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)

Marco Pannella

Overcoming the "Fear" of Being Radical

...What interests me is that there are other conferences, other meetings, other debates like this one. Just because I believe that ours is a corps which is vividly alive, I am always aware of the danger that the lively corps may be killed, may die. What matters to me is that this activity should continue. And for it to continue it is probable that we cannot permit the failure of a single one of these meetings of ours, or a single one of our initiatives. Because we really are in the midst of bad times. And when I say bad, I mean mediocre: times in which nothing really runs the risk of being formally killed, nor even censured, but rather constantly falsified and degraded by a constant and intensive violence which seeks to make unrecognisable the identity and the faces of those who speak to each other; and one even seeks by now to falsify the sounds and the words that are going the rounds in society and among us. I would almost say (if I were to accept the request of my friend Tramontana who, every five years w

hen she meets me, ask me, asks us: are you believers, and in what? - and if I use her language) that in these meetings we are celebrating a mystery: the mystery of ten, fifteen, or twenty Radical years, that is to say the duration of an attempt that before us, until we took on the responsibility of giving substance to certain ideas, had regularly been beaten in a much shorter time. This attempt lost under Fascism, in particular with Gobetti and with Rosselli (1). It was a loser in the Resistance as "Giustizia e libertà" (2). It was a loser after the war in the triple hope of a liberal far left wing, the libertarian re-proposal of Socialism and the reproducing of the liberal-Socialist experience: with the failure of liberal left, the Partito D'Azione [Action Party, ed.] and the libertarian components of Socialism.

Perhaps these last have been too much ignored, perhaps there has been an undervaluation of apparently secondary characters such as Umberto Calosso who appeared for a moment on the Italian Socialist scene and who were in reality those who at the time, having come out of the Fascist tunnel, brought up several issues which are still our own today: in the years '46 - '48 at the "Convegno dei cinque" [Conference of the Five], which was rather the formal site, more lively and popular of the political, social and civil debates, Calosso spoke then of free love, pacifism, anti-militarism, priests and religion, human and social liberation in a way that was unusual. And not by chance one of the episodes and battles in which we came out unvanquished (but then we couldn't have others) was when we managed to ensure that Calosso could hold his lessons. This was at the beginning of the Fifties at the University of Rome, generally Fascist, but already under an officially anti-Fascist direction.

Giuliano Rendi is here. I remember Giuliano, already non-violent at the time, who yet to defend me broke an umbrella on the head of Caradonna, to defend those counter-courses on Manzoni and Alfieri (3) (just think how revolutionary and yet how feared!). All in order to ensure that they could be held by that conscientious objector, that traitor, that deserter from Socialism. For what else, in reality, was Calosso when in the Forties he was spokesman for anti-Fascist Italy, for the voice of London which brought to many of us - Fascist youth, wolf cubs, the avant-garde - listening to the regime radio station, from time to time that very strange pirate voice that said unimaginable things, small and overwhelming, and said them in Radical style, in story and not essay form?...

This opening digression was in order to say that Calosso too, and those like him in the Socialist Party were done away with like the Partito d'Azione, like the liberal left, like Giustizia e libertà. And just as those who like Rossi, Capitani, Calamandrei and Salvemini were first immured in ghettos and then soon buried - and not rarely buried with lies, in a way to do extreme injury to the meaning of their lives (like the foul violence done to Silone and Gramsci, (4) to every heresy, Christian or Communist, Socialist or liberal). And then in 1955 radical hope is reborn with the Radical Party, but self-limiting even as hope: the aristocratic, blind, self-satisfaction of many of us who read or wrote for "Il Mondo" [a liberal periodical, ed.]; we, a group of forty or at most fifty thousand people in our country; "free", just as Croce before us was "free" under Fascism to write, and thousands to read his "La Critica" published by Laterza.

I listened very attentively to the substantial, important and positive report of Angiolo Bandinelli. There was only one moment in that report when I felt a break in our continuity - mine and yours, Angiolo - with our ancestors. It was when you spoke of the need of "restoring" certain values: that was the fundamental error of the Radicals of that generation. They were not aware that what they experienced as a political commitment to restore something from the pre-Fascist past (not of their own but of others) was rather the persistence of a Utopia to which the history of our country had never given substance: the Utopia of a more just, more humane, more lay society - that same kind of society for which the Radical Party worked intransigently even in the midst of uncertainties and contradictions. The error I have already hinted at was also of involuntary self-satisfaction arising from a choice of internal communication among a community of not more than forty or fifty thousand readers.

In this regard the Radical Party of that time was, much more than our Radical Party today, the antecedent of Il Manifesto [a small left-wing group, ed.]. I have always maintained that the true Radical-bourgeois - which is a certain radicalism represented by the Radical Party in the Fifties - was no longer represented by us in the Seventies, but by our comrades of Il Manifesto even from the standpoint of greater exterior, formal fidelity. These latter, producing their newspaper, communicating among their 70-80,000 readers, sharing with them - as we could say again in the manner of friend Tramontana - the bread, the mystic body and the communion of the saints of Il Manifesto's high-class production (with its nice pieces of ideological analysis, its political notes, its "how good we are", "how good they are" complacencies), in reality repeated the errors and the elitist, aristocratic culture of the Radical Party of that time, which was "also" our Radical Party, but primarily the one of the Valianis and the

Paggis, the Serinis and the Cattanis [all Radicals in the Fifties, ed.].

