> For more than fifteen years the new Radicals have situated themselves in the country as a political party that gives substance by way of the fight for liberty and liberation to the strategy proposed ever since the beginning of the Sixties for the "renewal and unity of an alternative left". Slowly but surely the Radicals have been emerging both as a leading force on the political scene and as a new affirmation of a deep tendency in society, Radicalism, to which the PR has given a voice and an interpretation. Even though they received rare and often belated recognition, the Radicals acted in all these years according to a vision that referred the single battles to general strategy and that strategy to an original kind of idealism.
Between 1975 and 1976 it might have seemed to many that conditions were ripening for the realisation of an alternative, even from a numerical viewpoint on the Parliamentary level and the balance of power among the parties. The alternative was not, certainly, a question only of alliances: but the strength of the left, which had grown notably in toto, even though the Communists were pre-eminent, constituted the premise that at least a change of leadership was possible in our country after thirty years of Christian Democratic domination. For the rest, that shift to the left that took place between '75 and '76 was only the translation into electoral-institutional terms of the thrust from the grass roots that had manifested itself in so many ways in the country from '68 on. The Radicals had made noteworthy contributions - as well as actively participating to the growth of an alternative - by proposing those issues, such as divorce which, among others, had favoured the liberation of many alternative energies
from the moderate and clerical set-ups in the country. Certainly the question of civil rights had revealed that there was a majority among the citizens for transformation and reform: and that had opened new horizons to the left itself and provoked a broadening of the electoral base that was so clamorously materialised on June 20, 1976. (1)
At a distance of two years, that popular thrust which had expressed itself in 1974 and then in 1976, and the atmosphere of great hope that had accompanied and pervaded a period of renewed vigour on the left, appeared to have petered out. The suicidal policy of the Communists in sustaining the Christian Democratic set-up and its permanence at the centre of the power system and the government in Italy, had destroyed the fervour for change even before that of this or that political formula. If an alternative government is still the point of reference for those who believe in the need of translating a system of values, practices and social forces into policies and institutions opposed to those of the existing order, certainly the hypothesis of being able to realise it is much more distant and improbable than it appeared to be in 1976. The Communists in the first place, and the traditional left in toto, have dissipated the popular thrust in favour of games internal to the party system.
By now it is clear that in a politically short period there is no hope for an alternative government, just as there are no thinkable "common programmes" of the left among groups that - in their concrete workings even more than in their ideological references - have shown such divergent positions, attitudes and objectives. The PCI has accepted, even less than in the past, the calls for freedom and transformation in a lay sense of which the Radicals, among others, have made themselves the spokesmen. The bonds imposed by the so-called "solidarity" of those consociated in the Grand Understanding have pushed the forces of the left into supporting policies of moderation and restoration (crucial being the one on public order), thus transforming forces that ought, due to their positions, to constitute the basis of the alternative, into administrators of the consolidation of the old order.
Even the French experience of the Union of the Left - which for a season was the point of reference for a possible and a hoped-for evolution of the Italian situation too - has put into evidence with the elections of March 1978 the fragility of global agreements among the leftist groups. For different reasons and by different strategies the parallel affairs of the PCI and the PCF [French Communists, ed.] have for the moment liquidated the candidacy of the left with unified formations at the behest of the government in France and in Italy. It is a situation of which one should openly take note because there is no doubt that, as in France, so too in Italy, a new political phase with new problems has opened during the last year.
The thesis of the Radicals has turned out to be true, according to which the historic compromise (2), or any form of collaboration with the DC, would show itself to be a losing game even from the standpoint of those who proposed it. Whenever the Radicals began initiatives and fights which, objectively and subjectively, tended to block and oppose the unanimous agreements between parties of opposing creeds, and in particular of the DC and the PCI, they aimed at a double objective: to strengthen the fights for liberty whose contents are indispensable for validating the formations of the left as an alternative choice; and to prime unifying elements that would be able to move up from society to the party system in such a way as to bring success to the progressive part of the country.
