ABSTRACT: The acts of the conference on the Radical Party's statute and their experience which was held at Rome's Hotel Parco dei Principi on April 5 - 7, 1978.

("THE RADICALS AS ANTAGONISTS" - The theory and practice of the new Socialist and libertarian party and the PR's statute and experience in society and the institutions - Conference of the Federative Council of the Radical Party - Rome, April 1978)

Gianfranco Spadaccia

THE REASONS FOR THE CONFERENCE

The theme of this conference is "The Theory and Practice of the New Socialist and Libertarian Party, and the Statute and Experience of the Radical Party in Society and in the Institutions". However we could easily remove the comma and the conjunction, substituting a colon for them, thus: "the Statute and Experience of the Radical Party..." It would not be presumption. We wish it were otherwise. I wish it were otherwise. But I think it would be difficult in the discussions and experience of Italian political parties in this post-war era, to find any traces - except possibly in the pages of some periodical or other - of the theory and practice of any libertarian political party except for the Radicals. Unfortunately this is true for the non-Leninist components of the traditional left, and thus basically for the Italian Socialist Party [PSI] and its splinter parties of the right and left (the first PSDI [Social Democrats] and PSIUP [Proletarian Unity]). Even today in the PSI when one speaks of renewal the

sensation is inescapable that they are pursuing models of business and technological efficiency without touching a theory of democratic formalism that in the past has produced the crystallisation and proliferation of factions, and without touching a centralist and bureaucratic praxis, the Morandi (1) model, never having been renounced, has largely been contaminated by experiences of wielding government power and, above all, patronage in the state administration.

But unfortunately it is also true of the so-called new left and the revolutionary left which have once again travelled the road of Leninism, looking more to the past history of Communism and Communist parties, more to ways of reviving the organisation of their revolutionary practice than to the political, ideological and social conditions that gave birth to the organisations of the new left after 1968 [a year of dramatic student and labour union ferment, ed.]. Naturally I am speaking of theory and practice in the specific sphere of political organisation, and more precisely in political parties.

I am not referring to the things that happened in the movement and movements from 1968 until today with the enormous thrust of direct democracy and that on more than one occasion managed to break down crystallisations, encrustations and bureaucratic habits. Among these there was in particular the justified impulse to reject the delegation of power. Far too often there was exploitation of the confusion between social subject and political subject in order to create, exalting the movement, a kind of limbo, a kind of no-man's-land, in which the movement's anti-institutionalism turned into the worst kind and most closed of institutionalism when it came round to organising, and in which the theorising about direct democracy went over to the most traditional and iron-clad centralism when it took the road of organisational experience.

This is a subject which would deserve to be treated separately and not with fleeting hints. I will limit myself to observing that these thrusts and these movements, which yet - and it could not be otherwise - influenced political organisation (only think of the influence on labour union organisation and the factory councils of '69 and '70) still did not manage to produce any substantial change, nor were they transformed into a consistent theory and practice of political organisation.

On the contrary, the relationship crystallised into a dialectic between political organisation on the one hand and the movement on the other, the latter often being identified with assemblyism. The consequence was the following: in some periods the organisation, profiting precisely from assemblyism and the refusal to delegate power, succeeded in influencing the movement to the point at times of gaining hegemony over it or recuperating it, while at other times, both the most vital and critical times, the movement rejected the organisation and broke with it as happened with the PCI [Communists], with the trade unions, and with the traditional left in 1977, or it succeeded in putting it into crisis as happened with Lotta Continua [a far-left party, ed.] after the 1976 elections (a crisis which showed itself to be vital but which did not resolve the problem of the relationship between movement and organisation).

The lack of a leap in quality, the lack of a synthesis and - worse - the persistence of this contradiction between theoretical direct democracy in the movement and centralistic practice in the organisation cannot easily be denied. Certainly there are objective reasons for it: the difficulties of the fight against power and against conditioning by the dominant culture. But there are also subjective reasons; the umbilical cord of Leninist ideology that continued to bind to the PCI its dissenters who wanted to confront the organisation and which impelled the PCI, in its purest and hardest military and paramilitary Leninist elements, to look backwards. But there would also be need to go deeper into the subject of assemblyism - in particular the identification of assemblyism with direct democracy and with the refusal to delegate power as one of the causes of this dialectic which did not manage to find a synthesis, of this crystallisation, of this - perhaps only apparent - contradiction. Is there not perhaps,

behind assemblyism, the Utopia of a general will that produced Jacobinism?

