SUMMARY: An essay on the nature and historic roots of the new radicalism and a comparison on the Radical question with contributions by Baget-Bozzo, Galli, Ciafaloni, Tarizzo, Galli della Loggia, Lalonde, Alfassio Grimaldi, Are, Asor Rosa, Corvisieri, Orfei, Cotta, Stame, Ungari, Amato, Mussi and

Savelli.

(SAVELLI Publishers, October 1978)

INDEX:

PART ONE

I Politics and Society (1376)

II Radicals Accused (1377)

III The Radicals as a Two-Front Party (1378)

IV Radicalism and Socialism (1379)

V Radicalism or Marxism, Co-existence or Techno-Fascism (1380)

PART TWO

A Debate on the Radical Issue (1381 > 1397)

1. Politics and Society

In the debate on radicalism, adversaries multiply and intensify accusations against the Radical Party and its politics in contrast to favourable voices. Depending on where it comes from, the argument is rough or is presented as culturally more elaborate; it alludes to a generic radicalism or takes specific comportments as its pretext. In each case, there is the recurrent imputation that the Radicals are "lower middle class" "qualunquisti," "irresponsible" and oscillate between "left and right." It is from these "accusations" that it appears opportune to begin in order to understand their meaning and to discuss their foundation. But this cannot be done without first, and concisely, pointing out some characteristics of present Italian society and grasping some of the deep currents in which it moves. It is only in reference to them that it becomes possible to discuss the validity of the Radical accusations.

"Political Society and Social Society"

In the last decade it became evident, from more than one point of view, that one of the major unresolved issues of the advanced and political society and industrialized countries is the relation between civil society that the crisis of Western democracy is centered precisely on this point. Such a concept has been expressed in different languages, and those who raised the question from time to time and focussed on it have had

dissimilar objectives. But, basically, the evaluation of the inadequacy of political representation to fully express society's needs in the political system and in representative institutions is generalized and generalizable. This might be the point of view -- sociological, politicological, institutional, or directly political -- that is adopted. Not only in our country are rivers of black ink used to describe and analyze the distance between the so-called "real country" and the "legal country," or even

between public and party opinion. The attention of noted international research is directed to the same subject, for example, that of the now famous Trilateral Commission on "The Crisis of Democracy."

Looming in the conflict between the "social" and the "political," or at least unresolved relations in accordance with the forms of representative democracy, is a tendency generally found throughout the West that nevertheless assumes particular characteristics in Italy. In all Western European countries the expansion of the state and its functions connects with the degree of development. The adoption of Keynesian techniques on the

economic level and social interventions had the effect of modifying and amplifying not only the role of the institutions but also that of the parties close to the institutions. The interweaving between state and parties led, with the expansion of the former, also to the institutionalization and the extension of the latter. They became more and more the symbols of one aspect of the state and less and less vehicles to represent the demands of social groups in the institutions. The process of channeling political demands that should go from the bottom to the top was

modified, being interwoven with the process of organizing the consensus from the top to the bottom. In Germany, the formula "state of the parties" was coined, signifying exactly such a new role in the political system as a prolongation of the state. It had assumed, not only in doctrine but also in reality, its more complete expressions, certainly, however much different, exactly in the Federal Republic of Germany as in Italy.

In our country the politics/society conflict has assumed particular aspects through the specific historical characteristics of the dominant political forces. The liberal and liberal democratic cultural that informs the state of rights and the distinction and separation between the force of government and state in many ways remained substantially extraneous to the

Christian Democratic Party, which has ruled the post-war country. In the same period, the Communist Party formed itself, according to the strategy of Togliatti, as a force of settlement and a line of social communication aimed at expanding its own areas of power without ever adhering to the hypotheses of the alternative connected with representative democracy. It is noted that the two policies, supported also by the respective Catholic and Communist political cultures, have flowed toward convergence in institutions and in society. Although there were delays and cross currents of every kind, they were motivated by the glorification of "staying together" as a value that was positive in itself - independent from the objectives and from the political programs realizable and realized through government accords.

We do not have the space here and it is not the object of this contribution to analyze the forms and the ways in which non-liberal and corporative characteristics have marked contemporary Italian society. What interests us here is only to stress how the Christian Democratic-Communist convergence,

through the same force and character of the two parties, has in recent years accented the process of generalized corporativization connected with the logical of installating the parties, directly or indirectly through the state, in every social and institutional area of the country. Lately, even the PCI has found a place in the "state of the parties," after previously exercising, even if only in part, a dialectic role of opposition and of control. The "state of the parties" has exalted that particular Italian aspect of occupying society by the role of party politics that has wasted the name of "patronage."

