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)

A Party Of Daily Life

By Domenico Tarizzo

(<>, no. 2, June-July 1977)

A request from AR [<>, a Radical Party news letter, ed.] for an interview on the "Radical question" induces me to think about the political picture of the new left and the left in general at this delicate moment.

In an acute and tendentious interpretation of the Radical phenomenon published in these same columns, Baget Bozzo wrote that "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 for the individual to make his own justice".

Personally I have the feeling that the change of code which has recently intervened - from the aphasia of the language of the revolver - is the filling of an old vacuum. One could discuss it at length, but if it is true that every transgression and transformation of a code must be seen within a socially determined context, present analyses cannot leave out the origins of the crisis and the way the new and the old left experience it.

Between 1975 and 1977 (without digging up - as one really ought to here - the Salerno "turning point" and the congresses of the International) official Marxism began to reshuffle all its cards and showed, under the avalanche of embarrassing questions, its will to renounce a large part of its doctrinal heritage. On the other hand, the young leftists confirm, in Italy at least their sectarian sterility. The extra-parliamentarians, the neo-councillors, the neo-anarchists, neo-Marxists, neo-Maoists, not to mention the residual Stalinists and Marxist-Leninists, present themselves in divided and in reality discouraged in the face of the greatest opportunity so far presented in post-war history to those contesting the PCI "from the left". The adherence of the Communists, by now almost with out any reserves, to the Christian Democrats' kind of equilibrium is evident even to the most uninformed masses by now. At the same time, the conviction is gaining ground in the Socialist Party and the PCI that "if we want t

o move from liberal pluralism to Socialist pluralism, it is imperative to maintain the principle of economic pluralism. (...) The market must be preserved, not only for precise technical-economic reasons (efficiency, productivity, etc.) but also to guarantee cultural and political pluralism" Bettino Craxi (1); from a letter to <> (2), February 13, 1977). While the PCI renounces the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat and even of its hegemony under the pressure of the ironic Prof. Bobbio (3) there erupts on the surface after years of incubation an aphasic and de-stabilising rebellion generated by the crisis and allied, more or less unconsciously by its planners, with the state of siege. There is not room for everyone in the class A society - that which has a job and which reasons - and the class B society seems to have disturbing regressive tendencies as well as extremist ones.

If that is the way things are, the left must "at once" find a new methodology that weaves tactics and strategies to bring a Socialist, libertarian, and lay presence to that which Freud called "the future of an illusion". Two hundred years (at least) of struggle, of hopes, of Utopian tensions and realisations of alternatives have been reduced to a bookish heritage, an avant-garde fetish. Having moved itself to the underdeveloped countries, "the weak links in the system", to the most isolated classes, "the weak links in society", the Revolution risks finding itself in medieval bigotry and para-religious intolerance (laws of various types restoring Stalinism) and of not setting out on the road of liberation.

Entire generations, in choosing the Socialism of the <>, were compelled, willy nilly, to invest in an ever more uncertain and distant future: we will not live to see the revolution, they said, but our children will. Today it is this permanently locked-up investment that people begin to reject when they take up again Fourier's invitation to "enjoy oneself now". The emptiness of a word that did not designate all needs thus is filled on the one hand with suicidal pistol shots, and on the other hand with demands for more life, more eros, more civil rights. But a few dry figures on the crisis have routed the old and the new left in its intentions for an existential alternative: the votes for renewal of '74 and '75 are confirmed in the '76 vote that sees the consolidation of the Christian Democrats. The <>, the hybrid alliances that those in power always put together in times of emergency, leaves room for the incoherent vengeance of the isolated outsiders produced by the violence, the bru

tality and the hatred of this our way of producing and of our society. To the sacred union of the threatened democracy (class A society), class B opposes sacred youthful egoism, the rejection of sacrifices.

Because of its double nature as the party of the emerging middle classes and of the outsiders, the Radical Party also finds itself involved in the logic of sacred egoism already identified by Baget Bozzo ("an individual answer (...) has no affirmation but self-affirmation in the form of self-determination (...) 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".

Baget Bozzo also enumerates, as qualifiers for Radical society, the merchants' needs of security, feminism and homosexual freedom. We have reached that mixture of needs that the orthodox left calls inter-classist, and which, in reality are present in all Italian society of the seventies as a result of the unbalanced boom, the civil growth, the maneuvered crises. Facily defined as the "new party of the bourgeoisie " by the orthodox left, the Radical Party confirms itself by this double role: as an expression of the movement (without excluding suggestions of '68 of a "creative" type) and the tradition of non-violent civil disobedience (whose roots are not in Italy but in countries of advanced capitalism with mature societies and strong pressure groups: and in saying this I do not mean to diminish the influence of such "diverse gallant gentlemen" as Salvemini and Ernesto Rossi, always strangers in their own land, even though in their own way not to be disassociated from typically Italian situations).