But let us return to our experiences. There is this mystery: everything was destroyed. Think of the PSIUP [Socialist Proletarian Unity Party]; think of Potere Operaio [Workers' Power Party]. There is no group and not even any people who have been able to hold up in the last fifty to sixty years, hence for the period in Italian political history which directly regards us, as we have been holding up for the last twenty years. And (since we do not, like friend Tramontana, believe in a pre-existing word which is destined to become flesh in the history of humanity and civilisation) we have to ask ourselves, and as laymen find a clear answer to what is behind this apparent mystery: why we are just the ones who have held up, we the shabbiest lot and apparently the least well prepared of all in theory. Whereas we know that theory and durability are two faces of the same thing. Without theory one cannot hold out because without theory, by activism, one "has things done" and one doesn't "act"; with spontaneous a

ction one kills spontaneity rather than exalting and nourishing it, just as with drunken sprees of rationality one also kills rationality and as much rationality as has to preside over organisation.

The answer is in what I consider - and this I will not tire of repeating for as long as I consider it essentially correct - the only segment of new political theory of the organisation or party praxis that I know of in Europe in the last fifteen years: it is in the Radical Party statute approved in Bologna eleven years ago, but which in reality already represents the synthesis of the partly victorious battles like those of the student movement in the Fifties (our Unione Goliardica) and the victory - if you will - of a certain inheritance claimed from our Radical Party of those days and still unknown today. It is the reason for which - Massimo knows it - I don't much agree with talk about the "new" Radicals: because I believe we are all old Radicals, but also because I believe we have a deep continuity with the old Radical Party above and beyond the choices we consider it opportune to make that differ from the old leadership.

When I see a historian, a sociologist, a political scientist - its hard to know any more what to call them - like Massimo L. Salvadori (as he once was called - the L. has now fallen away although he is still alive but the other Massimo Salvadori, anti-Fascist and Radical, is somewhat forgotten) and others revive for the readers of "Mondo Operaio" or "Panorama" Kautski and other thinkers of the Socialist movement (I would not say proletarian movement or international), I cannot forget that at the time the Radical Party was founded, Mario Paggi justified his choice speaking at length precisely of Kautski. And in those days of '54 - '55 it was only the Radicals who evoked Kautski or Luxembourg on political occasions. Thus we have a man of entrenched opportunism like Leo Valiani, in whom - we can see it now - the feeling for opportunity and power always prevails over faith in ideas, dialogue, political confrontation and the tension of ideas. Opportunism is a political practice which, however corrupt and cor

rupting, can still have all the dignity of the tradition of Gambetta's French Radicalism which always kept in sight the ideal ends, because to some degree and paradoxically it continued to believe in them. Whereas transformism, which is the Italian version of opportunism, in Crispi, (5) and above all in the historical left, was the cynical abandonment of any goal whatsoever exclusively for the sake of designs on power.

Well then, in that Radical Party an opportunist like Leo Valiani anticipated the kind of arguments we hear today being made within the group surrounding "Quaderni Piacentini" [a Communist review of the Sixties, ed.] where slowly a future for all of us begins to take shape that involves the development of ideas and hints which were quite rightly abandoned at the start of the Radical Party's life because - and I am convinced of this - they were already old and useless.

The new things that other groups are announcing as imminent are destined to be trampled down because in my opinion they lack the possibility of profiting from, I repeat, that possibly unique segment of European theory of political organisation which is in our statute. It is a limitation, this fear we Radicals sometimes have, or some of our comrades in this conference have, of appearing inelegant, of quoting ourselves, of claiming and emphasising the central role of what we might call Radical thought - even with regards to the themes involved in the present crisis - identified by the traces which it certainly has left. We must re-possess the significance of theory. On other occasions I have already insisted on the need of re-acquiring the knowledge that the word revolution is a scientific term taken from physics which indicates the revolving of a body around itself - a notion that was taken up into political terminology by those who believed in continuous and non-violent revolution, in revolution as a p

rocess, as a precisely defined place and situation; and instead it long ago ended up meaning the opposite. The same is true of the word theory. Think of it for a moment. I consider many of our comrades well up on theory, because theory also means "line" as in "a long theory [line] of facts", etc... I have often said: a long theory [line] of ants marching.

A common awareness of a long theory [line] of facts may perhaps be recuperated - rather less by means of the essay form than the narrative, which is to say history, of knowledge and of dialogical knowledge. When we passed the statute it was May 1967. The party was made up of not more than 70 or 80 Radicals if we also include the sick and the sleepers. In four years we had become the party of the marches, of the beatniks, of the provos of the squalid and filthy headquarters where - Silvestro wrote - screwing went on in the toilets, where meetings were held, where we mimeographed the flyers and made the sandwich boards, where denunciations arrived and the first arrest warrants, where the homosexuals became active, where Valpreda (6) was hosted. It was an important head-office for the Socialist and libertarian political theory of organisation which we applied. When in Rome Bordiga held his meetings at our place. Livio Maitan and Silvestro and the "provos" met there too. Valpreda and his comrades came to p

rint their communiques and the students movement was able to make it their first branch office. And already then it was the official meeting point for Iranians and South Vietnamese, deserters and men at large, pro-divorce people and anti-clerical Christians, Socialists and Communists united in new formulas of action and of dialogue. I don't think it would have been possible to unite in the same place such diverse elements unless a theoretical germ, an inner one most certainly, allowed us to behave in a way that knocked down opposing and unambiguous traditions. This microcosm already prefigured our central role, and it was the centrality of a "political site" which was "frequented" by not only Pino Pinelli but by Calabresi. This central function, this experience, this history can only be delineated through narrative - and it is still waiting to be discovered.

