ABSTRACT: The 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)

4. POLITICAL SYSTEM AND CORPORATIVE SOCIETY

The internal organisation and social basis of a political organisation are more the effect (despite a certain degree of retroaction) than the cause of its role in a social system. This is as true of the larger integrative parties as of the smaller apparatus-type ones. It is also true of the Radical Party. Neither the nature of the demands that this party organises, nor the characteristics of its political action are comprehensible except within the framework of an analysis - which we can only briefly sketch here - of the general conditions common to the late-capitalist societies and on the specific conditions that distinguish the Italian political system.

The late-capitalistic society is one "regulated by the State". (27) Once the old "separation" between civil society and the State has broken down, the tendency towards interpenetration of the two spheres is always stronger. The "global state regulation of society's vital processes" (28) produces the politicization of all social relationships. The class conflict whose epicentre was in the field of industry is still important, but new conflicts break out and spread like an oil stain in all sectors of the social system. The political class, the State's decision-making centres, the ideological control apparatuses are the counterparts of the new conflicts. As a sociologist wrote some time ago, who was one of the first to sense the new developments: << Our economic and social past was dominated by the central clash of industry and the unions. Today the two adversaries continue to oppose each other, but their fight no longer involves all the levels of social life; it is located at the intermediate levels which

leaves them a considerable importance. But one must recognise that it commands less directly and less completely than before the economic and social policies of the society as well as the private lives of the workers >>. (29)

The State's intervention in the economy opens up internal changes in the administrative class (growth of the State bourgeoisie, strengthening of the power of the political class that already controls the State apparatus, etc.) and modifications in the entire social block that this class organises. Only from a Nineteenth Century perspective, incapable of understanding the changes, can the State be conceived as a "superstructure" with regard to the class relationships. In contemporary society the State is rather - to adapt a phrase of Althusser [Louis Althusser, French philosopher, born 1918, ed.] - the "State is the place of condensation" of society's power relations.

The changed relationship of civil society and State, with respect to the epoch of liberal capitalism, has thus provoked changes in the inner physiognomy of the upper and lower classes, and moved the epicentre of the class conflict from the factories to the entire society. The institutionalisation of the industrial conflicts has given the workers' union greater political weight, but at the same time involves it in political transactions, transforms it from the organised expression of a social protest movement into an interest group like many others with the functions of representation and social control. (30)

Political society, the system of parties and pressure groups which is a structure occupying an intermediate place between civil society and the State, is now transformed from a tool of mediation between the State institutions and a restricted bourgeois "public" into a political market place where exchanges and collective contractual negotiations take place between the representatives of many social groups who express the "pluralistic" structure of society. The "mediation" among a plurality of sectorial interests takes place as much within the single parties as it does on the level of inter-party relations or those between parties and pressure groups. The "economic theory" of democracy (of Joseph Schumpeter and Robert Dahl) (31) has for some time identified this phenomenon precisely. Of course, the image of a "market place" to represent the real functioning of the political system must not be taken to mean that all the social groups participating in the "political game" have the same initial chances of s

uccess (to leave the negotiations, that is, having gained advantages). The system is loaded in favour of the administration class - that controls the process of the accumulation and use of the surplus - and which, by definition, never loses in the long run of the political process (even if, of course, it may come out of a specific negotiation with a disadvantage). (32)

The continual negotiations between sectors, whose stakes are enforceable administrative provisions which make up the principle activity of the political system, allow us by now to speak of a consolidated "neo-corporativism" as the dominant political feature of Western societies. (33)

The assertion of the interests of "categories", which is to say corporations, within the political system is directly proportional to the decline of ideological tensions, of ultimate goals for the reorganisation of society which are non-negotiable. The parties lose their "capacity to reform", to fight for general ends and they are changed into tools of mediation between sectorial interests.

This political system produces exclusion and estrangement. In fact, only the interests of those categories are politically evaluated that have what Weber calls "a monopolistic capacity on the market" (34), that can offer services relevant for the system in its totality in exchange for State intervention. Thus access to the political market is denied to those who lack "negotiating power" (convicts, housewives, pensioners, the unemployed, etc., but also the weaker "marginal" sectors of the working class itself) - all the groups or quasi-classes whose needs cannot be satisfied in a way compatible with the perpetuation and the reproduction of the social system: <<...From the standpoint of political stability in advanced systems of State-regulated capitalism, the problem is not so much that of the political privilege of a dominant minority that also dominates economically... but rather the guarantee of excluding and repressing the expressions of needs that can prejudice the system. The filter and the control

of the process that forms the will no longer comes by way of distinct rights associated with specific categories of persons, but by way of disciplinary measures incorporated in the institutions for the political expression of needs >>. (35)

In this system the political party, as we have seen, is a structure for representation (of sectorial interests that are protected and defended in the political arena) and a structure for social control that must "filter" the demands, excluding systematically from the market the representatives of "needs" that the system cannot meet without engaging in radical changes. This exclusion is exercised in two ways: directly by suppressing the demands of social categories without the power of negotiation, and indirectly by blocking or making access to the political system difficult for new formations that could take on the charge of representing such demands (thus violating the set "rules" of the political game). As a result, the political system <<...clearly bears monopolistic features in that access to the market is blocked to competing groups and the ambit of power administered communally is extended >>. (36)

Public financing of the parties is an eloquent indicator of their change from "private" organisations for the achievement of collective goals into "public" structures for social control with a common interest in maintaining a privileged position which is precisely that of an oligopolystic (political) market.