The "staying together" of the parties of the so-called "constitutional range" with the predominant role shared by the DC and the PCI, signifies also and above all "patronage together" and thus to intensify the forms of party intervention and control in every economic, social and institutional aspect of the national life. Great and small economic and financial institutions, mass media communications, local and regional organisms, institutions of education and culture, even grassroots organisms like neighborhood councils, became the fields in which the parties played power politics. The widening of the area the parties occupated, with respect to that traditional to Christian Democracy and to the minor role of the PSI in the 1970s, assumes a more scientific and totalizing quality by the ways in which the PCI participated in it.

According to the Communist vision and practice, an organized democracy must pass through the direction aware of wide party subjection that has full claim to represent the masses, speak structurally in their name and is therefore capable of directing them by constantly offering a global vision of society and its transformation. Thus the party is capable of resolving every problem because it has worked out a comprehensive plan that outlines social transformation: it is therefore legitimate to understand that for every political and administrative office the party and of the public structure that the party controls make their designations and, as a consequence, the designates respond to the organism from which they have received their investiture and towards which they feel responsible. In this way, the premise of general patronage has found theoretical legitimization after decades in which, with the DC, there also were practices of power and subjection. Based on such a vision, its supporters contend that it is

always preferable for the parties to have to do with the "legitimate" representatives of other parties with which the golden rule of power relations has been established and which do not have as spokesman someone who, free from these ties, might not respect the rules of the game. This point is easily comprehensible to anyone who lives in any structure subjected to public or parapublic influence. And it is the same principle on the basis of which, for example, the uniting of labour unions in single organisms like the Federation of Ironworkers or in any other equivalent organism is determined by a fixed agreement established a priori once and for all between the various components or factions independent of any possibility of expression by the mass in whose name they speak. This imposition so deeply moulds the Italian situation, making it a special an

dadditional case of the general crisis of political representation. It is imprinted with a substantial pessimism about the possibility of civil society's expression although reality might have given signs of an opposite direction. The fact is widely noted that in the last decade there have emerged from Italian society, perhaps still more than from other European

societies, behaviours and movements that, contrary to what is expected from a rigid and blocked political system, indicate the maturity and the collective will of the social sector to achieve major degrees of liberation and identity.

"The Assimilation of the Parties."

The "reawakening of civil society" is talked about. New movements and social subjects such as youth, women, minorities of every kind have appeared. Groups are formed on the basis of conflicts regarding the relation between individual and individual and between individual and nature. They are all marked by changed structural conditions. But the movements emerging in Italy and their manifestations from outside - if not against - the traditional political system are not only the natural product, so to speak, of the process of modernization due to a combination

of factors, mainly the expansion of welfare, information and the

aculturization that accompany development. It is a case also of the result of the progressive nationalization of the parties and of the plan to use the "organized democracy" to cage the social dynamic through great party agreements that try to include and contain everything.

The reasons for which a notable number of social phenomena lead to transformation in an innovative sense are certainly complex and multiple. They do not and cannot move politically inside the historic left. But they undoubtedly contribute to the inadequacy or error of the traditional left by building the state-society relation in the form that the PCI would want to be organistic and at the same time also by organizing its own political force. That is why the prevalent analysis of the PCI, above all most recently, labels as "disintegrative social forces" all that cannot be concluded and contained in its plan in which political mediation is the duty exclusively of the parties.

There have been and there are ever more so two closely linked

characteristic features of the parties and the political system in Italy: on one side "negotiation" at any cost with constant refusal of a clash deriving from the presentation of alternatives on single problems such as on the general prospectives of the country; and on the other side the tendancy to the substantial "reduction of diversity" among the parties. From this comes public opinion's perception of the parties as a single block and also distant from the social dialectic because they have no

internal dialectic. The sociologist Pizzorno wrote on this premise: " ... the parties that in the twenty years preceeding the first world war were radically opposed to each other since then have constantly, regularly drawn closer until they now have programmes practically indistinguishable from each other: the same objectives outlined, the same, or almost, provisions

proposed ... . Based on what criteria will (the citizens) choose who will be able to govern them with a programme that is better or even more useful for their single interests?" (Alessandro Pizzorno, "But What Is The Use Of The Parties?", Panorama, 11 July 1978).