In this sense, and for what the civil rights battles had represented, in the last decade the contribution of the Radicals in cultivating factors of both non-frontist unity and the renewal of the left (or better: the unity of new battles and attitudes), went far beyond the creation of programmatic and organisational convergences. In that too Radicalism had been able to become one of the protagonists of the day who had finally to be taken into account as a tendency that ran through society and the parties.
But in the face of the new situation in which, on the one hand, the left had not wanted to pursue its own candidacy for the governing of the country and its process of transformation, and, on the other hand, the splits created by its very failure whose real meaning and whose possible outcome one does not understand, one must ask oneself if the Radical project still has validity, if Radical strength has the possibility and a reason for further development, and in what direction Radicalism is moving today.
In order to answer such questions, one must first of all keep well in mind the fact that the project for "renewal, unity and alternative" has never been understood in mechanical terms. The "renewal" of the left takes place - and is prepared - in the first instance, in the values brought to life in a "revolutionary" function in the conscience of the public and the militant sectors of the country as a premise for any party operation whatsoever. During these years the Radicals have managed to bring forth again, initially in an isolated way, just those lay, humanistic and libertarian demands of Socialism, democracy, and liberalism, which then penetrated deeply into political action and setting in motion entire social sectors who, on this basis, became political protagonists of ideal political counter-positions.
The <> promulgated by the Radicals was never conceived as a pure alliance among parties independent of its contents and of the unified movements that were supposed to support it, but always as a lay manner for finding unified objectives of struggle among forces which ought never to abandon their characteristics. In this way many political projects were primed that have contributed in recent years to finding winning unified factors and not consociative alliances. In the new phase that has begun, precisely because neither a unity of forces based on party alliances, nor hypotheses of alternative governments are possible, the role of the Radicals still remains that of developing - outside of all formulas and formations - further unifying and alternative factors that truly will contribute to the refounding of the left, or, at least, to make these demands increase within the left and throughout the country.
The function of the PR has never been that of creating a large Radical Party, but that of giving political substance to the values of radicalism on the left and for the left. Faced with the emerging authoritarianism that "also" penetrates the left, it is more necessary than ever to emit and strengthen counter-thrusts of liberty in society and the institutions, thus creating once again occasion for victorious fights around which to rally the political forces as well as the unfocused energies that need a political outlet.
It is certain that the very identity crisis of the left (Communist and Socialist), its interweaving with the administration of existing power and the general development of authoritarian and corporative tendencies more than ever demand that in the near future there be action - and not words - by a libertarian Socialist-inspired force that declares its position outside the negotiations and the sites of the handling of power. The Radical Party can play this role because it is inherent in its tradition to pose problems of "government" from the opposition, cultivating the values in new institutions, the social impulses in reforms and giving substance to the idea that one does not only govern by administering power through the state apparatus, but by contributing to the change in social relations outside the "palazzo" (3) too.
<> The recent change of position by the Socialist leaders and its words on Socialism which are to be guaranteed in the means and ends with which it pursues freedoms, could lead one to believe that the Socialist and libertarian action of the Radical Party have lost their reason for being since the values and demands, overlooked by all the other political forces in the past, can today be found in the PSI. It has already been said in the introduction that, in this sense, there have been explicit declarations made by this or that Socialist leader of the PSI's political intention to occupy the so-called "Radical position".
In a discussion such as ours, which is concerned with delineating the structural lines of Italian Radicalism and its future, one cannot ignore the Socialist hypothesis, even though it remains for the moment only a verbal expression. Certainly, it is true that when the roots and heritage of the Socialist tradition in its irreducibly opposed positions of, on the one hand Jacobin-Leninism and collectivist-authoritarianism, and, on the other, the lay-libertarian and autonomistic one, we are dealing with one of the fundamental questions, in terms of idealistic inspiration, that historically separates the various positions within the renewing and workers' movement, and on the left in general.
