal, ed.) conscience to be utopian and inadequate to the gravity of the moment. He opposed the realism of politics to the "realism" of exemplary actions: <>. (30)

Pasolini, on the other hand, on the basis of exactly the same elements, insisted on the breadth of Radical action considering it <>. (31)

Wladimiro Dorigo, in the same debate, showed evidence that besides the two philosophies of the crisis, the so-to-speak technocratic one, and the PCI, PSI and labor unions one, there existed a third that made reference to << cases, affairs, issues for battle and new contradictions raised by the grass roots >> that created a minority heritage of ideals that << cannot help but feel itself the bearer and solicitor of authentic values, elementary and irreplaceable not only as values but as instruments for liberty >>. And on the basis of this emerging collective sensibility he supported the reason for being of the Radical position, not content with coming to terms with the other philosophies of the crisis. << This is the root >> Dorigo commented, << of the presumptuousness of Pannella and his libertarian comrades >>. (32)

Maurizio Ferrara replied on behalf of the PCI to these reasons for understanding of the "new" Radical which corresponded

also to emerging objective factors. The two reasons he gave were typical of the Communist ideological repertory: the rejection of the specific civil rights issues as neither central to nor urgent for the life of the nation, and the rejection of the acts of minorities as political tools to substitute for actions of the masses and their representatives. (33)

Besides the questions of Utopia and realism, of the political and the non-political, the arguments of those weeks were centred on the ideological basis and the idealistic heritage of the Radicals. The moderate laity underlined the total rupture of the new Radicals with the tradition of the old radicalism of the fifties, tossing the new Radical praxis into the camp of "spontaneous politics": <> wrote Giovanni Spadolini (PRI), <>. (34) From the same ideal observation post, Nicola Matteuci, who was more attentive to the development of concrete actions, replied that < individual and the sovereignty of his conscience...>>. (35)

If intellectuals and politicians sifted through the Radicals' political culture, utilising for this purpose information obtained from the press and the analysis of the various elements that made them unique, the directly political message with its original ideas and methods of confronting men and problems was given for the first time on the television news. And this was the first new factor in the relationship between Radical politics and the attempt to arrive at a consensus of opinion about them. From the hundreds of thousands of people who had had contact with this or that episode of Radical affairs, millions now learned about them in that Summer because of the access to the news that Pannella had forced the RAI-TV to give to himself and to the minorities in general.

The Radical Party and its politics had made a further leap in quality by winning the possibility for action in the sphere of a historical condition for the minorities. The Radicals had succeeded in enlarging the area of knowledge about civil rights issues beyond the limits of those involved in this work, and together with them they had given the impression of the presence of a political force, very small to be sure, but with ambitions to organise and conduct general battles for the country.

4. THE RADICALS FACE THE << SOCIALIST QUESTION >>

The political group with which the Radicals had always had the closest relations was the PSI. The Radicals shared with the Socialists questions of principle even if they were divided in great part on the concrete of the choices with regard to collaboration with the Christian Democrats and the involvements in secondary power that these meant. For the most part Socialist members of parliament had been the one actively interested in the divorce action, the Concordat and other civil rights even if often from positions that isolated them from the rest of their party. Socialists had made up most of the Radicals' fundamental counterparts in encounters over their militant actions since every initiative almost automatically brought in individual Socialist adherents or those from groups and sections. The PSI had been the party they supported in the 1970 regional elections on the basis of commitments on several qualifying issues. Almost constantly the Radicals entrusted to the Socialists the interpretation and med

iation in Parliament regarding the PR's actions, demands and initiatives. The Socialists thus constituted the party of the traditional left most in harmony with the Radicals for two reasons: because in actuality there was a continuous line of contact with many channels of the [PSI] grass roots or with individual representatives even when the contacts with official channels were difficult or impossible; and because the Radicals never ceased to claim their own place in the Socialist family despite their own libertarian features and methods for action. Contributing to all this were also the historical characteristics of the PSI which in Italy had become the heir of "Radical democracy" after the end of the Action Party and the period of fronts: not by chance did many of the old Radicals turn to the PSI like some of Ferruccio Parri's Actionists and members of Piero Calamandrei's Popular Unity Party before them.