The general picture can once again be summarised in the words of Offe: << The pluralistic system of organised interests excludes from the process of formation of the will all expressions of general needs that are not connected to groups with status, that have no ability to produce conflicts, that have no functional meaning for the process of appreciating capital and the work force, and that being utopian exceed the historical limits of the system by not necessarily holding to the norms of pragmatic prudence in negotiations >>. (37)

At this point two opposing tendencies assert themselves. The first is the de-politicizing of the demand that finds its way into the political system: the request for sectorial benefits suffocates the political proposal for general change. And since every new social process produces rationalisations to justify itself, with the coming of "regulated society" the concept of democracy itself changes: from meaning a combination of political procedures and conditions that should favour the collectivity's process of self-emancipation and the expansion of the sphere of freedom, (38) it becomes a "technique of government", a tool for negotiations among the sectorial interests and of resolving social conflicts. (To make ourselves clear, it is the difference between J.J. Rousseau's classic theory of democracy and Jospeh Schumpeter's theory of "democratic elitism").

The second tendency is towards the explosion of spontaneous collective movements as a product of the politicization of all social relations (family, sex, etc.). De-politicization of the relations within political society and politicization of social relations are two sides of the same coin. The crisis created in the social system by these two opposing tendencies is resolved, as Habermas noted (Juergen Habermas, born 1929, German philosopher and sociologist, ed.), (39) in a permanent lack in the legitimacy of the political system.

The collective movement, by its very existence, gives rise to a crisis of legitimacy for the political powers and implies a reappropriation of "ideological capacity", the lost capacity of the political system to fight for non-negotiable ends. The break-out of this crisis is a consequence of the "barring" of non-negotiable demands for change by the political system. The progress of the political crisis following on the break-out of a collective movement depends in the end as much on the movement's internal logic of expansion (the birth-expansion-decadence cycle) (40) as it does on the capacity of the parties to "reabsorb" the subversive impulse of the collective movements by transforming the ideological demands and breaking them up into a package of demands negotiable on the market.

On should add that the crisis of social formation, here described in its main features, is not only brought about by the incapacity of the political system to meet the emerging demands (crisis of legitimacy). It is also the fruit of the inefficient management of resources - "programmed" waste, (41) "fiscal crisis", (42) "feudalisation" of the economy (43) that this system of social organisation brings about (efficiency crisis).

If the quick preceding observations allow us to put into focus several fundamental tendencies common to contemporary Western societies, it is still clear that each single social system presents specific features of its own, different from all the others. In Italy several trends have been manifested with particular force, others instead have not shown up at all, and still others have been active, but much more weakly.

The presence of a predominating party in the political system and the "freezing" of the Communist Party in the opposition for thirty years have determined several variants from the preceding picture that should be carefully considered:

the absence of a "class compromise" (Social Democracy) such as has been realised long ago in those countries more closely under the scrutiny of the students of late-capitalist formations, with the consequent lack of rationalising processes of productive structures as well as welfare-state type developments; (44)

a greater propensity to compromise among the elites partly, for a long time, as a consequence of the low level of competition within the political system (because of the permanent exclusion from government roles of a significant fraction of the political class), and in part because of the confirmation of several constant factors in Italian political history ("trasformismo") [an untranslatable word indicating the method of forming majorities in Parliament by absorbing individuals and groups of opposing tendencies into agreements based on patronage, ed.]; (45) greater difficulty in "reading" the functioning of the Italian political system with respect to other systems, because this political system presents, and in strong colours, features of the "market" described above and at the same time contains more potential for general political change than others.

The contradictory functioning of the Italian political system brings about a more "expressive" and less "instrumental" ideological role: the ideological fragmentation, the presence of deeply-rooted political subcultures, have blocked the reduction of the political system to a pure and simple market place for the bartering of sectorial interests. This is because the Socialist subculture and its pole of attraction, the PCI, have for a long time organised not only "specific" demands, but also "general" demands for change - that is to say, that specific political demand that presupposes a process of exchange between the represented and the representatives that <<... takes place with a minimum of negotiation and a maximum of identification with the general ends of the subjective collective party >>. (47) From another side, however, the low level of competition in the system has had a countereffect and disproportionally broadened the negotiations and bartering in the government on behalf of sectorial inter

ests, thus annulling the capacity for reform (efficiency and legitimacy crises) of the political system. The opposition itself has not remained immune from involvement in the bartering process (as research on parliamentary behaviour demonstrates) (48), surely to some degree because for a long time it was: <<... one of the few ways the opposition had of maintaining concrete relations with demands throughout the country, however particular in nature, and not be reduced to mere intellectual debate without any practical effects >>; (49) but also in part because of the strategy of approach to the area of government and of domestic and international legitimation (the Salerno decision/historic compromise [the PCI's strategy of Communist collaboration with the Christian Democrats, ed.]) which, according to the consolidated tradition of political opposition in Italy, favours accords and compromises over clashes and conflict. Thus between opposition and compromise, there develops, during the period o

f stability in the electoral body (1948 - 1972), that "negative integration" of which one spoke to define the relationship between the PCI and the political system. (50)

This is the cause of that characteristic ambivalence of the Italian political system that makes it a market for sectorial interests (neo-corporatism) like other political systems and even more so, but yet at the same time less "closed" against the outbreak of "general" and non-negotiable demands.

