ABSTRACT: An essay on the nature and historical roots of the new Radicalism and a debate on the Radical problem with contributions from: Contributions by Gianni Baget-Bozzo, Giorgio Galli; Francesco Ciafaloni; Domenico Tarizzo; Ernesto Galli della Loggia; Brice Lalonde; Ugoberto Alfassio Grimaldi; Giuseppe Are; Alberto Asor Rosa; Silverio Corvisieri; Ruggero Orfei; Sergio Cotta; Federico Stame; Paolo Ungari; Giuliano Amato; Fabio Mussi; Giulio Savelli

(SAVELLI Publishers, October 1978)

Introduction (1375)

PART ONE

I. Politics and Society

II. The Accusations Against the Radicals (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 Problem (1381 - 1397)

Radical Society And Radical Politics

Radicalism is a new phenomenon in Italian politics: perhaps the new phenomenon par excellence. It is strange that this should be so little known. And yet in Italy we have made a specialty of "different" journalism, of "politicology", the study of politics, that manages to analyse the smallest details of every mysterious object, whether it regards the PCI [Communist Party, ed.], the DC [Christian Democrats, ed.], and now Confindustria [the industrialists confederation, ed.] and the unions who have become honoured protagonists of the present political course. The greater analysability of the kind of politics that, on the cultural level, rotates around the PCI, is due to the fact that Marxism, even in its definitive fragmentation, is a culture that has been entirely explored, that offers no new surprises, and has become a mass news phenomenon; it can, that is, be considered a cultural fact and, thus, the stuff of common operations and interpretations.

European cultural production no longer identifies with Marxism; its last operation - the new Marxism of the university chair (and of publishing) in the Sixties and early Seventies - is an operation concluded. After the humanistic neo-Marxism of Garaudy and the structural neo-Marxism of Althusser (1), after recuperating all the dissident Leninist lines, everything now seems to have been said. And cultural production no longer seems to solicit any form of creativity that is identified with the serene line of Marxist language.

As a cultural fact, Radicalism presupposes the extinction of Marxism as a language capable of further renewal, the attitude of that language as an exhausted container for new thoughts.

But what alternative does Radicalism now present, what type of culture does it presuppose? Radicalism presupposes the recuperation not, I will say, of the subject (the dialectics of consciousness as all the elements of the Hegelian tradition can already directly or indirectly be contained in Marxist language: Sartre is the most obvious example), but of the individual.

The name of Radical leads us to the individualistic fervour of English rationalism that was capable of putting into operation a precise political proposal, joining together the fight for economic liberalism and of universal suffrage. But how different is the "individual" of the Seventies in the 20th Century from that of the Thirties in the 19th Century! The individual of the last century was the agent of a civilisation of the Enlightenment, and even more the expression of an ordered cosmos. The choices of individual judgement, left to their ingenuousness, realise a universal order and manifest reason which until then had been hide-bound by opinion.

The individual of the Seventies is an "atom" in the sense that he is the final residue of all possible divisions. All sacred political orders have been consumed in the "blood of Europe" with the end of Zarism and the central empires. But the world has not been saved for democracy: the great bourgeois-colonial order of the 19th Century has won in the 20th Century only to end by not surviving its own victory. What Hegel saved of the Prussian state has become the sacred atheistic reason of the Soviet system, while the United States oscillates between the inability to stop being a European province to become an empire and the need to offer a point of order and reference to the non-Soviet world. While technological progress is making evident its limits, and science ceases to look like a treasure chest from which one will pull out "magnificent and progressive destinies", what prospects are offered to reason for putting together in a rational perspective the scrambled mosaic which is the condition of man in ou

r times?

In this impotence of historical rationality that has followed upon the defeat of the metaphysical mind, one must recognise that the Radicals have discovered "the thing that is left over": the individual. An individual who has no personal prospects of universal solutions, but who wants the guarantee of possessing his special and irreducible reality: the reality of his body.

At this point it is important to distinguish between Radicalism as a collective sentiment and Radicalism as a political force. Between these two there is a great split which is that between a reality and its interpretation. Radicalism as a collective sentiment is the will to affirm the individual in the double collapse of communal values and the social fabric. The most barbarous aspect of this rediscovery of the individual is the tendency of the individual to make his own justice. To group violence, which justifies itself with the excuse of revolution, it opposes an individual answer which has no affirmation but self-affirmation in the form of self-determination. And for the rest, a certain form of elementary violence that is in the air, also leads to this double stock-taking, of the eclipse of values and the crumbling of society. On a higher level, the emergence of private social groups (from industry to unions) and their tendency to become autonomous and to control parties, organs of political value a

nd institutions that are guarantees for the collectivity, represent the same impulse.