A discussion of this kind is important and one can only hope that the terms of the question will be more thoroughly elaborated, not only with regard to the historical heritage but also with regard to the tasks of the present. And with respect to the PSI, one can only look with sympathy and interest on its search for identity, even if we fear that it could end in a brandishing of Sacred Scriptures which would do little to help the Socialists and the left escape from the impasse in which they find themselves today.
The libertarian and liberal calls being heard in the current debate within the PSI are also a sign that they have grasped a certain spirit of the moment. Up until now, however, these calls have not been generated by concrete struggles promoted by the PSI, but seem to be more of an ideological manifesto proposed to the party by certain Socialist leaders, so that one will have to wait for them to become the daily food of concrete action rather than a doctrine superimposed on a political body.
We all know how far it is from intentions to their implementation and, above all, how difficult it is to translate principles into coherent action. The democratic Socialism of Silone and Saragat (4) in 1974 was also nourished by good intentions, except that they were found in that PSDI [Social Democrats, ed.] which we all know so well, already back in the Fifties. If, therefore, it is in political action that the intentions of the Socialist turning point will be verified, it is also necessary to ask oneself what are the difficulties and the contradictions that at this time can be identified for the PSI to be turned into that great Socialist force that we all hope it will become.
First of all we cannot forget the absence of the "promotion of political struggles", the only ones capable of giving substance to the libertarian and liberal aspirations that validate a Socialist force, unless it considers political culture to be only an expedient "superstructure" for conducting polemics without prejudice to their continuing in agnostic behaviour that leads in the opposite direction: a single efficacious initiative is worth more than many referrals to Carlo Rosselli and Proudhon. The polemics with the Communists, in this regard, would take on a far greater value and weight if, instead of taking as their point of departure the conception of the relationship between party and state, it had its raison d'etre in conflicts on the specific answers to crucial questions of reality.
For the rest, it is the PSI's same "way of being" that makes problematic the possibility of its capacity to "occupy" the so-called Radical position - if, in politics, one can ever occupy anything other than positions of power. The intertwining of the Socialist Party with power structures (and their hidden forms), which is still decisive in its physiognomy,
makes of "this" PSI a force that has lived and is living on the practice of partitioning up (the information media, state-capitalism, local agencies...) and actually theorising about the necessity of such as an obvious consequence of the balance of forces of the governing parties. Is not the PSI the party, after all, that is at the moment made up of some tens of thousands of local administrators, or aspiring ones, throughout the country, whose actions - in collaboration with the DC and the PCI - is anything but inspired by an alternative way of administering public affairs?
A policy which takes up the issue of civil rights not merely as a false front necessarily comes into conflict with the policy tailored for power in which, from many aspects, the cadres of the PSI have been formed under the wing of the institutions and in the atmosphere of inter-party games and the exploitation of ideology. From this standpoint it is improbable that it can have a chance of developing a Socialist Radical policy as long as there persists a network that conditions men and structures emanating from a power that is strictly interconnected to the party. The PSI is still today a party shaped too much by its vital links to the institutions which have occupied it, rather than a radical party in society and the ferment that is produced in that society.
Along with the contradictory collaboration with the DC, the defect of the center-left has been the claim to be able to produce changes by "pressing a button" without mobilising those social protagonists in whose name and for whose sake social reforms must be made. Thus, even today, the claim to connect up with and take over the direction of emerging movements with a Socialist or libertarian potential, clashes with the essentially incongruous behaviour of the PSI towards the movements themselves. A sufficient example would be the contradictory attitude on divorce in Parliament with the search for compromises at any price against the referendum and the declared but merely ritual support for the women's movement. Another sign of this same ambiguity is the general behaviour of the PSI on the question of the two June 11 referendums: on the one hand they officially indicated their opposition to the abrogations, not having the courage to follow a straight line at least on the Reale law (5); and on the other h
and, regarding freedom of conscience, they flirted with the humour of the country by encouraging a vote against the consociation of parties to which they belong.