The presence of a predominant party strengthens several basic tendencies that are at work in all Western systems but with specific characteristics. Here the "control of the State" by part of the governing political class and the expansion of the State in the economy proceed more quickly than elsewhere, but not as a consequence of the development of the welfare state (a development which has not taken place) and rather as a consequence of the electoral stalemate, of the "unremovability" of the party of relative majority from government power. The patronage system, the possibility of dispensing "jobs" and "sinecures" as "measures" of political power, patronage as a method of governing - all of this attaches itself to the general tendency of State and civil society to interpenetrate, but with different results from other Western systems. The governing political class acquires more power than in those systems where "alternation" - or the "expectation" of alternation - prevails. (51)

The collective movements break out with more force and tenacity in Italy than in other Western systems - not only because the party system functions by excluding several needs of the political sphere. This, in fact, is true of Italy as it is of all other political systems. It does not follow that the collective movements are equally strong and vital everywhere. The complete closure of the political system to non-negotiable demands produces apathy, not rebellion, inability to react, not contesting.

It seems to be rather the contradictory functioning of the political system that is the principle cause of power of the collective movements that are on the outside of the Italian political system, its functioning all at once as a market for depoliticised demands, blocked and lacking in the capacity for reform, and yet not totally closed to demands for change, with repressed, "latent", but still existing possibilities for general change. (52)

The collective movements that have periodically arisen in Italian society ever since '68 are certainly characterised by << the rejection of negotiations and for the reappropriation of ideology >> and are definitely connected <<... to the lack of (or wrong) use of institutional resources and the sclerosis of the relationships of representation >>. (53) They also have surely arisen from the bad functioning of representative democracy understood as an instrument of the institutionalisation of social conflicts (which presupposes a periodic alternation of the government in order to completely develop its "pacifying" effects). (54) But they are also connected, and perhaps most of all, to those potentialities for change that exist in the political system and which the leftist opposition, in seeking agreements with the dominating power block or with some of its sectors, does not manage to express.

The tendency to compromise, to agreements among the political elite - with its inevitable socio-economic corollary, corporatism - was not pre-empted by the June 20, 1976 elections, with what in political language has been called << the end of the Christian Democrat's central role >> and which in substance means passing from a system with a predominant party to a new political configuration in which the system << ...does not function in a bipartisan fashion, but as a system with two dominant and converging parties >>. (55) The aspect of convergence is essential. In fact, with the new power relationships << there are intrinsic political reasons (relative to the political system and the parties) that work to reinforce stability... >>. The political reasons were expressed in the election results.

One is justified in speaking of the end of the Christian Democrats' central role. Not only on the basis of parliamentary arithmetic, but above all because of the necessity of stabilising a political picture in which a social block can again accumulate and reconstruct itself. The central role can only be substituted, within the bonds of the system, by a convergence of the DC and the PCI. The convergence is a surrogate for a lost "central role". (56) Said in another way, the polarisation experienced by the Italian political system has not resulted in radicalising the political confrontation. (57) On the contrary, it has imposed an expansion of the area of negotiations (the government of the abstentions) and, what is perhaps more, a greater "visibility" of bartering and the characteristics of the party system as a "political market".

At the same time there exist powerful social forces that then to destabilise the political picture, expressions as much of specific contradictions (for example, the rupture between the labour market and scholastic institutions) (58) as of the needs of "weak" social groups which have been or are in the process of being shunted aside. Exclusion does not produce apathy but rebellion, it has been said. And the opposition expressed by Luciano Lama (Communist union leader, ed.) at the University of Rome has been read, symbolically, as the revolt of the outsiders against those employed in industry and protected by the unions, which confirms for Italy as well, at least as a tendency, the judgement recalled above concerning the changed role of unions in the Western political systems.

In recapitulation, the Italian political system presents in an aggravated form many features typical of the late-capitalistic systems, but with several significant, basic differences. For our purposes here, two specific features of this system appear especially relevant:

1) the incomplete reduction of the political system to a market-place according to the democratic theory of economics, and yet a strong tendency towards neo-corporatism fosters - not discouraged - by the strategic choices of the opposition's political elite;

2) the presence of collective movements that are stronger than elsewhere, breaking out continually in various sectors of society. According to this profile, Italy would seem to suit more than others the judgement of Touraine according to which: << Although grass-roots movements and the appeal to spontaneity come from other causes and for this reason can be of brief duration, they seem to represent signs of a more durable transformation: the rapprochement between the social base of a collective action and its methods of acting at the social level... This situation, which puts the central power and the grass roots face to face, does not in itself bring about a strengthening or a weakening of the political system. It is important in itself because it indicates the generalised appearance of social movements which do not take form at the level of a collective policy, but start from the social problem itself >>. (59)

The contradictoriness of the Italian political system offers a chance to the civil social movements to exert a political influence which is denied to them in more closed systems. But to make themselves heard they need political tools and channels that the system of traditional parties must negate and suffocate due to the logic of convergence that dictates its functioning.