People of this kind, of the kind that we were, suddenly feel the need of something whose importance is not felt by any other political force. Then there was, it is true - I see it here - Paolo Ungari who almost at the same time even managed to get the Republican Party to publish a booklet entitled "The New Party". Paolino Ungari now knows how new the party was and the statute it had prepared, because now I don't know if he will even be able to the Republican Party Congress, and he will go only on the condition that it will not be dangerous for his "new" party. But aside from this exception, the only political group that took on the burden of the problems of the theory and practice of political organisation were these 70 or 80 people who produced this statute under the heavy fire of the various militant battles.

If I reread it today as a member of Parliament, I find there a kind of leap, an incursion into a territory apparently not his in a document which yet is so attentive to the currents, to the possible facts of our planning. It is in the part where in substance the parliamentary group is prohibited from binding the elected Radicals to party discipline. In 1967 the statute of a party entirely engrossed in organising what today would be called the factor of civil society (in any case an ambiguous factor, although perhaps not in a necessarily negative sense of the word) makes this leap which was unthinkable in that period, invades institutional territory and establishes that if a parliamentary group calls itself Radical it cannot have party discipline, cannot bind its components to voting with the majority. It is, if you think about it, the essence of the problem we have in Parliament today, because incompatible with anything of what is being practised and which is perverting the republican Parliament today.

If you remember, at the beginning of the legislature we made the acceptance of this norm our only condition for forming a single group with the PSI [Socialist Party] and our joining the Socialist group. Was it for the sake of us four guaranteeing our corporative liberty perhaps? And who would have taken it away from us? No, it was an attempt to acquire this feature for official Italian Socialism through an agreement with the Radicals and to make not only us four alone, but all the deputies of the Socialist group freer and more responsible. It was no accident that they rejected it unanimously and considered it unthinkable.

And it is no accident that the likes of Bobbio, Salvadori, and "Mondo Operaio" [a Socialist periodical, ed.] do not bother themselves with such trifles as these. I cannot manage to get excited about the re-organisation and the new prestige of "Mondo Operaio". Certainly "Mondo Operaio" is something different than what it was three years ago, but mainly in form. It still remains something that doesn't really upset anyone. I really can't see what is so earthshaking in some of the things that "Mondo Operaio" digs up. (Digging up: this is the main method of Norberto Bobbio who not by chance has become the new pontifex of Socialist thought.) A demonstration of this is the very way in which they have helped to recuperate and establish in our political language a word as perverse, perverted and perverting as "pluralism" which, in Italy, is unequivocally marked by and nailed down to the worst in Catholic and Fascist thought - after which it has to be distinguished through their exertions by counterposing c

onflictual pluralism to organicist pluralism, and so on. While I stubbornly continue to insist that it does not interest me: everything they say there is behind the word pluralism and behind the exercising of political engineering to which they dedicate themselves, is laicism for me and nothing else. Meanwhile these people are ashamed to pronounce the words lay and libertarian. But these were the very words behind our statute. And I would not want, Massimo, that we too, for the sake of communication perhaps, should tone down a little the emphasis on these two words, these two characteristics, so fundamental to our party.

Because the new and important fact of the '67 statute is that precisely from within the libertarian movement and from a group that proclaims itself libertarian that the question of law, of organisation, of procedure, of the definition of the rules of the game is a necessary question for any group that truly wants to be libertarian and liberating. Thus in 1966, in the concrete form of a statute, our argument with the paleo-anarchists according to whom man and society are originally good, uncorrupted and non-violent until the state and the laws come along to corrupt them. And thus they must cut down not only tyrants, but the state and its laws.

To this anarchist vision we oppose our concrete libertarian vitality (not our vitalism), verifying rather that in many historical circumstances it is law that is the alternative to violence, the historically possible alternative to violence. Wherever natural differences, differences of species, even differences of ideals, economic and physical, are left uncontrolled when the rules of the game are not demanded by every participant in the life of this or that "forest", there "natural" law reigns. Not even, that is to say, that subsequent law of retaliation which, at least being a law, is already less barbarous, but the law "of nature", according to which the big fish eats the little fish and the more cunning and stronger gets the better of the weaker. And this, paradoxically, is the society that our anarchist comrades of a certain type have long invoked as the moment of original purity, this world of original sin.

We for our part have noticed that there is in a party's statute the prefiguration of a social programme and project for behaviour. It is decisively theoretical. It is also a scenario. If you read it in a certain way - like good laws - it is an essential scenario. First this is done then that is done, then even something else. Our statute can be narrated. And in fact for the only interpretations I have found myself giving in the pages of "Notizie Radicali" fifteen lines were enough: in our party this is not possible, this other thing is possible, etc....

The reason for the "mystery" of our living and growing as a political force is therefore also that of having as libertarians affirmed this in a concrete way. It is having drawn practical and concrete consequences from the useless and learned enunciations of Lelio Basso and from the more intelligent of the Marxists who, after having polemicised on this point with us, began precisely in those years to maintain that one of the proofs of the need for a Socialist alternative and a proletarian revolution of the new "Third State" was given by the objective evidence of the fact that only in this new dimension of the Socialist revolution could the bourgeois ideals find their actuation.