The PR's attention to the Socialists expressed itself on three different levels. The Radicals paid attention to the choices of the PSI in its daily politics and were thus led to criticise them too. On the other hand they tried to offer the Socialists issues and initiatives to fight for as points of encounter for revitalised politics. And finally, they searched for the way in which a renewed and unified Socialist group could develop which could absorb them and thus strengthen their particular experience as a minority.

The final motion of the 1972 Radical Congress affirmed the need to regain the initiative in the Socialist area: << It is the task of the entire party to mobilise so that this faction of associations and of free, new lay organisations, of libertarians, of Socialists is not interrupted but continues and widens... >>. (36) At the July 1973 congress to set up the referendums the Hons. Vincenzo Balsamo and Fabrizio Cicchito participated while Giacomo Mancini sent his greetings: this participation was interpreted as << a sign of the possibility of collaboration with wide sectors of Socialists and not only the grass roots >>.(37)

When the daily "Liberazione" came out, it followed Socialist affairs assiduously even if it criticised them, first of all with regard to their return to the government [coalition] in the Summer of 1973 when the third Rumor government put out a new edition of the center-left. The daily paper headlined: << The PSI returns to its Calvary. Worsened reproposal of the conditions of the first center-left. The PSI by calculation or delusion again chooses the road to its Calvary or to a few vice-president posts. It is time to attack the center-left again.>> (38)

The polemics against the PSI's choice of participating in the government - << The DC has already won hegemony over De Martino. Let us oppose them with Socialism >>; (39) << PSI floating in a vacuum >>; (40) <> (41) - was kept company by continuous, explicit recognition of its necessary role: <> wrote "Liberazione" in October, <>. (42) "La Prova Radicale" in turn, published a special dossier entitled "The Alternative and Socialist Movement" including a long conversation with Riccardo Lombardi and edited by Massimo Teodori and Gianfranco Spadaccia. (43) And when, after May 12, 1974, there began a long Summer struggle with a collective hunger strike, the Radicals again found several PSI Socialists as their counterparts. Pannella was received by De Martino, who had yet been a target of criticism for his a

cquiescent leadership; and Socialist party representatives publicly declared: <> (44) and <>.(45)

Apart from these and other episodes, the Radicals were very aware of the fundamental question: the need of a large Socialist force in the country as the presupposition for any talk of an alternative to the DC. Nevertheless there was never any sign that could open the question of a Radical-Socialist relationship in terms of a traditional alliance or convergence. It had always made and continued to make clear, even in the moments of closest convergence on specific issues, that a convergence of the minority party with the Socialists could only take place starting with united battles, that is with factors that caused the grass roots to rally round. The positive experiences of the divorce movement had been of this kind and the referendums project of 1974 indicated the nature of the possible unifying processes.

On the other hand in the post '68 era all attempts on the new left to form new parties using the old formulas for aggregation were failing. After the 1972 elections the Movimento Politico dei Lavoratori [Workers Political Movement, formed by a group of Catholics who shifted to the left under the leadership of the ex ACLI (46) president Livio Labor], which was a typical example of a process not based on specific struggles, disappeared and some of its members were absorbed into the PSI. Even the PSIUP had declared its own end and returned to the great currents of the traditional left, the PCI and the PSI. Manifesto, a residue of the PSIUP and the MPL (Movimento Popolare dei Lavoratori or Popular Workers' Movement, ed.) , tried with difficulty to unite with the PDUP, retracing the steps of aggregations and separations that had little to do with the country's new movements.

The Radicals remained extraneous to these affairs, not only nor so much because of politico-ideological differences as for the fact that the most authentic heritage of the group was its way of setting in motion movements with specific political intentions and objectives. And it was on that heritage that it intended to construct possible aggregations directed towards the Socialists, and not only towards them.