5. FROM NEGOTIATION TO CONFLICT

This long digression was necessary in order to evaluate, without over simplifying, the Radical Party's role in the political system, the nature of the social demand that this party represents, the structural reasons for the explosive effects its way of acting regularly provokes in the relations and balances among the parties.

At this point it may be possible to understand better the Radicals' political action in its various expressions - above all what most strikes the observer, which is the combination of legalistic and subversive, the literal respecting of the Constitution and, at the same time, the "revolutionary" connotations of Radical initiatives. One can affirm, in the first case, that it is the discrepancy between the (formal) Constitution and the combination of de facto powers (the regime, the applied constitution) that confer this double character on the Radicals' actions and allows the PR to fight the de facto powers in the name of the same norms that these latter use in order to legitimate themselves. (60)

The legalistic character (the appeal to the Constitution) allows the opposing of democracy as participation to democracy as a technique of government, the "citizen's" power of decision to the hegemony of the parties. The political action of the Radicals at the same time subverts the equilibrium of the parties because:

it is a deliberate expression of the demands that the political system cannot satisfy;

it introduces elements of conflict into a party system that tends to convergences and agreements;

opposes the hegemony of the parties with the "re-awakening" of civil society, the grass-roots reappropriation (consider the referendums) of powers of decision against the power of the parties as mediators and filters. All this explains the violence of the parties' opposition, inasmuch as they are structures that tend to an absolute monopoly of the representation of interests, to the Radicals' politics and their efforts to block a non-mediated expression of political demands (for example, the bills that tend to make it impossible for small groups without the support of rich and powerful organisations to collect signatures for the calling of referendums).

In the multifarious activities of the PR, three main types of action standout clearly: traditional activities, those, that is, which conform to the "rules" of representative democracy (from elections to life in Parliament); non-violent direct action (hunger strikes, self-incrimination, protest marches, etc.); the referendums. The heterogeneous nature of the tools of political struggle adopted is the mixture of direct and indirect democracy, of spontaneous action and political delegation of which we spoke in analysing the inner organisation. (61)

The organisation of referendums to abrogate laws and the direct actions are certainly the most typical of the three types of Radical action. Both are adaptable and suitable to a party which does not aggregate and negotiate various kinds of demands with other political groups. Referendums and direct actions, in other words, are a consequence of the relationship, already analysed, existing among the PR, civil society and political society. In both cases it is a question of actions that introduce conflict into the political system, that do not lend themselves by their very nature to negotiation and thus are the opposite of the principle mechanisms by which the Italian political system functions. The choice of these tools of struggle is a consequence of the "heterodox" nature of the Radical Party.

DIRECT ACTION. It is different from "demonstrative actions" (for example, the exemplary actions of the anarchists at the beginning of the century) which are purely symbolic and serve to influence public opinion generally. It consists in "wrestling" with an identifiable political adversary and, therefore, always results in an immediate defeat or a victory (equally immediate) of one of the two contenders. Thus it has a direct effect on the political system which shifts the power relationship in one direction or the other: << The direct action aims to have an effect on the political system. It is not an expressive action but an instrumental one, even if it can have expressive and symbolical aspects. In this sense the direct action always has a strategic aspect, implies a choice of means and of interlocutors, it calculates the effect on the public and the relationship between the cost and the benefits of the action >>. (62)

In contrast to the demonstrative action, the direct action does not have the public as its object or target, but calls on the public to support it in its fight with the political adversary. The direct action can be either violent or non-violent. The former is typical of terrorist groups (but in this case it is difficult to distinguish from the demonstrative act since, normally, the terrorist group tries to prevail over its adversaries indirectly by influencing public opinion and provoking changes in the general political attitudes). (63)

Non-violent direct action (which, as we know, is the kind practised by the Radical Party) is a "secularised" version of the techniques tried by the Gandhian movement, but purged of their original religious components and then reproposed during the '60s by peace and civil rights movements, particularly in the United States. (64)

It is a form of struggle that is distinguished at once for its efficacy (because it forces the political powers to fight on a terrain chosen by the adversary) and for its legalism which, unlike violent action, rallies large sectors of the collectivity to its banner while tending, because of its intrinsic features, to neutralise the reactions of the opposition. (65) A hunger strike conducted almost to its extreme consequences, for example, has good chances of putting its adversary on the ropes. If the latter gives in, he shows up his weakness and the indefensibility (illegality) of his preceding position (e.g. the refusal of access to television for minorities); if he does not give in he is bound to be unpopular and suffer the negative reactions of society.