Basso thought above all of those of the French revolution while we thought also of those of Bertrando Spaventa, of the constitutional state (not of Cavour's political praxis, of the Historical Right or of the left). It is no accident if Rosario Romeo and the other reactionary scholars study mostly that datum - positive, progressive from certain points of view, but then from the most various signs - that is represented by Cavour and the "liberal" governors. We, for our part, salvage from that historical experience, the Utopia of the constitutional state and not the absolutist and classist praxis by means of which the bourgeoisie, to maintain its power, was obliged to deny its own revolutionary ideals.

How is it that political scientists and scholars have not thought a little more about studying this mysterious thing that is the Radical Party and its statute? I think this depends in part on the lack of awareness in all of us that the statute is the only truly ordering-disordering document of a political force that otherwise cannot in the long run produce anything other than non-liberty and non-liberation, the old and decayed "order".

Yesterday Panebianco reminded you, as usual, that there are such things as regional referendums. I say as usual in giving homage to his intelligence, his capacity to define the nerve-centres of Radical politics, as I had already done apropos of non-violence. And you know that in all the congresses which I have attended, I always said that either there must be regional parties, or a regional political aspect of the Radical political struggle, or else there is no Radical Party. What does this mean? It means that the "national" political struggle for our statute is either regional or it is not, with the added value too that it is represented by the central federation of the regional parties - an added value that is altogether relative to the structure of the national State with provisions for also using the necessary moment of the clash with the Leviathan that we have at the centre and which represents the continuity of the national State, always classist, authoritarian and violent. Pre-Fascist liberalism

managed to realise certain guarantees of liberty within, sociologically, 10% - 20% of the country at the cost of the liberty of the rest who were left out. Just as the possibility of liberty and material well-being of England was at the same time bound to the imperialistic rape of the colonies' economies and legal rights, so in Italy the propriety of the constitutional state for a minority was founded on the rape of the fundamental rights of the large majority of the country.

The national State has known various forms of Jacobinism of the right and the left, but along these lines the only national candidacy - and also the only international one - the only winning proposition, the only modern social statute possible is the one conceived by the National Fascist Party. This is its corporativism, its organicistic pluralism, consociative, of which no one has sufficiently emphasised that the Fascist superstructures were potentially "democratic" superstructures as well, if it is true - and it is true - that even the Great Council voted democratically with a majority vote to cast out Mussolini and arrest him. Just have a try, Paolo Ungari, to get a majority vote against La Malfa! [The Republican Party leader, ed.] As always, it is no accident if the Manichean visions - Fascism-Anti-Fascism - have shown they are not lay visions.

In the face of this idea of society, the Radical Party has been the only one that decided to organise itself as a federation of ethnic realities, of historical-cultural realities, of various human and associative realities, in order to adhere to these diverse histories and realities and to acquire in this diversity the force of a "European universality", which is to say, of the greatest universality historically possible. It has been the only one to foresee its structuring through the promotion of organisations and groups of all the democratic minorities which represented the large majority of society. The majority is not composed of a crowd or of indistinct axes, but of many minorities, differing historically, in their choices and their consciences.

We were very far from this possibility when we thought out the statute. And just because of this we realised provisional structures officially different from those foreseen in the statute, but we said to ourselves: until such a time as the regional and the federated parties are not created, we will not call the deliberating organ a federative council but we called it, even formally, in a traditional way, I do not remember whether directorate or directing committee. In reality we were unconsciously thinking not of the Radical Party statute but of the desired great party of the alternative. This is the limitation of that statute as of all theories, but it is also its strength. The organisation of a democratic alternative was foreseen, hence a mass and majoritarian one. It was a proposal made to others for new rules of the game. It seems to me that Panebianco says that the two basic characteristics of political clash are its timeliness - the specific and differing timely positions that confront each other

in a political clash - and procedural aspects: hence the way and the place because procedure also means to proceed and one proceeds according to the terrain that one defines; if it is a rough terrain one proceeds in a certain way, if it is smooth and level, one proceeds in another way.

Hence here is the first affirmation, it seems to me, of the new party: the new party promotes "legality", ensures the rules of the game being followed, overturns the sensibility that looks like natural law, that looks like anarchy according to which the organisation is the negation of liberty. Nietzsche too, whom Panebianco quotes, like the Social Democrats, is affected by this historical error. What is the organisation? It is the price we have to pay, the restriction on the liberty of each individual so that at least a little liberty survives for all? No, this is a losing concept in history which is destined to bring victory to the opposite idea, the Fascist one, according to which one must organise authority and only from that point on will individual perimeters of greater liberty be possible. This concept wins out because a political theory and a kind of legality that are based on the lesser evil rather than on full development, but on the necessary sacrifice of one's o

wn presuppositions and principles are lacking in ideological tension and a positive foundation and thus of historical perspective.