The process of cultural and political homologation of the parties has accelerated in recent years even if it is a general characteristic of advanced industrial societies and in Italian itself comes from afar. Behind the ideological clashes of the 1950s between the left and the block of centrist power, behind the socialist maximalism and verbose reformism of the center left, behind the speeches on plans of historic significance that

would result in the realization of the compromise between the so-called "great popular forces" (Communist, Socialist and Catholic) there were always party practices tending towards assimilation. The purpose was the disappearance of all that information about diversity between political forces whose acceptance would have involved, not an associative vision and

perpetual negotiation of national political life, but the setting up of prospectives of alternation and alternatives.

"The New Antagonistic Social Phenomena"

Generally, the idea is attributed to the Radicals of opposing a mythical civil society, which would be a place of spontaneity and freedom, to the political society as the party state and font of bureaucracy and oppresive manipulation. In direct argument with the Radical position, Adalberto Minucci, director of Rinascita, maintained in a debate promoted by Mondoperaio: "There is a rejection between public and party opinion. It is real, and it has emerged recently. We will continue to search for mistaken

answers if we start from a vision ... of a sort of gigantic manipulation of civil society by the parties, against which society rebels, seeking space, autonomy and so on ... ." (Round Table, "Referendum and the Party Systems," in Mondoperaio, No. 7-8, July-august 1978).

These types of interpretations, now widespread, distort the terms of the question. It is not the Radicals, in fact, who invented the "awakening of civil society" and bestride it. But it is the objective situation that continually shows the symptoms of a crisis due to what in slang is called a lack of a "political way out." Why are there so many movements, so many petitions outside and against the parties? Why do there emerge periodically

phenomena, although quite different from each other, like the Movement of 1977, rampant terrorism, social insubordination and much collective apathy and estrangement? It is not a case, on the part of the Radicals, of an opposition between a political society and a civil society, together idealized and made to become abstract entities, as some would have it believed, but of the recognition of the ever greater incapacity of "these" parties to channel and express pressure and the need to translate it, as

much as is translatable, into transformations of economic, social and civil relations in the institutions.

The basic issue of recent years has been and is exactly that of finding the ways and channels through which "society on the boil" might find new arrangements better suited to the level of development and of maturity it has reached. Italy - it is going to be repeated at every step - is the most "mobile" country with the highest rate of politicization as regards party members and, above all, in the quality and quality of those who participate

in collective processes: and yet it is also the most immobile country, in which there is so much talk of great projects of transformation in the short, medium and long term without any corresponding reform.

Why is a country so rich in social and political tension at the same time a country so poor in reform? In the last decade it took movements born outside the party system to put in motion such rare and significant reform. It saw divorce (Radical and pro-divorce movement); it saw the labour law (which would not have been without the workers movement of 1969); it saw the abortion law (women's movement); it saw the ouster of Leone from the Quirinal Palace (press campaign), which is reform in the extent in which a minimum of public morality was vested in the institutions.

In rejecting as a block the new social and political phenomena which manifest themselves in a manner that is new and extraneous to the traditional forms, the parties, in particular those of the left, showed the limits of their own political culture. Some aspects of the "autonomy," in violent or corporate dimensions, were extreme reactions to the political immobility with mistrust in any politico-reformist action, and thus were

rightly troubling to the left. Requests for participation and the

consequent grassroots mobilization by groups that the traditional parties were not able to assimilate are also erroneously rejected from the Marxist political culture. It is just in this regard that radicalism was perceived

as a real and dangerous adversary because it was capable of organizing politically groups and social gatherings outside the legitimate subject and forms.

Certainly, the historical merit of the force of socialism is that of having brought to the state, or at least to the dialectic of the representative institutions, the masses that were held outside it when they were in conditions of ignorance and materially and culturally extraneous. But that period has certainly been overcome through the changes of the general

conditions of the masses to which reference has been made. The crisis of the left and of its parties' way of being - from Leninism to Morandism to every form of centralized mediation - is in relations with a civil society that is no longer that of the masses, that is coming step by step to lead, instruct, orient and interpret. When you try to lead society with the same criteria that could have been valid in a previous period, you are condemned inevitably to defeat.

The citizen-individual of middle class memory of a restricted society re-emerges today as a generalized individual subject, undoubtedly produced by the fragmentation of social groupings defining themselves on the basis of rights of economic interests but also by regrouping in different categories and groups that have even been called "situational": youth, women, the elderly, users, consumors, members of particular institutions

and minorities of every type as social protagonists who understand how to act beginning from their own existential situation. The interpretation and channelization of these pressures therefore demands some political mediation, institutional instruments and means of organization of the

political force - the party - different from those considered universally valid to the left until now.

----------------------------------------------------------------TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

* Qualunquisti, qualunquismo - a much-used term in Italian political parlance referring to an attitude of mistrust towards parties and the party system in general.