It is no easy thing surely to invent ways of establishing connections between parties and social movements which by their very nature do not want to accept mediation, but the attempt certainly cannot be made either by using the political personnel of the new left and the movement without assimilating the essence of ten years of extra-parliamentary struggles, nor by making theoretical proclamations. Despite recent important innovations, the political nature and culture of the PSI, like the larger part of its mechanisms, remain those of a party for managing the values of freedom, equality and democracy rather than one organised to cultivate their growth - and it matters little if this occurs from the position of government or from the opposition. Certainly one can exercise quite different functions from positions within the power structure, either passively accepting the status quo or holding a dialectic of innovation with the other parties established there. And there is no doubt that the public begins t
o perceive the PSI as a party distinct and distant from both the DC and the PCI, and in competition with them. But at bottom it is still considered - and quite rightly - a member of the "party club" against which protests are mounting by people who consider them "all" responsible for not resolving the problems of the country.
The Socialists are taking a step forward with the fact of wanting to talk to those outside the party and to want to gather new, valid energy instead of enclosing themselves in an entirely internal debate regarding party problems. And the results of this will become visible in the future in the balance of power with the Communists to whom, up to now, has been left the monopoly of establishing themselves in the country.
If the PSI takes concrete steps in transforming its nature and in actively promoting those battles for civil rights that today they theoretically claim to support, in that case it will be natural for the Socialists and Radicals of the PR to converge with the Radicals and Socialists of the PSI in something new which still has to be thought up and which must be forged in the fire of the struggles in the country.
For the moment it is the task of the Radicals to keep a firm presence as a political pole that has been a subjective factor in the reconstruction of policies charged with "otherness" and a decisive stimulus in the growth of those orientations of public opinion which on the basis of which the transformation of the PSI, a still full potentiality, is also possible. The Radical function has been and is precisely that of having given substance to a wide-spread need for a different kind of politics - and what is no less important, of having raised its banner - capable of inspiring hope and occasionally enthusiasm. Neither the debate on hegemony, nor the polemics on Leninism, are in themselves enough to reconstruct the reality and the image of a libertarian Socialism capable of responding to the ideological tensions and the political dialectics provoked by the levelling out of the parties. There are important signs that an interest in ideological revision is involving not only the PSI, but the PCI as well. The
old ideas are crumbling because they are not able to furnish positive answers to and because they are all perceived - both Communist and Socialist - as being substantially the same even if expressed in different words. That large part of the country that welcomes change continues to a great degree to identify with the PCI, and to a lesser degree with the PSI. The merit of the Radicals for these masses is to have re-introduced in recent years the value of "political clashes" as an essential factor in for saving faith in politics and so increase the civil maturity of the country. The effect of a policy centred on clear alternative and diverse positions has made itself felt today in the PSI and perhaps the PCI as well.
What one must ask the Socialists today, and certainly the Communists too, is to move the conflict from the realm of ideology to that of politics, because only in that way can the left regain true credibility as a movement "different" from the power-holders and so be able to re-kindle hopes in a better future.
<> All in all, what then is the role the new Radicalism plays in the general reshuffling of the cards on all sides of the left and which even is partially modifying the meaning of terms like "left" and "right"? And what are the distinctive characteristics of the political culture and , hence, the politics that bring the Radicals closer or separate them from other leftist factions? In the attempt to analyse the material on which such questions are based one cannot look alone to the past and the present but one must also speculate on possibilities for the future. To us it seems that the answer of the Radicals tends and must tend even more to offer not merely global models, totally or partly defined, of transformations of the social body in its relations with the institutions, but put at the disposition of individuals, in whatever aggregations, the tools and the space in which it will be possible to express their identity and develop the potential that men have in them to intervene actively in the choices tha
t regard their own lives.
Radicalism has never been the prefiguring and the search for an ideal society, but a process to identify, even by way of attempts and errors, the power nodes that must be done away with and of the always new aspects of freedom to be gained. If this is, to say it in a formula, the historical heritage, today the emergence of movements or simply of collective attitudes of liberation, it seems to be connected to a demand on the part of social, situational and ethnic-regional groups to be allowed to develop their own identity and diversity as a counter-tendency to the present process of standardisation, of homogenisation, and of centralisation containing in themselves the germs of authoritarianism.