Overturning this set-up we have reaffirmed that liberty, like love and like all other values is a social "product" - even that famous inner liberty of the prisoner in the dungeons of a castle of whom it is said that he is freer than his guard. This too is the fruit of an anthropological conquest, a historical-social product. The approaches which presuppose the existence and the possibility, above and beyond the factor of organisation, of a greater liberty, commit the individualistic and consumistic error of retaining that each of us has an individual freedom quotient which has been genetically ascertained and perhaps some day will biochemically isolated and which resides in one or another of our cells which to survive we must constantly sacrifice. Because otherwise, if we lived freely life would be a jungle and not rational existence. So here we are with social rationality too conceived as renunciation and sacrifice and not as the product of a vision according to which organisation is the only way of

giving life to freedoms, even the most intimate freedoms. There is no fact, no value (whatever it may be - think of love, think of law, think of dialogue) that does not presuppose a plurality of beings, that cannot be thought of or realised other than socially and historically, objectively organised.

There is this organisational intuition in the Radical statute, perhaps for the first time in the last 150 years, ever since, with a certain libertarian and Utopian Communism, every attempt at libertarian political struggle has gone into a crisis and dissolved itself, and every presage of a libertarian society with the recurring fall, as an effect of this crisis, into the desperation of drugs today, yesterday of the bowler hat, of political emigration, of the recourse to Rousseau, to Robinson Crusoe, or of going to Brooklyn, to California, to the mountains of Massa Carrara - this constant seeking of the anarchist of the "some place else", the good place uncontaminated by history which comes in part from a certain way of being a Catholic, of looking at the reality that pursues us.

For my part I think that we Radicals have been the first to realise in our organisation a project to promote freedom and freedoms rather than the creation of power and powers. We can realise and carry on this attempt claiming, starting from the historical ambiguity of the concept of law, the possibility, and I would almost say the necessity that precisely anti-power is what is inherent in law, it is precisely in law, if affirmed in a certain way, that there is the negation of power. This is the theoretical segment that I read in our statute to which I find nothing that corresponds either in "Mondo Operaio" nor in the writings of the best of our friends.

Why are the best of our friends always losers? Why are they the commentators of past disasters or the prophets of coming ones? Yesterday you heard the address of [Stefano] Rodotà. Stefano thinks that Giuliano may be thinking of... and is worried about it. But these best of our friends, rather than worrying about what Giuliano thinks in the last phrase of his article in "Panorama", why do they not worry more about the commitments that should be made - possibly without Radical mediation, perhaps without having to be concerned with being tarred as Radicals - commitments such as that regarding the Chamber of Deputies where the violation of existing rights is becoming systematic, deliberately destructive of the statutory and also constitutional channels.

I have rarely felt as Radical in a "political" event as I did during the episode of the Republican [Party] Congress in Genoa, in which (others would say going "in partibus infidelium", whereas we were able to feel like Radicals at home) I participated simply in order to say something very simple: that it was very serious when a party did not respect the sentence pronounced by a college of arbiters which it had elected almost unanimously, and pronounced on the basis of the statute and the internal law which it had been given. In our statute there are no sanctions, there are no colleges of arbiters, there are no expulsions, none of all this. Instead, at the moment in which law is made the sacred basis of sanctions, it regularly happens that those who live by the sword of law, inflicting legal wounds, die by the sword. And my wish for you, my dear Paolo, is that you may be wounded by the Republican sword, but that you don't die from it, partly because you are here - which is a good defence - and I thank yo

u for it.

But look again at the Moro affair, at the dramatic events of these days. For weeks now we have been uselessly making almost daily requests for a discussion in Parliament on the Moro case. In this case the Socialist [Bettino] Craxi comes out, and not being able to say to the Red Brigades "no one is ever to be killed, under no circumstances, no one is to be kidnapped", he proposes negotiations, proposes negotiating I don't know what, it is not clear with whom. I who have always protested against not only Asinara, but Regina Coeli [the names of two prisons, ed.] too - and not only have visited them - I can say with some effect that the Moro kidnapping is ignoble, can tell the Red Brigades: I reprove in you one thing above all, which is your likeness to those you say you are fighting.

Craxi can't say this - except if he has the right to contradict himself - nor can the Socialist comrades who in these very days have consented to the Cabinet's approving a bill which perfects and definitively strengthens the Fascist military courts. It is a bill drawn up by the government, but in substance it is the Balzamo project. And the abortion law also bears the name of Balzamo. Not only has the Constitutional Court with a servile ruling blocked the referendum against the Fascist military jurisdiction, but now we will also have military justice ever more of a caste kind, more autonomous, stronger, wealthier.

I believe that a party like ours which does not consent to trials within its own structure, that is aware of the futility of hoping to defend ourselves from violence by killing the violent, is the only group that from this point on and for all past time offers an answer - with deeds and not with exploiting and intermittent polemics - to the PCI and the DC, united by the worst aspects of their traditions, united in the conviction of the need to violate the Constitution, the parliamentary regulations, to maintain and, if the Fatherland requires it, to worsen the Fascist laws. This is what certain political scientists call consociative democracy: conceptually it is charlatanism, dangerous charlatanism, not so much for its desire to do harm but for its guilty, comfortable superficiality. Each time there is a violation of the law, every time that the institutional crisis of the Republic appears more evident, they remind us of the contradictory way our society is going, they remind us that there are regional

councils, neighbourhood committees, abortion clinics, all of this consociationism, in short, as if it were grass-roots democracy and not the supporting bases of a pyramid, the ever heavier pyramid of power.

In this congress many things have been cited, but perhaps not cited have been the motions of our congresses of Florence '67 and Turin '72 when we wrote, more or less, "...the Christian Democrat and Communist ministers and bureaucrats who wield real power..." were already at that time in polemics with the myths of grass-roots democracy and the inter-classist, unanimistic labour union unity that was taking shape. One ought to re-read, rediscover those motions.