In re-reading once again the theme of the conference, perhaps we should have also taken out that word "new". Personally I feel a certain reluctance and antipathy towards this adjective - certainly due to its obviousness and also its superfluousness in this context if what I have just delineated above is true. Also perhaps because it echoes somewhat Togliatti's (2) talk of the "new party". But also because, like Pannella, I too am convinced that in order to fight and beat the old and acquire the new, one must win back much of the old in the theoretical and historical heritage of the left that was liquidated and abandoned by so-called scientific Socialism as Utopian, ingenuous and primitive. One must recover from the old Socialist battles the values of liberalism and democracy that gained substance from the very battles of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. One must delve into the history of the left, into the cultures of the minorities that were conquered by what became the victorious and dominati

ng one, and in particular by Leninism.

And finally, still with regard to the theme of the conference, it is necessary to clarify something. Why "theory and practise" when it would have been more correct to speak of theory and praxis? It was neither an error nor by chance.

In 1967 the Radical Party produced a statute that would have been inconceivable - for a party which then was composed at the best of times of not more than a few hundred members - if we had proposed only to regulate the internal relationships of the Radicals who were part of the party at the time. In reality that statute was a projection into the future, a model and a programme of political organisation for a party yet to be created which we considered valid and proposed not only for the Radical Party but for the entire left. In its polemics against the ideologising of the left, in which it saw a tool of class power, the Radical Party, contrary to all appearances, never overestimated the factor of action to the detriment of the factor of thinking.

The Radical assault troops of the marches and sit-ins, of the trials and hunger strikes, of conscientious objection and the referendums, were vigorous experimenters, but also pragmatists and representatives of spontaneous action. The statute was our theory of the organisation. There was the lack of a praxis that one could say was truly consistent with the statute.

This affirmation should not, of course, be taken literally. One cannot, in fact, not speak of Radical theory and praxis if one looks back on our struggles and the theoretical perceptions that inspired them and which we developed and tried out with political action. I shall recall a few of them while keeping my feet on the ground - that is to say, keeping to the ground that we really broke in society and the institutions: civil rights conceived as the delayed realisation of a paleo-liberal guaranteeism that had never found the possibility of being implemented in Italy, but as a concrete tool of class liberation struggles, not only for minorities, but also for majorities and the entire society; our non-violence and our non-violent relationship with the laws in effect (it would be enough to remember our use of political defence in trials, our limited but rigorous civil disobedience, the methods and aims of our hunger strikes in relationship to those in power and to the institutions); the role we had in est

ablishing in this country - for the first time - the struggles for sexual freedom and women's liberation, the issue of diversity, all of them today perhaps somewhat simplistically subsumed in the formula "the personal and the political"; our pacifism and anti-militarism based on the conviction that one cannot build a Socialist society with means that contradict the ends; our critique of and alternative to the economics-oriented ideology of the rest of the left and our contribution to the dismantling at the beginning of the Sixties of a schematic, scholastic and false structure-superstructure relationship; our dispute with official anti-Fascism as against the Fascism of the structures, laws and institutions; our analyses of the regime, clericalism, and corporatism, on the role of state capitalism, on the concrete mechanisms of integration, compromising and corporative, inter-classist co-management that encompass the left and the trade unions; our consistent promotion of a strategy of an alternative of and by

the left in opposition to that of institutional compromise.

One is inclined to smile at these theoretical and ideological anchors which would like to confound us with their power of equivocation, of breaking apart and their "qualunquista" (1) nature. This is not even artificial and exploiting political polemics. Unfortunately it is something worse: it is gross ignorance of what we are and what we have been, the lack of knowledge which is the product of intolerance and the rejection of dialogue and of measuring oneself against the libertarian alternative which we have represented and to which we have given, often successfully, an organisation and political force which have been of advantage to the entire left.