That the left should be ill at ease in the face of these phenomena, even when it discovers them within its own structures, is easily explained. These phenomena, even when they are politically included in the sphere of the left, do not enter into that perspective of the primacy of the general over the individual which is the basis of the line that dominates the left: Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx. I do not believe it has been pointed out that the right has given birth to the theme of the metropolitan Indians: the saga of Black Elk was introduced in Italy by Rusconi and presented culturally by Elèmire Zolla.

Political Radicalism is not this fact: it is its interpretation. If we properly understand the intentions of political Radicalism, they are directed towards the attempt to civilise the latent Radicalism in society, and to socialise in some way the emerging individualism. Thus political Radicalism takes the form of mediation that adapts itself to the most diverse realities: the needs of the prison guard and that of the prisoner can well find a place in it. It is significant that the protection of the merchant has also been taken up. Feminism and the liberty of homosexuals are not meaningful for the Radical Party's mediation in their contents, but it is meaningful that they have been taken up because they are qualifying phenomena for what we have called Radical society. What is the material with which Radicalism, and Marco Pannella in particular, has constructed Radical mediation? It is significant that non-violent action has been its instrument. This indicates a remarkable intuition: the de facto violent

character that individualism has as affirming the possession of one's own body. Radical society contains a violent element, and in order to mediate that element Radical politics must provide for physical action, but of a non-violent kind: the hunger strike, the meaningful manifesto, the inspired gesture. Undoubtedly Pannella's political creativity lies in this: that he has managed himself as the image and representation of an outlet for violence in word and gesture - that is, in the symbol, the primary tool for the socialisation of tensions.

The Radical Party, therefore, is no party but a political form of a society that is by now different from the one that expressed its political form in ideological parties (those of which the Leninist Party represents the apex). Its capabilities are founded on the culture of the image which allows for the efficacy of the word and gesture in resolving things. The decay of the party-association with its bureaucratic structure is due to the new impact of the audio-visual culture

which offers opportunities to gesture and representation.

The Radical Party's present way of making politics not only represents the understanding of a new type of society and its problems, but also the intention to use new techniques of political guidance.

The Radical's political problem lies in giving the word not only to the most visible and protesting sectors of society but also to the needs of those who were the masses and within the very sphere of the labour unions. In a certain sense the type of claims that the PR has defended up until now is also a limiting factor in its expansion.

This poses the problem of its relationships with the parties. I shall say something which sounds paradoxical, but the natural ally of the PR is the DC. In one sense it is the type of political leadership that the DC has given the country that has made possible the formation of Radical society and the PR itself. In another sense any other type of management closer to the model of the ideological party would make it harder for the Radicals to mediate. The violent tensions would be combated in another way: the need and the possibility of RAdical mediation would be reduced. There is an effective solidarity between the PR and the DC, a solidarity manifested in the fact that both of them have the <> (2) as their chief adversary. In other words, the agreement between the DC and the PR is shown in the adversity of the DC leaders to the historic compromise and in relationship to it.

This effective solidarity is more than a mere possibility. The subtle tactical-strategic convergence, despite all general declared differences in the goals of the DC and the PR, is already a fact of Italian politics. The relationship between the PR and the PCI is the proof of it.

To the good functioning of a non-written alliance, covered, on the contrary, by a declaration of war, there corresponds the failure of all the PR's attempts to form alliances, in particular with the Republicans and the Socialists. In spite of everything, the DC is the least party-like of all the Italian parties. It is a party that models itself on civil society, a party of mediation like the PR. That is, since the DC does not collaborate with the PCI beyond a certain point, it not only secures the political possibilities of a party like the PR but also is politically homogeneous with it to a degree.

From what has been said, it follows that one cannot call the PR a leftist party, according to us, in the traditional sense of this word, and we do not think that its influence extends in the direction of sectors usually qualified as right wing, at least in their mentality even more than in their social position. And it seems to us that the PR is moving in this direction too, even if not without some foreseeable crisis perhaps.

It has been asked if the PR is a religious or a lay force. The difficulty is in defining what is meant by "religious" and "lay".

The PR's fighting techniques come from the non-violent tradition which has a religious matrix, but not a Christian one (Gandhi). This seems significant: It appears to us that the PR cannot consider itself an heir of ideological laicism (which, in being a party ends by falling under the hegemony of the Leninist model) if it seeks forms of action that appeal not only to reason but also and amply to religious feeling. Beyond this I would hesitate to go. This article is already rather proleptic (that is, it presumes to anticipate: proleptic is a word in current theological jargon and I cannot renounce using it), because it may push far ahead in the reading of words which have not yet been written.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

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

(1) Althusser - Louis Althusser (1918), a French philosopher and interpreter of Marxism.

(2) Historic compromise - The Communist polict of collaborating with the Christian Democrats.