We have to continue along the road indicated by our statute. For this reason Adelaide's [Aglietta] decision to suspend our "national" activities seemed a just one to me since they had become an alternative to those of the statute, of the party. Do we want to join those who - because history would not allow it to us, because we are not ready for this - continue to live against their constitution, with a single national headquarters and without real regional parties? And since things are serious, are we to hold to the single national party and not create the federative diversities of the regional parties, are we no longer to be concerned with holding regional referendums and not take up regional battles? But this is the habitual reflex, they are the motivations of those who govern us, of the principles that have been governing us for thirty years, who continue to maintain that maybe the death penalty is not necessary but that life imprisonment is, and that in any case order cannot be based on anything but

violence and fear, and who indicate their ignorance of the fact that firing-squad executions on the spot without a trial are by now an unwritten but iron law in our country for passers-by, the fearful, chicken thieves, distracted citizens or suspects. It wouldn't interest me to win of lose a referendum on the Reale Law [an anti-terrorist law severely limiting civil rights, ed.] if then we were to lose forever in the history of a country and a party the Utopian possibility of liberating, libertarian and liberal constitutional state. And certainly this Utopia would be lost forever if we were to let pass even for one day in Parliament or in the country without opposing it the principle that to affirm order and social peace and to fight the violent it is necessary to increase the violence of the law and the State against the weak, increasing the privileges of the worst of the powerful, and that only the fear of this violence can be a brake or a deterrent on the violent.

Some people are hurt because we say that "La Repubblica" offers incorrect and falsified information with regard to all this just because even in the pages of "La Repubblica" there are what the French call some "grains de beauté", a few "beauty spots". I am willing to grant that the Rodotà family constitutes in "La Repubblica" two beauty spots, two moles of correct and honest information in comparison to perfidiously, systematically, and filthily incorrect information. But if ours is an alternative culture, it has to be also an alternative cultural anthropology. We have re-proposed and continue to re-propose in the Chamber the reform of the police. Why? Because anthropologically we know that only a police whose men and women live like all of us and alongside all of us as a part of the same social body with children that are born and grow together with our children, knowing each other - only this in terms of cultural anthropology and within a period of five, or ten or thirty years can contribute to creati

ng the possibility of guided social prevention that is realised by the public security worker who lives not in a barracks but in an apartment house, a street, a neighbourhood and who has need of this because it helps him re-acquire the self governing aspect of the institutions as well.

Otherwise in five or ten or thirty years from now (the nuclear society that is taking shape today) we will have a very powerful state that will attempt to re-propose the myth of opulence; we will have some new Socialists alla Mitterand who will say that Socialism is only conceivable on the basis of opulence and not poverty and that therefore... But in reality we will have only two possible structures: we will have the new energy priests, the new priests of knowledge, of the five or six cathedrals of a society that will have to defend itself from the danger that the host, the body of its history, plutonium, will fall into the hands of terrorists, of a few brigadiers, of organised dissent. And the military organisation of this social defence will be the only possibility. Certainly there is that temptation. In the Chamber of Deputies, in Parliament, there are perhaps the few true "grands commis" of this state - I am speaking of the functionaries - and the ideology that I see making headway in the office

s (I hope it is not a definitive thing) is a Fascist ideology, once again in the cleanest and greatest sense of the term. How does this ideology express itself? In terms of historical justification and collaborationism. Faced with the historical fact, by now ineluctable, (whereas more simply it is already the reality of yesterday and today) of the great coalition of interests that sees the DC aNd the PCI, the Catholic Church and the Communists, the owners and the unions united, we should not, according to them, commit the sin of formalism. We must remember that the flower of law can grow on any kind of historical dung heap and we have the duty to fertilise it, not to try to impose the continuity of an idea, of a form, when in reality the necessitating form is already another. And so, they say, let us furnish the new tyrant with the instruments for these marginal and contingent victories of his in order to later become necessary and be able to condition him, or condition the reality of which he will have been

the demiurge rather than the Leviathan... We have no objections of principle or of morals to serving as a profession. But it doesn't even seem worthwhile to us to serve only what is already an accomplished historical synthesis and not a different present and future.

And so another thing in our statute seems to me essential. Written in our statute is the trust in the law of conscience which is or can be born as juridical, as an institutional norm, in the victory that can have non-violence as its midwife. This excluding of sanctions, of the possibility of expulsions, of punishment, of accepting or rejecting membership requests, is justifiable only if based on trust in dialogue and non-violence. Ours is not a statute of the weak, of people resigned to being victims and offering themselves as prey to their adversaries. No. And neither is it heroism. We are strong too and believe that strength today also consists in these things. Thanks to them we have been able to demonstrate - above all to ourselves - that in this party no fatal hegemonies are possible, the traditional troubles and disasters of typical of the organisational theories and praxes of the left. The party which apparently was, due to its statute and a conscious calculated risk, was the most open and vulnera

ble has turned out to be the least contaminated, the one in which infiltrations have been least possible, the one that has gone furthest in contrast to parties, small groups and their members who have put their trust in the delusion of a defence, sometimes even violent, of the party structures, the delusion of the sword. With violent so-called revolution, with the Red Brigades, all the state-perpetrated massacres have been made possible. Because violence is the unifying factor, in which the Secret Service, the regime, Cefis, and I don't know who else, can agree, even ideologically, even fundamentally, in choosing the same arms and opting for the same structures.