I believe it would be legitimate as well to speak of theory and praxis if we look at the concrete organisational experiences of the party in those cases where we have succeeded in activating what is written in the statute. Think of self-financing and the publishing of the budgets introduced in 1967. Think of the praxis of the annual party congresses which grew little by little in the participation and the number of people attending and which today reveal themselves yearly as an important factor in collective growth, in the mutual acquisition of the reflexes of political struggle by the Radical militants. Think of the two-thirds quorum required to make political and platform motions binding and of the congress's direct election of the Secretary with a mandate limited to the commitments undertaken by the congressional motion. Think of that other executive organ, also directly elected by the congress, the Treasurer, who is a figure unknown to the other parties. And more: the absence of all disciplinary me

asures for the internal relations of the party, the absence of arbiters, of control commissions, of party judges and policemen, of the impossibility of controlling the motivations of those who ask to become members or of accepting or rejecting applications for membership; the recognised autonomy of party candidates elected to office which is not subject to discipline either by the party or the parliamentary group.

If we take a look at these experiences I think that we have constructed, with all its lacks and limitations, the embryo of an organisation that is not only original and new but which is radically different from the habitual way in which the Italian and leftist political groups regard organisation. To find its equal one would probably have to go back very far in time to the most creative phase of the workers' movement, the phase in which labour chambers arose, the leagues, the Socialist sections, and the first workers' and co-operative organisations.

But the essence of our statute is not to be found in all of this. The essence of our statute is in having tried to five a libertarian reply to the problems of Socialist political organisation by re-discovering and re-proposing a federalism which is typical of the republican and Socialist tradition as well as the liberal one.

A Radical praxis for this basic theoretical nucleus of our statute has been lacking precisely because there has been a lack of both the subjective conditions (of the Radical Party) and the objective ones (of the left and of society) that would have made it possible. The point around which the statute revolves are the regional Radical parties and the federated movements, directly and permanently represented in the federated council - the only decision-making organisation besides the congress - by their secretaries and without any other mediation. Certainly, precisely because the statute inspires and requests it, we have had a constellation of autonomous movements (some of them even significant and important), of associative experiences, and of acronyms: the LID (Lega del divorzio); the MLD (Movmento di liberazione della donna); LOC (Lega degli obiettori di coscienza); FUORI (Movimento di liberazione sessuale e omosessuale); and most recently FRI (Fronte radicale invalidi), CARM (Centro per l'abolizione

dei regolamenti manicomiali), and LSD (Lega socialista per il disarmo). For the rest, all of our associative experience, even at the beginning, was studded with attempts of this kind.

With regard to the regional parties, they began to be established when the size of the party membership allowed it, but they have only just begun to make their experiences and still have most slender structures.

But for a better understanding of what we intended to propose with our statute, our theoretical formulations, the organisational dimensions we had in mind, I will recall that in our debates we made explicit reference to a federative solution to the relationship of party-trade union according to a statutory model that has only been realised by the Labour Party among Europe's Socialist parties: an independent labour union but with a federative connection to the party by means of which it participates in the deliberations and decisions of the party's political intentions. These were the years in which Amendola (2) spoke of the failure of the Leninist and the social-democratic experiments, and of the need to re-establish the Socialists by overcoming the schism of 1921. So, in that case, there was no more radical alternative than this federalist nucleus of ours with respect to both the Leninist and Stalinist conceptions - which had prevailed up to then - of the union as a transmission belt, and to the inter-

classist and unanimistic tendencies of the new union unity which was beginning to take shape and which we denounced already at that time.

What we proposed was the organisational conciliation by way of the federative solution of the factors of autonomy and of necessary unity. Thus we took the stance of antagonists to a line and a strategy which, by means of demanding independence from the parties in the face of previous exploitation, nevertheless led the unions to espouse an interclassist and corporative theory which radically contradicts the experience of the Italian and European workers' movement. (Everywhere in Europe, in their relations with both the Socialist and the Communist parties, the union is either Socialist or it is not, is either classist or it is not.)

In the same way, when we thought of the regional parties, we thought of independent parties capable of organising themselves over territories which in size and populations often exceed those of small- and medium-sized European countries.

If I bring up all of this, I do it to make clear the type of theoretical solution - wide in breadth and valid not for a tiny minority group, but for a new party of the left - which we proposed as an alternative to the Communist Party's model of democratic centralism and the Social Democratic one of democratic formalism. We had in mind a party that created unity by means of programs and the living together of broad and effective independent groups, and not by means of an ideology's connective tissue. We had in mind a party with the capacity to prefigure, already in its organisation, the type of society and state that it intended to create.