The doctrine and practise of the 19th Century nourish anguishing dreams, a real and true waste of time (see the backward big-baby pranks of the sophisticated sado-pop avant-garde) when atomic extermination, ecological death and terrifying demographic growth are already a concrete reality. Lacking authentic love of their neighbours, the political avant-garde rapidly decline to a leadership (the avant-gardes of the homosexuals, the feminists, the outsiders, the young etc.) that reaffirms the morality of the herd and the conformists.

The workers' movement also teaches us that the class struggle also is threatened with such sterility (populism as the culture of equal-equality is what resembles the Fascism of the left and National Socialism; not by accident in Argentina, a country which some see as a model of "explosive contradictions", populism, under the guise of Peronist justice is much stronger and deeper-rooted than Marxism). But as Giobetti discovered in his fight "for the revolution", the workers' movement has in reality liberated society and made it more civil. Is a revolutionary reform movement possible today? At bottom this is the dilemma that we are facing: any corporal issue which does not want to be reduced to individual escapism must confront society. In a degraded socio-economic context mystic consolations flourish, turn back to a sphere that smells of contentment and the ghetto. In the absence of a broader reply from the parties of the historic left to emerging needs, a double danger thus takes shape. The protest

gives up the word (which it considers integration in the dominant logical system) and chooses the gesture. Demonstrations in the streets is by now kids' stuff or the adventure of deviants who see themselves as heroic and separate. At the same time the gap grows between the summit and the grass roots, between "logos" and gesture. The word dies but it is not replaced by eros. What Camus saw as a relic of theology in totalitarian societies is confirmed: on the bottom that religious sentiment of commitment and obedience that flowered mainly in pre-revolutionary Russia; and at the top political realism.

I also remember the feeling I had on a hot May night in the Piazza del Duomo in Milan. It was the Radical assembly to close the '76 election campaign. For the first time in many years I was present at a gathering of men and women, the young and the old, without heroic and demented slogans.

The sensation was pleasant and quite new. There was no adult chief up there on the podium giving a line to leaderless youths. The relationship seemed more equal.

Through the merits of Marco Pannella and Adele Faccio the corporate body in Italy had received a libertarian statute. This seems to me one of the greatest merits of that Radical presence. After the timid hints of '68, in that '76 assembly the issues of corporeal happiness were taken up by a larger assembly followed by a participating and approving crowd. If I remember correctly it was Adele Faccio who first spoke from the podium in Piazza del Duomo of sexual pleasure as a claim of feminism. After that electoral campaign, the groups of Marxist origin, victims too of their arid doctrines, were kept off and outraged by daily life. And the tutelage of the coup-makers prospers and weighs on all society when a true opposition is lacking. The presence of the historic compromise hits close to the Radical proposals as well. Imagined to be a moment of civil reflection, "different", in an ebb phase of the post-'68 movement; after the relative affirmation of '76, it saw its own margins of legibility shrink rapidly

. Baget Bozzo expounded the idea of its survival in an impure, symbiotic and necessary relationship with the Christian Democrats. On this he basis his conclusion: the PR must "keep" to the DC because "the type of political leadership the DC has given to the country has made possible the formation of both Radical society and the PR" whose mediation would be more difficult with an "ideological party".

Here, as always, words are ambivalent. A certain expansion of the Radicals was made possible by the backward state of legislation and practice in which the DC, as the post-Fascist power, kept the country which was in reality more advanced in part than those governing it. But for Baget Bozzo "Radical society means above all the emergence of the individual, of the barbarous, the violent. The Radicals, in my opinion are instead making a wager on the libertarian and lay values holding out in this mass society, degraded and led as it is by heterogeneous groups. The historic compromise allows the Radicals a certain margin for maneuvering as long as its ideas and intermediate goals are not achieved. But the historic compromise is revealing itself to be without premises of productive and cultural renewal, but a system of balances with the risk of ruining any alternative system of needs.

To ward off any definitive split in society, what is needed today is a compromise between the employed and the unemployed, between the movement and the actual country, between the avant-garde and the masses. The mediation of the Radicals - in this

Baget Bozzo is right again - has at bottom been satisfied with very little ("the type of demands that the PR has defended up to now has been a limitation and a brake on its expansion"). It doesn't seem possible however to share his other affirmation. "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." Both parties of "mediation", according to Baget Bozzo's formulation, the DC and the PR, differentiate themselves in the country which chooses between them.

On the one hand there is power, ignorance, Catholic virginity; on the other hand there is the lay practice of civil rights and the public body. Furthermore Baget Bozzo foresees a static situation. But the DC which does not collaborate with the PCI beyond a certain level is in reality disposed to Chilean solutions - that is, to a dynamic that would destroy tolerance and development, the socio-economic framework (but also the psycho-political one) in which, except for adventuristic temptations, only a slender libertarian proposal can become more robust and expand.

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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) Bettino Craxi - Secretary of the Socialist Party.

2) L'Espresso - A popular weekly review.

3) Bobbio - Norberto Bobbio (1909), a well-known jurist and philosopher.