There are many more things I would have to say. I would like to conclude with an observation. I say this to Massimo Teodori. would say it to Angelo Panebianco if he were still here. It is this: Let us be careful not to imagine that there are ways of living and struggling homogeneous with non-intellectual militants, and other which are homogeneous with intellectual militants. Let us be careful, because if there is something which threatens us it is this: if we go forward, within a year homage will be rendered to our ideas and thus to our men who will appear to be men of ideas. Quite aside from their intentions, they will try (this has already been pre-figured in Bologna) to define the rigor, the seriousness, the sense of responsibility of men of ideas and of revolutionary ideas as the party of anger, of gross behaviour, of paranoid and "excessive" militants. If there is a moment in which are necessary - not provocation which I never use - but hardness and the most firm refusal to leave our "arms",

all of our arms, from the ideas to the grossnesss, in the vestibule, at the entrance, this must above all concern the universities, the newspapers, the radio and television. As for us, whenever we are dressed in rags we may be able to accept living according to the social rules and forms and different, Victorian or neo-bourgeois manners, but until then we cannot avoid being ready to ward off - at the risk of our political death - attempts to separate, to annex, to integrate any Radical whomsoever who proposes in a not ill-bred way, that is to say according to the customs of the ruling class, and so with customs homogeneous with ruling, the things we have learned together and to which we are giving substance, and this is important.

We of the parliamentary group believe we have overcome this danger. In fact it existed for us too. We overcame it perhaps the moment in which we had the employees of Montecitorio [seat of the Chamber of Deputies, ed.] howling around us because we would not allow them to go home for Christmas or Easter, Saturday afternoon or Sunday, because already at that difficult moment we felt, without precisely wanting to, an already human relationship, because at that moment we may have learned how many children they had and who had none, we may have learned something about their social or their civil circumstances. Even within the institutions today, right there we are governed by this ill-bred behaviour, by the fact that we have obliged speakers of the Chamber to return suddenly from illegitimate vacations, we have forced the deputies to do night work, to go unshaven and have messy hair.

And just because I believe, Massimo, that the contribution of each one of us is equally important, and I consider that I am as much a product of your presence in the party as you are of mine, all the more reason why I must tell you that how serious I felt it to be in terms of the theory of Radical praxis that after the Bologna congress the minority, which was identified as the minority of Radical Party intellectuals, did not feel the duty to be the first to stand up - in the newspapers, where they get a little more space, or by public declarations or by making appeals against the ignoble way in which the press presented the conclusions of the congress, our decisions on public financing [of the political parties, ed.] or our so-called discussions with the Fascists, our Radical-Fascism claims. Today it seems to me that the duty of Radical intellectuals is not to hold dialogues within the Bobbiesque or Bobbian [a reference to the noted jurist and philosopher Norberto Bobbio, ed.] structures which I highly

respect, but it is to ask for a reckoning with these structures of the continuing censoring of truth, the proof of which they can read every day, as well as to deny their specific trait, abusive as well as abused, overcoming it and bringing it into line with the truth of the party's history.

I believe that respectability is important only if one knows how to make use of it coherent with our morality: to use respectability we acquire against the contents of the respectability of others who always want practically to impose it on us increasingly. Otherwise one confuses liberty with the mere freedom to write this essay and that article in the language, the time and the place of others. Otherwise one does at best what Benedetto Croce [Neapolitan philosopher, ed.] did - with due respect to the relative differences of importance - under Fascism who was free to have Laterza publish the six thousand copies of his "Critique" and to write several things for five or six thousand people or for American and European libraries as long as he wrote not one word of the unemployed of Spaccanapoli [a main Naples thoroughfare, ed.] or of the carpenter arrested the day before, or not in such a way as to be read by 100,000 or a million readers.

We must speak more and more of Radical theory and practice, discuss it, on one condition: that then in the play among our parts one takes care above all to reflect on theory, be it the first to defend the party and the truth in opposition to those who want, like clerics, make "knowledge" and its communication a monopoly and a weapon to make the majority deaf and blind, reserving knowledge for 10,000 or 100,000 people free to read well and thus also to read Panebianco who expresses himself mainly through essays. But if Panebianco every now and then were to say a few words of the kind we usually are obliged to say about the sequestering of truth and legality, it would allow some of us who perhaps also enjoy theorising, who believe in theory, who perhaps consciously give more substance than others to the slow, long file of Radical, civil and alternative facts - it would allow us also to make the contribution of our reflections , our arrangements, theoretical or organisational, of the theory of practice and

perhaps of knowledge too.

I repeat: there must not be in the Radical Party this double tendency of which I have heard speak, of those who consider the political situation critical we are going through, and those who believe on the other hand that it is being dramatised in order through the dramatic tension to obtain a unity which otherwise could not be guaranteed in a full democratic confrontation.