It is clear that within this framework, this perspective, there never existed due to a lack of objective conditions, a Radical federalist praxis. The recurring polemics that took place within the party on the actuation of this or that part of the statute, all of them certainly legitimate, are part of the normal conflicts within all political organisations. I think one must recognise (even those who used the indications in the statute to feed this legitimate kind of conflict) that it would put the debate on Radical theory and praxis in a miserable light to maintain that the realisation of a praxis consistent with this theory is only a question of political will and does not demand rather the existence of a minimum of subjective and objective, qualitative and quantitative conditions. In the absence of these conditions, and in a state of the party's inadequate and insufficient growth, a purely formal correspondence of praxis to theory would only be a caricature of the statute's intentions which we propose

d and continue to propose ever since 1976 to ourselves, to the left, and to the country.

But why were these conditions lacking, even given the important successes of the Radicals' political struggle? In "Quaderni Radicali" [a Radical periodical, ed.] I recently had occasion to cite a judgement of Vittorio Saltini taken from an article of his on post-'68 political culture. [1968 was a year of vehement student and worker protests, ed.] I shall mention it here as well because it seems to me to be emblematic of the limits to the consideration, even the favourable consideration, political and cultural observers give to the Radical Party and its policies.

Saltini wrote: "The only group which, under the pressure of '68, was efficacious in comparison to its numerical strength were the Radicals. Without too many Marxist-workers illusions, they understood that the possibility opened by '68 was that of changing customs and hence the laws limiting civil rights. So with their actions, as the divorce vote showed, they favoured the growth of the entire left. The effectiveness of the Radicals, despite the limitations of their leadership, offers an idea of what might have been accomplished ever since '68 if thousands of intellectuals and youths had not been lost in the conformist Marxist dreams of Il Manifesto, Avanguardia Operaia, and Lotta Continua [small far-left parties, ed.]".

The question I asked myself, commenting in QR on Saltini's considerations was this: How could those thousands of intellectuals and youths possibly have been different from what they had always been? If the great libertarian explosion of '68 has been turned into the mechanical re-proposing of more or less camouflaged forms of democratic centralism, that certainly didn't happen by accident. In the eyes of the mass culture and communication "clergy" we were a small heresy, a culturally rejected and ignored minority that had to be squashed just as all the preceding Radical and libertarian minorities had been squashed from Gobetti's (3) time on. The post-'68 movements, instead, grew from a dialectical relationship with the dominating culture and ideology of the left. And at the same they contested it, they reproduced some of its fundamental characteristics. For this simple reason all the cultural fashions, all the attention of the news services, all the amplifiers of mass communication concurred in multiplyi

ng these neo-Leninist tendencies of the post-'68 era. Those who go against the current have not only no right to information, but they do not even have a right to their own identity, have no right even to be considered as cultural and political antagonists. The strategy behind our fight and our analyses, that perhaps were the only ones on the left to stand up to the test of fifteen years of political struggle were not considered worthy of attention. What remained of us were the folkloristic aspects or the victories we won with our actions: to say it in Saltini's words, in the best of cases, the so-called "efficacy" of the Radicals.

No wonder then, if in this situation we have had conflicts among ourselves and have been conditioned by cliches which we have only been able to weed out and overcome with difficulty. I will cite one as an example of all - the one about the Radicals being a movement or party which was recently dug up again by Craxi during the PSI congress in Turin when he said: "How lovely the Radical Party was when it was only a movement!" But we have never been a movement. Even when there were only a few dozen of us left, we never stopped calling ourselves a party, we never renounced the right to insist on our conception of a party, and we have never given up being a political party and proposing as such our values and our ideal lines of demarcation. When there is talk of our efficacy, when the attention we are given stops at the folkloristic aspects of our initiatives or the battles we have won, one must never forget that none of this would have happened or would have been possible if behind it there had not been the

will of a negligible number of people to be a party, that is to say, to take a political part in contraposition to other political parts with the right to impose one's own conception of a party, one's own values, one's own political battles. Without all this, the LID and the pro-divorce battle would not have been possible. Instead it would have been recaptured, occupied and so reduced to the defence of the corporative interests of the separated [couples, ed.] and substantially blocked by the other political groups all of whom, without exception, saw a danger for their strategies and the political balance in the explosive effects of laicism and anti-clericalism. But this can easily be said as well of all our other political battles to which Saltini refers when he speaks of the Radicals' extraordinary effectiveness, or to which Corvisieri and Tronti referred to in the past when they recognised our capacity, from their ideological point of view, to make "Leninist" use of the institutions (of which the Leninist

s were not considered capable).