This method of struggle, which was imported into Italy, has intrinsic qualities that can have shattering effects on the political balances. This aspect is immediately comprehensible if we use the language of game theory to to describe the differences between direct action and other forms of political struggle - a mathematical language, that is, which is usually employed to for the study of decisions in uncertain situations and of the optimal strategies for the different kinds of decisions. (66) The main distinction, within game theory, is between "games of zero sums" where the amount that one player wins is the same as the amount his adversary loses (and so the total of winnings and losses equals zero) and " games of variable sums" where all the players may win something in varying proportions according to the way the game progresses. Direct actions are typically "games of zero sums" and thus implies a conflict, a head-on clash among the opponents: the winner takes all, the loser loses all. But the It

alian political system, as we have seen, is based on a logic which excludes almost completely "games of zero sums" (head-on clashes). In this political system prevail negotiation and barter and << deferred reciprocal compensations >>, (67) that is, a process of decision founded on the principle that whoever is relatively damaged by a specific decision can count on receiving "compensations" in subsequent decisions. In short, the system's low level of competition favours "games of variable sums", those where the stakes are divided up among all the players (that is to say, all the "legitimate" players - e.g. the parties of the "constitutional range" [68]) and the objective of the political conflict is to decide how much of the stakes goes to each player.

The logic of convergences that prevails, for the reasons cited, in the political system, favours this mechanism which in order to function postulates a low conflict level among the parties and the party system. It further postulates what has been called << the systematic exclusion of the least favoured >>, (69)

which is to say the non-choice, the non-decision (the technique of "postponement" of reforms as a method of government), on problems for which no agreement can be found among the parties and the various pressure groups.

Non-violent direct action is the antithesis of this mechanism. It re-introduces conflict and breaks up negotiation. Its strong points are, of course, also its weak points. In fact, from the preceding description it is clear that to be successful the methods and aims of direct action must be presented without distortion to the public by mass media and so it presupposes extensive information. This is why the media and their attitude have strategic importance in the Radicals' battles. And this is why direct action, rather than be an efficacious and potentially invincible instrument, can rapidly boomerang if the media do not present the information or present it in a substantially distorted manner.

THE REFERENDUMS. In other political systems with more internal conflict, referendums are nothing other than a tool of direct democracy that takes its place beside the tools of representative democracy without excessive trauma. (71) But in Italy it has upsetting effects on the political system for the same reasons direct actions do. The referendum is also a game of zero sums, the majority takes all, the minority loses all. In those political systems where the election results allow for the alteration and the penalisation of the government, the referendum has no shattering effects on the political balances, because the elections too have the features of a game of zero sums. In Italy the "blocked" political system does not allow for the substitutions of those that govern, nor do the strategies adopted by the leftist opposition. In this political system, at least in the 1948-1972 period, <<...the elections tended to be celebrations of the legitimacy bestowed on the parties by the sovereign people. They appr

oximate, that is, the function that elections have in one-party regimes. In a sense one can say that the electoral apparatus of the parties serves less for the battle among the parties than for extracting from the people the proof of legitimacy, the recognition of the right to govern or to be present in Parliament. Almost in the way that the publicity apparatus of oligopolistic regimes does not serve as much for reciprocal competition as for the stable conditioning of a market that is divided up >>. (72)

The denaturing of the original meaning of election competitions in Italy, about which such scholars as Alessandro Pizzorno or Giorgio Galli have written so much, make the referendum - which, I repeat, is a perfectly normal tool in other political systems - a substitute for rather than an addition to elections, because it unblocks a jammed decision-making process and brings back the element of conflict that the logic of the political system tends to take away from the elections. It puts an end, at least for a while, to negotiating, it forces the parties to take an unambiguous stand for or against, without the possibility of mediation, and it involves the formation of majorities and minorities on each single issue.

In Italy, therefore, this method of battle acquires a different meaning from what it has in those systems where there is more inter-party conflict: it gives back the power of decision to a collectivity that does not manage to impose its will by elections; it becomes an effective instrument of direct democracy. That it has disruptive effects on political balances is proved by what happened after the divorce referendum in 1974: in a system with so little competition and the prevalence of variable-sums games", the introduction of a zero-sum game surely was one of the principle explosive forces to break up the thirty- year stability of the electorate (as the subsequent regional and national elections of 1975 and 1976 showed). Quite aside from its specific effects on the Italian political system, the referendum, even more than direct actions, lends itself to concretely realising the Radical project or giving back the power of decision to civil society by giving political weight to the many impulses coming fr

om collective action movements, often in a confused way, and that break up regularly when hitting the barriers set up by a political system incapable of functioning as the driving force for political development and social change.

The Radical Party is today in a phase where both its consenses and its membership is growing as local associations multiply in a uniform way throughout the national territory. A transition period has begun of which both leaders and members of the party will have to take account. Everything, in fact, points

to a "growth crisis" that is about to hit the party. For the first time in the history of this small political group a dilemma has arisen which has divided the members: (72) to deal with the growth by reinforcing the organisation, or to preserve, even if with the necessary adaptations, the spontaneous character of the party.