This is not the problem. Personally I know that at moments like these what I produce is much better and so I am in much better shape. But I also know that this is the reality and it is not arbitrary dramatising. I know - let me add - that what I produce is better, not that I necessarily live better. It is not even being hypersensitive to say that we are living in an age such as the anti-Fascists lived through when Fascism first began and during its reign. Or the way the followers of Salvemini and the Socialists lived, the peasants and the reformers in the Giollitian South of prefects and mace-bearers or like the dissenting Liberals, Radicals, Republicans and Socialists - not the rebellious - under the monarchy. And if it is just and pertinent to shout "Don't give in", we must be in a condition to make the reasons for not giving in win out - those reasons which have always been politically cut down and conquered for the historical limitations of those who were not to give in and to whom we owe our acqui

sition of the political morality of not giving in (not our teachers and our fathers whom I consider to be like contemporaries of mine, comrades to whom one must answer for one's actions).

But for this very reason, let's put an end to this story of defeats and failures. Our way of being Radical has been different: it has been the way of those who have always felt, unlike the others, that there is nothing to restore, that it was necessary to have a theory of praxis, theory of organisation; that it was necessary to have the ambition and the capacity to represent the majorities because the minorities do not exist outside of the majorities. The true historical minority is the one which repeats in itself the essential elements of the identity crises of all the other minorities which make up the majorities. The democratic axiom is true which says that in political democracy today's minority is tomorrow's majority, but on the condition that it contains within itself virtually the capacity of developing the life and growth of other minorities. Otherwise it will be a minority based on power and later a majority based on power - that is, once taking over the reigns of government it will be a violen

t minority subduing the others too, in fact, that is what it already is in its actions and not only in its potential.

I believe that at bottom being Radical ought not to be defined, but "done"; to be Radical today is perhaps "necessary" to an ever greater number of people. But then, let us clearly understand that one is a Radical in one's day-to-day precision, one's humility and one's works and according to the measure of these, not of eternity.

For example, men of juridical knowledge, know and reflect that it is useless to for them to explain to us great things about future conceptions or future risks of presidentialism if they, the priests of this knowledge, do not contribute, if you will, to "clericising" the people, or better, to "laicising" their truths. I am referring to all those who are able to grasp the enormous gravity, the lethal weight, of the things we are denouncing in the Chamber of Deputies each day. And capable of grasping the enormity of the lies of the political news beginning with papers like "La Repubblica" and "Il Messaggero", the Second Programme TV news and the First Programme radio news.

And on this note I will end because I see that I have only just begun. I remain convinced that a theory of the new party is today a necessity for all parties and all democracies. I remain convinced that the fight we are waging in Parliament is a fundamental fight because there is the danger that within three, four, or five months we will also see the situation in Parliament reduced to concluded and conclusive lies. I maintain that we have managed to bear witness, modest but certain, that prejudices even today any possible new theory and practice of a new Socialist and libertarian party, that today a battle in Parliament as everywhere else is possible: and if it is possible in Parliament, just think how possible it is elsewhere! This business of the regional referendums, the not having held or attempted many, is for us with our statute something shameful. What is the point of having a democratic constitution and then not using it? What is the point of having the institution of the referendum in the regio

ns and then not actuating it in democratic and institutional life? What is the use of telling oneself: but we do not have the strength! Well then, for what will we ever have the strength? To enter the election battle, to administrate?

Our strength is in non-violence, it is in the awareness that even the creation of a different kind of law - one of life! - has to go through the stage of giving substance to the idea in which one believes from all aspects, including sex. Our statute is already our theory. The great thing that we have to lay claim to is concrete history - the theory of these past twenty years, the concrete history of our days and our nights, of our failures which we have had too, but also of the hopes that can become law besides - as they are sometimes in danger of doing - becoming the privilege of those who have the strength of hope.

But one must be conscious that the claim to the murder of the corpus of Radical history in these two traditional aspects (theory and practice) is already under way: it goes by the road of news and information, the road of communications, the change of our connotations, of our identity, so that we do not even manage to recognise ourselves.

We can only put up opposition to all that by overcoming the fear of being Radical. Because I think that today whoever understands how great in relation to all the rest is our theory and our practice is quite right in being "afraid" of rigorously being or not being Radical. It is right to know that in history the temptation and the delusion of violence is that of ridding oneself of these claims in a violent and right-wing radical way, trying to cut off the head and not only shoot at the legs of those who show they know how not to give in and managing to lose their souls only in order to save the souls of others. Don't give in, ever!

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Gobetti and Rosselli - Piero Gobetti (1901 - 1926) a Liberal Socialist ideologist who fled to France under Fascist persecution; Carlo Rosselli (1899 - 1937), statesman, among the founders of Giustizia e Libertà (see following note), he fled to France under Fascism where he was assassinated together with his brother Nello on the orders of the Italian secret service.

2) Giustizia e Libertà - A Socialist inspired anti-Fascist movement founded in Paris in 1929 by Italian exiles.

3) Manzoni and Alfieri - Two great names of Italian literature - Alessandro Manzoni (1785 - 1873), author of "I promessi sposi"; Vittorio Alfieri (1749 - 1803), primarily a dramatist.

4) Silone and Gramsci - Ignazio Silone (1900 - 1978) prominent novelist and a founder of the Italian Communist Party which he left in 1930 for which reason he became anathema to the party. Died in poverty in Geneva. Antonio Gramsci (1891 - 1937) One of the founders and great thinkers of the Communist Party. Imprisoned by the Fascists.

5) Crispi - Francesco Crispi (1818 - 1901) statesman; as prime minister he manifested authoritarian and nationalist tendencies, an author of the Triple Alliance and colonialist expansion in Ethiopia.

6) Valpreda - An anarchist accused of a terrorist bombing and later acquitted after years of preventive custody in prison.