But independently of the reasons that blocked the implementation of the statute and of their being a federalist praxis consistent with the theories contained in the statute, today we are facing the need of a turning point, and it is a critical situation in which we feel ourselves to be near a precipice or an empty space extremely difficult either to leap across or to fill. This is the meaning of the decision taken last February by Adelaide Algietta to suspend the party's national activities. At least this is the meaning I see in that decision.

Faced with the dramatic political processes of recent months; faced with the crises in the country and the institutions; faced with the left 's inability to change itself, its strategies and its way of being, either we will succeed in realising in this country the federalist party foreseen in the statute - to realise not one but many Radical parties, that is to say the regional Radical parties, or else we will not succeed, it will not be possible to advance the Radical initiatives and its presence successfully.

Last November's congress in Bologna, when we planned this conference, we felt the that whether we won or lost the referendums there was the need for a period of collective reflection and study analogous to the one in 1967 which led to the passing of the statute. The events of recent months show that the phenomena which we had denounced have intensified and faster than we ourselves imagined they would. This is a reason for considering this conference important and useful. But I believe we should not hide the fact from ourselves that it has certain limitations, because only if we are aware of them can we succeed in overcoming them.

The first limitation is that it has not grown out of a preparation and a debate that has involved the whole party. On the contrary, it is itself a preparation for a party debate, a technical instrument that the federative council has arranged for the party.

Furthermore I sense another danger: that of a theoretical debate that is outside the body of the party and separated from its active experience. And there is a third limitation: going over our experiences of struggle again, we have seem that there are many segments of reality that would merit deeper theoretical concern, or even simply being handled in a way to put them back in the collective memory and mind of the party. But some of them will not be taken up in this conference, they will be neglected for lack of energy inside and outside the party. But I hope that even with these limitations the conference will turn out to be important and useful, avoiding the double risk of a theoretical handling a posteriori that will patch up the unavoidable contradictions of Radical experience, or a general political debate on the ideas that the present crises has brought to our minds.

In 1971, on the morrow of the victory in Parliament on divorce which we succeeded in bringing about, imposing it on the country's lay forces, we found ourselves in a situation in many ways similar to the present one. Instead of profiting from the consequences of that victory in Parliament, the PCI withdrew and preferred to intensify the politics of compromise. Thus we came out in "Prova radicale" [a Radical periodical, ed.] saying: the lay party which we desired to be no longer exists even in Parliament. Either the Radical Party will find the strength to be a lay party throughout the country, or else laicism, in its concrete realisation, in its historicity, will once again be trampled down as it was by Fascism in 1929, and in 1947 by art.7 (4).

I recall an article of Berlinguer's (5) on the morrow of the battle in Parliament over divorce. Berlinguer wrote: there are libertarian drugs which are more dangerous still than chemical drugs. We were the libertarian drugs, we and our battles, our strategies, our alternative values, the same ones which would become the heritage of the generation of the Seventies. Those words of Berlinguer have become current once again. In fact, our victories in subsequent years only succeeded in delaying bankrupt choices for the left and the whole country which today however are being put over in a catastrophic way. Thus that alternative has again become a current issue for us: once again no one else by we will have to be the party of laicism, of libertarianism, of the alternative.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Morandi, Rodolfo (1902-1955) Socialist historian and statesman.

2) Amendola, Giorgio (1907-1980) Communist statesman.

3) Gobetti, Piero (1901-1926) Liberal Socialist thinker who emigrated to France under Fascism.

4) Art. 7 - The constitutional article establishing the Church-State Concordat.

5) Berlinguer, Enrico (1922-1984) - Communist Party Secretary from 1972 until his death.