At the end of 1974 it was the external facts - the decline of the inert center-left due to the arrival of the economic crisis on top of the political, moral and institutional ones - together with the internal situation of the party that urgently put the "Socialist question" on the Radical Party's order of the day. The Radicals had conducted a series of specific struggles and were by now aware that they interpreted needs in the country

and so, if at the cost of hard clashes with the institutions, specific, single successes were possible. On the other hand, they noted how the general political picture was taking on a constantly more non-democratic character, concretely if not formally, and that it was therefore necessary to shift attention from the sum of the single struggles to an alternative strategy in respect to which the role of leftists took on a determined weight. <> read the official document of the Milan Congress of November 1974, <> (47)

There strongly emerged at the Congress the need, on the one hand, of constituting a political organisation up to the tasks that public opinion by now attributed to the Radicals, and on the other, the urgent need of developing the Radical potential for contributing to a Socialist refoundation. At the conclusion of the congress the need of such a double requirement was explicitly accepted in the motion with the clear reference to the "Socialist

question" as basic to the question of an alternative.

Thus it happened over a few years that as the party gradually expanded its field of action it also broadened its goals. From the definition of itself as a "lay party" vaguely formulated in 1971 in terms of its ideas and struggles, it went over to the precise objective of being "a new Socialist force" to win 20% of the vote. Civil disobedience and single battles were no longer considered sufficient to create the conditions to construct an alternative, <aity and the Socialists. And the creation of a great Socialist and libertarian force is the necessary condition for a democratic and Socialist alternative>>. (48)

It was not only in the official party documents that the consideration could be found that the Radicals felt there was the possibility of beginning a process of Socialist refoundation in which they could play a part. Marco Pannella, while still keeping substantially his leadership of the party, continued with his policy of increasing the initiatives and movements that might break up the tight party balances. He declared that he wanted to act as a Socialist [<< I believe that by now my position as a militant is in the PSI ranks... months ago I already expressed this evaluation of mine to my Radical comrades who understood and shared it >> (49)] and several months later he launched the "Movimento socialista per i diritti e le libertà civili - Lega XIII Maggio" (Socialist Movement for Civil Rights and Liberties - the May 13th League, ed.) whose name indicated its political intentions. Other Radicals (Massimo Teodori, Mercedes Bresso, Franco Sircana, Lorenzo Strik Lievers and Enzo Belli Nicoletti) along wit

h Socialists (Alberto Benzoni, Umberto Dragone, Gerardo Mombelli and Piero Bizzarri) unionists (Giorgio Benvenuto and Enzo Mattina) and independents (Giorgio Galli and Stefano Rodotà) founded in January 1975 the ARA - Azione e Ricerca per l'Alternativa - (Action and Research for an Alternative) with the goal of bridging the gap between individuals and groups, of complementing the work of the party, for the Socialist refoundation and for an alternative. (50)

NOTES

1) IRI = Istituzione per la ricostruzione industriale, or Institution of Industrial Reconstruction, a state holding company.

2) Final motion of the XIth Congress of the PR, Turin, November 1972, in "Le lotte radicali attraverso i documenti congressuali e lo statuto", edited by the PR, Rome, 1976, IIIrd edition, p.29

3) Ibidem, p.30

4) Ibidem, p.31

5) Letter of Marco Pannella to "Il Messaggero", January 16, 1975 which was followed by a debate including letters published by the daily until the end of January. See also the letter of Massimo Teodori, "Il Messaggero", January 25, 1973.

6) Cf. "La droga nera", edited by Stampa Alternativa, in "La Prova Radicale", year II, no.7-8-9, May-July 1973, pp.106-111.

7) Letter of Marco Pannella, cit.

8) Cf. "Dossier Droga/2"" edited by Stampa Alternativa in "La Prova Radicale", year II no.5, March 1973, pp.109-118, and "Notizie Radicali", year II no.2, January 23, 1973.

9) Cf. "La droga nera", cit.

10) Cf. "Notizie Radicali" no.176, year VII no.2 , January 1973

11) Lettera di Marco Pannella, cit.

12) Angelo Pezzana, "Il Fuori e il partito", "Notizie Radicali", Year VII, no.199-200, June 20, 1973.

13) Cf. "Notizie Radicali", year VII no.199-120, June 20, 1973.