It is a dilemma all the more difficult for the Radical Party in the same degree as its form is anomalous with regard to other parties. In a traditional party a problem of sudden growth would be resolved with equally traditional methods by reinforcing the organisation: once the "heroic" phase was over the "rational" one would begin involving the division of political labour, of professionalism, of the organisation's "guided" growth. To say it with a slogan: From a "charismatic" community to a "bureaucratic" community. For a small Leninist party that was expanding the problem would simply not exist since the organisational reinforcement would run parallel to the political project; it would be in itself a sign of success, an indication that one was on the right road. But for the Radical Party, if our analysis of its nature has been correct up to now, such a line of reasoning is not possible. That is the source of the dilemma: if the PR chooses the road of organisational reinforcement, it will be able to de

al with the growth in size, but it runs the risk of "bureaucratisation"; it strengthens the organisational bonds within the group, but it risks losing the original character which made its political action effective. The rules of the organisation's functioning could get the upper hand, the well-known process could take place from which up to now the party had been protected by its minuscule size and weak organisation: "heterogeneous ends", the survival of the group at the cost of suffocating or postponing its political goals.(73) In the best of cases there is the risk that the transformation could bring the PR to resemble other parties more and more in at least two fundamental respects: the birth and consolidation within it of structures for the aggregation of interests and of political actions always more concerned with inter-party balances and always less concerned with the impulses of collective movements. And so it would run all the risks that such behaviour can bring: the abandoning of the character of

a movement of political dispute, the loosening of the bonds with the collective movements or the substitution of a direct relationship with a bureaucratically mediated one, the progressive impulse towards hegemony over the social areas the party represents.

Otherwise, despite its growth politically and in size, the PR can choose to keep its internal characteristics unaltered and continue to trust to the spontaneity and activism of its members. In this case, however, it runs the risk of triggering off uncontrollable internal conflicts as the product of unguided growth and due to the group's heterogeneous internal growth. In this second case, there is danger of disintegration because of increased internal conflict beyond tolerable limits for an ambience lacking in a strong network of organisational bonds.

Whatever may be the political and organisational choices of the Radicals, they therefore bear the not enviable marks of being at once urgent, undeferrable, and difficult. Urgent because the present growth imposes a leap in quality in all cases on the organisational level. Difficult because the management and the optimal ways of developing the organisation would require a more accurate working out of the Radicals political project in order to be identified with enough precision. If the analysis made up to this point is valid, one can say that contrary to wide-spread opinion the Radicals have a general political project. It consists, as we have seen, in giving back civil society its voice, considering the party system's incapacity to represent it, according to a model of direct democracy which is impeded by the way the political system functions.

For this reason the objection often made would not appear to be valid that the Radicals' political action implies the risk of "populism", a political phenomenon that often appears when in societies that are in the process of disintegrating. The category of "populism" consists, in fact, in mobilising "from above" the sectors, classes, or groups that previously had not been mobilised. (75) And this, we have seen, is not the kind of relationship the PR has with civil society. Here the tie is formed with sectors of the social system already mobilised; it arises from the encounter of a political group and a multiplicity of spontaneous movements. And since the spontaneous movements of collective action seem destined to endure as typical phenomena of late-capitalistic societies, the risk of populism does not exist, in fact it is a category that is not serviceable and not only for describing Radical action. Rather the PR, together with partly analogous phenomena that are beginning to show up in other Western c

ountries, could be a first symptom of possible changes and accommodations of great import in the socio-political sphere and in the relations between civil society and the political system. In the first place, the beginning of the end of the political phenomenon that has dominated the scene in the last fifty years, the large mediator-party, the party of social integration.

The problem that the Radicals must solve is actually another one: it is a more detailed working out of their political program. Several problems remain unsolved and the analysis we have made here has indicated them implicitly. The main one is undoubtedly the the practicability of a project of true democracy in an advanced industrial system that requires an always more complicated technical management. These are what Norberto Bobbio (jurist and philosopher, born 1909, ed.) recently has pointed out as the "paradoxes of democracy". (76) These create obstacles to a self-managing Socialist project in a system which has reached a state of development where a politically valuable "technical know-how" is more and more the guarantee and the necessity of governability and which will certainly, for a long time to come, remain the prerogative of a restricted elite. (77) Division of labour, bureaucratisation, the growing technical dependence of political decisions (e.g. macroeconomic choices) and, last but not leas

t, the progressive de facto loss of sovereignty of single societies to transnational politico-economic centres - these are so many challenges flung in the face of an hypothesis of a libertarian and self-managing form of Socialism.

They are the challenges that the French left, or at least its "self-managing" wing, must face. On a more modest scale, they are the same challenges that the PR is facing and to which it must try to find a reply to make its project credible and practicable. In order not to be the reproposal of a large-hearted Utopia that is technically, even more than politically, unrealisable (because of the objective conditions of an industrially advanced society) - for this the anarchist Utopia, a project of self-managing Socialism, the goal of a political action that opposes the free expression of civil society to the hegemony of the parties, requires the identification of points of balance that will allow the coexistence of the development of local, geographical and/or functional, self-managing communities with the co-ordinating centres of a complex society. (78)

A project for the growth of liberty cannot avoid this point. For the moment only liberalism and militant Catholicism have offered answers to the ways and forms that coexistence between local associations and the complex social system can take - as we have been reminded recently by the debate on "pluralism". (79) It would be hard to maintain that the various trends connected to libertarian Socialism have been able to furnish a complete and convincing reply so far.

From the way in which the Radicals react to these problems, the way in which they work out their political project, will depend, as we have said, the direction to be given to the present growth of the party for adjusting the organisation to its political objectives, whatever these choices may be.