It is that process already perceived by Pier Paolo Pasolini (6) and on which he lucidly centred his attention in the last years of his life: "Today (...) the adherence to models imposed from the Centre is total and unconditional. The true cultural models have been disowned. They have been completely abjured. Therefore one can affirm that the "tolerance" for the new hedonistic ideology desired by the new powers is the worst of repressions in human history (...) the revolution of the infrastructures and the information system. The roads, the motorisation etc. have by now tightly linked up the periphery with the Centre, abolishing all material distance (...) By means of television the Centre has absorbed into itself the entire country which was historically differentiated and rich in original cultures. It has begun the work of homologation destructive of all authenticity and concreteness. It has imposed, that is to say (...) its models: the models desired by the new industrialisation which no longer is c
ontent with "a man who consumes" but presumes that no ideologies other than consumption are conceivable. A neo-layist hedonism that blindly forgets every humanistic value and is blindly foreign to the human sciences". (Pier Paolo Pasolini, <>, in <>, Milan, Garzanti, 1975, p.32, previously published in <>, December 9, 1973. Therefore Italian Radicalism, and in general the Radicalism of our times in the developed countries - the new Radicalism - although its roots may reach far back to the beginning of the industrial age of bourgeois democracy, today assumes different values and connotations. There one can synthesise with the intent of corresponding more to the demand for liberation of a society blocked and caged by the many bureaucratic structure typical of the complex industrial world, and in the desire to seek - even perhaps to invent - the political tools, without any ideological or doctrinaire prejudices, which can give form to the many impulses towards "liberty", "equality", and "co-existence" that originate directly in the dynamics of society.
Radicalism does not believe in the possibility of controlling all the elements that allow for a global transformation and considers illusory or worse, dangerous and destined to failure all such attempts. On the contrary, it believes in the value of specific projects and delimited battles for freedom as the tools suitable for social liberation and transformation.
For the rest, the recent history of our own country and more generally of Western Europe itself shows not only the justice of such an attitude, but also its efficacy in terms of results obtained and obtainable.
When one speaks of the decline of models, and ever more
insistently of the decline of Socialism as a point of arrival, one is evidently not alluding only to the wearing out of banal finalistic conceptions of political struggles, but also to that of its way of proceeding by way of all-inclusive projects.
The unified programme of the French leftists falls, the historic compromise falls and the very idea of an alternative in Italy becomes fuzzy; the solid Scandinavian social democracies meet difficulties and electoral defeats: all of that is evidently not the result of a political contingency, but also the result of an objective loss of force of all the projects and their relative all-inclusive myths that have for so many years nourished the leftists of the industrialised world.
The very irreducibility of the movements and the demands they make on the parties and their habitual structural forms prove that the passable roads for transformation and liberation by now go, without illusions, via the particular struggles and the acceptance of their co-existence and multiplicity.
For this reason the ideal heritage and the practice of a Radicalism that looks to the future today constitute a political culture consonant with this situation of mass industrialised society and allow them to become candidates for supplying the necessary political answers that express the ideas of the various kinds of political Socialist and libertarian struggle in Europe.
Once again, as in the past, Radicalism and Socialism intertwine to fertilise reciprocally traditions, cultures and working hypotheses within the ambit of a lay vision of society and history which has been characteristic of many political and politico-cultural experiences of the great galaxy of non-Leninist Western Socialism.