14) Giulio Ercolessi, "Chiudere la baracca?", "Liberazione", Year I no.32, October 25, 1973.

15) "Il PR ha deciso: otto referendum", "Liberazione", Year I no.34, November 9, 1973.

16) The paper "Liberazione" was published daily from September 8 to October 19, 1973 and afterwards as a fortnightly until February 1974. Marco Pannella has been managing editor since November 1973, Enzo Zeno is its co-managing editor.

17) "Otto referendum contro il regime, promossi dal Partito Radicale", edited by Massimo Teodori, "La nouva Sinistra", Savelli Editions, Rome, 1974.

18) Massimo Teodori, "Perchè i referendum", in "Otto referendum..." cit., p.20.

19) "Come non è stata colta una grande occasione unitaria", in "Notizie Radicali" no.307, October 10, 1974, p.5.

20) "Digiuno collettivo: comincia tutto il 15 Aprile. In tre mese oltre 100 militanti nonviolenti riprendono l'arma del digiuno", in "Notizie Radicali" no.289, July 23, 1974.

21) "Manifesto per la difesa delle libertà civili" in "Notizie Radicali", mimeographed, July 8, 1973.

22) "Noi siamo pazzi di libertà": Pannella intervistato da Pasolini, in "Il Mondo", July 25, 1976. Cf. also the reply: "Signori i pazzi siete voi" by Marco Pannella in "Il Mondo", August 8, 1974.

23) Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Apriamo un dibattito sul caso Pannella", in "Il Corriere della Sera", July 16, 1974.

24) Stenographic text of the television discourse in "L'Espresso" no.30, July 28, 1974.

25) Cf. "Pro e contro" in "L'Espresso", July 28, 1974.

26) Open letter of Dom Franzoni to Marco Pannella in "Aut", year III no.24, July 28, 1974, p.13.

27) Cf. "Notizie Radicali", no.289, July 23, 1974.

28) "XX settembre, Una breccia a Viale Manzoni", "Notizie

Radicali", no.307, October 10, 1974.

29) P.P.Pasolini, "Corriere della Sera", cit.

30) Adolfo Battaglia, "Corriere della Sera", July 20, 1974.

311 P.P. Pasolini, "Corriere della Sera", cit.

32) Waldimiro Dorigo, "Corriere della Sera", August 10, 1974.

33) Maurizio Ferrara, "Corriere della Sera", July 18, 1974

34) Giovanni Sapdolini, "Corriere della Sera", July 25, 1974

35) Nicola Matteucci, "Una rabbia liberale" in "Il Mondo", July 18, 1974.

36) "Le lotte radicalia attraverso...", cit. p.29

37) Ibidem, p.34

38) "Liberazione", 15 September 1973

39) "Liberazione", 22 September 1973

40) "Liberazione", 27 September 1973

41) "Liberazione", 11 October 1973

42) "Liberazione", 11 October 1973

43) "Dossier: Movimento socialista e alternativa" in "La Prova Radicale", year II no. 7-8-9, May-July, 1973, pp.45-92.

44) Enrico Manca in "Aut", year III no.24; July 28, 1974.

45) Aldo Ajello in "Aut", yearII no.24, July 28, 1974.

46) Associazioni Cristiani Lavoratori Italiani or Italian Christian Workers Associations.

47) "Le lotte radicali attraverso...", cit. p.39

48) Ibidem, p.40

49) Marco Pannella, "Scacco al regime" in "Aut", year III no.24, July 28, 1974, p.12.

50) The ARA was founded in January 1975 by a group of people belonging to the PR and the PSI or involved in union and journalistic organisations. Its objectives were: a) the renewal of the organisational structure of the Socialist forces and their capacity for ideological and programatic development and of their strategy; b) the leftist alternative to the DC in terms of the programatic content and political orientation of the social forces. It promoted a series of undertakings: "Primo colloquio per l'alternativa " (April 1975); "Quale Socialismo, Quale Europa" (November 1975); "Alternativa e elementi di socialismo nelle communità locali" (September 1975); "La sinistra e la strategia dei referendum" (October 1975). The secretary general was Massimo Teodori, and the treasurer was Piero Bizzari.