Until now, the Radicals have demonstrated the capacity for political fantasy and inventiveness of a kind not found in other Italian political groups. An original response to the present challenge can have consequences not only for the fortunes of this small party (which is less important), but for also for the future possibilities of those "excluded" from "normal" political processes to influence the balances of the political system and the whole society.

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NOTES

27) J. Habermas, "La crisi della razionalità nel capitalismo maturo", Laterza, Bari, 1975.

28) C. Offe, "Dominio politico e struttura di classe" in

<< Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia >>, XIV (1973), p.52.

29) A. Touraine, "La società post-industriale", Il Mulino, Bologna, 1970, pp.193-194.

30) << Unionism thus tends no longer to be the primary instrument of a social movement which exceeds it both higher and lower levels, on a properly political level and on the level of the grass roots resistance to integration in organisations and to the institutionalisation of the conflicts. While unionism gains influence and intervenes efficaciously in decision making, it is ignored, surpassed, or contested by anti-technocratic movements which are at the same time more politicised and less  organised >>. A. Touraine, op. cit., p.194.

31) J. Schumpeter, "Socialismo, Capitalismo, Democrazia"; Etas Kompass, Milan, 1970, R. Dahl and C.E. Linblom, "Politics, Economics and Welfare", Harper, New York, 1953.

32) On the relations between the dominating class and the political system, A. Touraine, "La produzione della società", Il Mulino, Bologna, 1973, in particular p.241.

33) F.B. Pike and T. Stritch (editors), "The New Corporatism", Notre Dame University Press, 1974, and the analyses from a divergent point of view of S. Huntington, "La politica nella società postindustriale", in << Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica >>, III (1974), pp. 489-525; G. Miglio, "Le trasformazioni dell'attuale sistema economico", in << Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica >> II (1976), pp.213-241 and, above all, Ph. C. Schmitter, "Modalità di mediazione degli interessi e mutamento sociale in Europa occidentale", << Il Mulino >> (1976), pp.889-916.

34) M.Weber, "Economia e società", cit.

35) C.Offe, "Dominio politico e struttura di classe", cit. p.57.

36) Ibidem.

37) Ibidem.

38) For an ample discussion of this point see: F. Neumann, "Lo stato democratico e lo stato autoritario", Il Mulino, Bologna, 1973, and J. Habermas, "Sul concetto di partecipazione politica in Germania: verso una società autoritaria", Laterza, Bari, 1968, pp. 5-66. Naurally, as Norberto Bobbio recently called to mind ("Quale Socialismo?", Einaudi, Turin, 1976), democracy also consists in a combination of political procedures. The problem is: these procedures, which are always necessary, are supposed to be the means to an end. (In the case of democracy the end is the growth of liberty and the participation of everyone in making decisions.) The involution of a democracy, as of its theoretical thought, occurs when the means itself becomes an end and the procedures are reduced to techniques of governing.

39) J. Habermas, "La crisi della razionalità nel capitalismo maturo", cit. p.37 and onwards.

40) Cf. F. Alberoni, "Movimento e Istituzione", Il Mulino, Bologna, 1977 and idem "Stati Nascenti", Il Mulino, Bologna, 1968.

41) P.Baran, P. Sweezy, "Il capitale monopolistico", Einaudi, Turin, 1968.

42) J. O'Connor. "la crise fiscale dello Stato", Einaudi, Turin, 1977 and idem "Le grandi imprese e lo Stato", Liguori, Napoli, 1976.

43) For an analysis of this point see L. Tomasetta, "La rifeudalizzazione della sfera pubblica" in << Problemi del Socialismo >>, 16-17 (1973), pp.533-551.

44) On this point cf. C.G. Rossetti, "Difficoltà e problemi del compromesso storico" in << Il Leviatano >>, IV (1977), pp.35-38.

45) G. Galli, "I partiti politici", UTET, Turin, 1974.

46) Cf. A. Pizzorno, "Il sistema politica italiano", in << Politica del diritto >>, II (1971), pp.197-209.

47) A. Pizzorno, "Potere e partito" in AA.VV. "Potere e istitutzioni oggi", Giappichelli, Turin 1972, p.33.

48) F. Cazzola, "Governo e opposizione nel Parlamento Italiano", Giuffrè, Milan, 1974; A. Predieri, "Mediazione e indirizzo politico nel Parlamento Italiano", in << Rivista Italiano di Scienza Politica >>, III (1975), pp.407-441.

49) A. Pizzorno, "Elementi per uno schemo teorico con riferimento ai partiti politici in Italia", cit. p.40.

50) G. Pasquino, "Il sistema politico italiano fra neo-trasformismo e democrazia consociativa" in << Il Mulino >>, XXII (1973), pp.5459-566.

51) See the conclusions of the researches of G. Galli and A. Nannei, "Il capitalismo assistenziale", Sugar, Milan, 1975, and G. Amato, "Economia, politica e istituzioni in Italia", Il Mulino, Bologna, 1977.