<> As in the past, so for the future one cannot ignore that, for their different conceptions of politics, there is a "conflict between Radicalism and Marxist Communism". To be aware of this, however, does not mean to count on insoluble clashes and conflicts, but to have the tools for identifying the possible forms of agreement and collaboration among forces that take their inspiration from the two traditions. In fact, if there is a common core to the different forms of Marxism, it is the idea of totality ("The Marxist method is one of a generalised genetic structuralism supported by the idea of <>" Lucien Goldman, <>, in Braudel, <>, Bari, Laterza, 1974, p.251) of social dialectics in order to act on them for the purpose of delineating the characteristics of the social system to be constructed. It is a conception of the transformation of society and of history that aspires to an entirely planned future. And it is not only the real Socialism of the Eastern [European, ed.] countries to have furnished the proof of the impossibility of entirely planning more just and equal societies, but it is demonstrated as well by all the situations in which parties and movements which are Communist or at least based on "scientific Socialism". That great realist Giorgio Amendola (7) noticed this too when he affirmed in 1964, in an interview as famous as it was set aside, that in Europe "neither of the two solutions foreseen in the last fifty years, the Social Democratic or the Communist ones, has until now shown itself to be valid for the bringing about the Socialist transformation of society" (Giorgio Amendola, in <>, November 28, 1964). At this time of disorientation and crisis, one must keep in mind one historical and current fact. The lay vision and the Radical vision of society on the one hand, and the Marxist vision of global transformation on the other, inevitably lead to conflict whose roots are more cultural than strategic. For this reason we have frequently affirmed that the clash between Radicals and Communists in Italy is a deep one and cannot be reduced to contingent factors. It is nevertheless a reality that the Communists in Italy as in France represent and shape decisive forces for social transformation. For this reason it is necessary for those who, like us, aspire to setting processes for change into motion that not only regard minorities but aim at the political direction of the country, at the construction of concrete, politically significant actions with factors for collaboration among differing groups, and for the confrontation of specific solutions inspired by differing heritages. This - without doubt - is the gre
at problem of the countries of the Mediterranean basin and of Italy in particular where the large mass of workers has historically been organised by Communist movements.
The difference that arises from the theories and the ideological heritages of Marxism-Communism and Socialism-Radicalism are, however, insufficient premises for identifying political hypotheses and formations or appropriate agreements or divergences in struggles. They do not automatically generate clear lines of division among the solutions needed for the problems we face, and, with them the lines of theoretical and ideological demarcation are not exhausted which persist within the forces for change on the left.
There is another split in the Socialist camp which is not rooted in the Sacred Scriptures or in the calls to them - appropriate or exploiting - which at this time are being made, but rather is based on the ideological and practical attitudes that the various factions are taking to the crucial problems of the moment: "progress and the quality of life, development, the relationship with nature and the nuclear question".
To a great degree the Socialist forces in Europe - from positions in the government or in the opposition - have based their policies in the last few decades as well as today on modernising the administration of the present order and on the intervention of the state to re-distribute resources. The beneficiaries of this are those ranks and those classes of workers who constitute the grass roots of their political and electoral forces in interest groups, which, precisely through the party and union organisations of the workers' movement actively intervene in the great negotiations of the national political scene.
It is the story of Social Democracy, Labour parties and all the other forces in Europe which, even while holding a non-Leninist and non-centralist view of the state, and even while formally respecting the freedoms and civil rights of pluralism, have built their fortunes under the wing of the regulatory function of the public sector and the fundamental adherence to a postulate which has never been openly discussed: indefinite progress as a value in itself, from which descend the corollaries of development and affluence.
In Italy too the political and cultural events of the Sixties which were realised in the center-left alliance were based on these premises and tended - if it had not been frustrated from the start by the Christian Democratic power system - to accredit and realise the possibility of social transformation under the aegis of the "technocratic optimism of progress".
Today the adherence of the PSI's kind of Italian Socialism to the values of the so-called "European" line can mean the return with greater force and vigour to precisely that line which translates the theoretical premises of autonomy and the calls for liberty into a policy of modern administration. As the fundamental elements of this line, which apparently do not contradict the aspirations to the expansion of freedom and democracy in the pursuit of higher levels of social justice, there are the same postulates as before: progress, affluence, rationalisation.
But the terms of the Socialist equation are changing. It is no longer a matter of strengthening state intervention: even where the latter has obtained its best results in terms of social justice and democracy it has been perceived as a great structure whose further growth would increase the perils for liberty and developing independence through its character as a great central apparatus. The day of the affluent state is over.
The idea of progress as indefinite industrial growth is already in discussion as a positive value for the very survival of mankind. It is no longer a question of choosing between the public and the private sector in the management of the economic and social complexities of developed societies, but of "choosing between more development and more democracy". To the myth of affluence in the post-war era we must oppose the search for a different quality of life in which it may be necessary to sacrifice the increase in individual material resources above a certain critical threshold beyond which we would obtain effects contrary to those we have sought with the freedom from need.
Connected to the question of affluence and democracy is the one of "nuclear energy", the new tool for aiding development and thus permitting a presumed improvement of living conditions. The debate on alternative energy is open and we don't have the intention or the possibility of taking it up here except for saying, as a schematic point of reference, that democratic and Socialist hypotheses cannot be obtained with the formula <> (just as the Communist one was <>), because the set-up that the first term involves (centralisation, the militarisation of society, more controls) contradicts the needs of the second term. It is no accident that precisely with regard to these postulates, considered fixed or at least neutral, that new movements arose in the Socialist and democratic culture and practice, impelled by the force of mass thrusts. And it is also no accident that the new humanistic and libertarian movements which, even if in a confused way, are sometimes being represented by the new social subjects we have discussed earlier, come into unresolvable conflict with those of an apparently rational kind founded on the work ethic, productivity and power.
Within the Socialist nebula we must come to grips - uniting or separating from each other - with different options that are conflicting and alternative: those of a libertarian Radicalism and Socialism that take on the burden of the new values on which to base concrete political action consequent with that which is the real "choice of civilisation" today; and the other which is a kind of Socialism, perhaps formally democratic and autonomistic, which continues to ignore the great contradictions of the moment: the life or death, development or the quantity of life, the logic of industrialisation or that of the relationship to nature, the iron-clad logic of the great apparatuses (state, military, social assistance...) that seem to be necessary for steering the modern world, or else the search for a dimension of social, civil and economic organisation on a different scale of priorities on which, to give only three examples that directly regard the Italian situation of every day, the defense of civil rights,
the access to information and the defense of the environment have central importance.
It is that alternative which Ivan Illich has clearly identified in his research on "co-existence", a term which - along with "liberty" and "equality" - now has taken over the position of "fraternity" in the triad of values that are the basis of the modern democratic revolution. André Gorz, a Marxist who has understood and clarified the great dilemma of the moment presents as follows the alternative which faces us in <> (Le Seuil, 1978, p.23): "...Either we gather together to impose on institutional production and on techniques limits which manage natural resources, preserve balances favourable to life, favour the complete realisation and sovereignty of communities and individuals: <>; or else the necessary limits for the preservation of life will be calculated and centrally planned by ecology engineers and the planned production for an environment of optimal life will be entrusted to the present centralised institutions and techniques. <is is the techno-Fascist option>> along which we have already marched half way: <>".-----------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSLATOR'S NOTES
(1) June 20, 1976 - The first election in which the PR won seats in Parliament.
(2) Historic compromise - The policy of the Communist Party to collaborate with the Christian Democratic government.
(3) The palazzo - A much-used journalistic term to indicate the power-holders in a negative sense as being extraneous and insensitive to the will and needs of the people.
(4) Silone and Saragat - Ignazio Silone (1900-1978), the famous writer, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party which he later abjured; Giuseppe Saragat (1898-1988), a Socialist leader exiled under Fascism. President of the Italian Republic (1964-71).
(5) Reale law - A public order law limiting civil rights with the excuse of fighting terrorism.
(6) Pier Paolo Pasolini - (1922-1975) The prominent writer, poet and film maker.
(7) Giorgio Amendola - (1907-1980) A PCI leader during the Resistance and in the post World War II era.