52) To this there seems to be connected the oscillations of the leftist opposition between a line of "concentration" and a line of "dispersion" of tensions - that is, the contradiction between the propensity to reach an accommodation with the DC and the desire for a head-on clash: P. Farneti, "Partiti e sistema di potere", in AA.VV. "L'Italia contemporanea" 1945-1975, Einaudi, Turin, 1976, pp.61-104.

53) P. Farneti, op.cit. p.88.

54) G. Galli, "Dal bipartitismo imperfetto alla possibile alternativa", Il Mulino, Bologna, 1975, Chapter I.

55) C. Donolo, "Oltre il '68. La società italiana fra mutamento e transizione" in << Quaderni Piacentini >>, 60-61 (1976), p.12.

56) Ibidem. p.12

57) A. Parisi and G. Pasquino, "20 giugno: strutture politiche e comportamento elettorale", in A. Parisi and G. Pasquino (editors), "Continuità e mutamento elettorale in Italia", Il Mulino, Bologna, 1977, pp.11-65.

58) Cf. The results of the inquiry of G. Colasanti, B. Mebane, M. Bomolis, "La divisione del lavoro intellettuale", Il Mulino, Bologna, 1977.

59) A.Touraine, "I nuovi conflitti sociali", in A. Melucci (editors), "Movimenti di rivoltà", cit., pp. 156-157.

60) "The ideological justification of every form of government is reducible, in the expression of Gaetano Mosca, to a political formula, such as "liberal democracy", "socialist democracy", the "dictatorship of the proletariat". One speaks of a regime whenever the form of government appears to be disassociated from the political formula that ought to express it's nature in a nutshell, and the very proponents of the formula appear to make a strictly instrumental use of it to cover a hegemony that the formula itself no longer can justify ", L. Gallino, << Sociologia dello Stato >>, XXV (1976), p.357.

61) On the methods of the Radicals, see the observations of E. Bettinelli, "Quattro radicali a Montecitorio: primo bilancio di una stagione parlamentare per la rivoluzione democratica" in  << Argomenti Radicali >>, I (1977), pp.114-127.

62) A. Melucci, "L'azione ribelle. Formazione e struttura dei movimenti sociali", in A. Melucci (editor) "Movimenti di rivolta", cit., p.58.

63) On the theme of violence as a method of political battle see H.L. Nieburg, "La violenza politica", Guida, Napoli, 1974, and above all L. Bonante, "Dimensioni del terrorismo politico" in << Communità >>, XXXI (1977), pp. 76-112.

64) M. Teodori, "La nuova sinsitra americana", Feltrinelli, Milano, 1970.

65) On the efficacy of direct non-violent action and its more general significance see the analyses of a sociologist who in the '50s was also a leader of the conscientious objectors movement in Norway, Johan Galtung, "On the Meaning of Non-Violence" and "Pacifism from a Sociological Point of View", both in J. Galtung, "Peace, War and Defense",Christian Ejlers, Copenhagen, 1977.

66) J. Von Neumann and C.Morgenstern, "Theories of Games and Economic Behavior", Wilej, New York, 1964.

67) For a deeper theoretical study of these aspects of decision-making processes cf. D'Alimonte, "Regola di maggioranza, stabilità e equidistribuzione", in << Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica >>. I (1974); pp.43-105.

68) The so-called parties of the constitutional range are those that participated in the drafting of the Italian Constitution, ed.

69) See the work cited in note 67 from page 60 onwards.

70) Of course, in a system in which the information media (like the methods of production) bear strong oligopolistic features and, furthermore, the control of financing sources (advertising, etc.) is firmly in the hands of political power, the attitude of the media is a variable (directly) dependent on political balances. After June 20, 1976, and the ensuing passage of the PCI from the semi-opposition to a convergent if not (yet) co-administration of government, these balances are now such as to render direct, non-violent actions much more difficult (and dangerous) than in the past. The events of Bologna and Rome in March, and, most of all, that of May 12, 1977 in Rome (where for the first time the Radicals were defeated by the political powers during a civil disobedience action) can be read as the consequences of the new set-up of the system: the lack of a political opposition on the one hand, and on the other the passive acceptance of the new balances on the part of the media.

71) G. Sartori, "Techniche decisionali e sistema dei comitati" in << Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica >>, I (1974), from p.35 on.

72) A. Pizzorno, "Elementi per uno schema teorico con riferimento ai partiti politici in Italia", cit., p.37.

73) Cf. the results of the questions on organisation, Chap.I, Part Two.

74) R. Michels, "Sociologia del partito politico", cit.

75) On populism in Latin America, where this phenomenon has been most widespread, see G. Germani, "Sociologia della modernizzazione", Laterza, Bari, 1970, and idem, "Autorianismo, fascismo e classi sociali", Il Mulino, Bologna, 1975.

76) N. Bobbio, "Quale socialismo?", cit.

77) Only the abolition of the division of labour could lead to a different result, but it is evident that an objective of such significance requires a very long gestation period during which the real power of decision is destined to stay in the hands of the few.

78) For useful but still only approximative information see the contributions of Giorgio Ruffolo and Roberto Guiducci in "Il marxismo e lo Stato ", << Quaderni di Mondoperaio >>, Rome, 1976.

79) Cf. AA.VV., "Il pluralismo", Edizioni RAI, Rome, 1976.