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)

<> And The Radicals

By Ernesto Galli della Loggia

(<>, no. 3/4, August-November 1977

1. An Italian of "the left" (inescapable vagueness of the word) who would have the right, as does someone of 35-40 years old, of drawing up a balance of what he has gone through in the history of his country during the fifteen years of his adult life.

Balance sheets, I agree, should be based on facts alone, but in certain circumstances feelings too, taken in themselves, become facts; without considering that feelings, in any case, allude to facts. To have considered them secondary or of little importance has, more than once, proved to be a serious mistake.

Well then, the general feeling of the last fifteen years is that of a "long march" of a particular kind which doesn't resemble the one of Mao nor the one, which was once fantasised, through the institutions. Ours recalls ever more a long march towards the <>, towards the <> as in a famous science fiction story (entitled <> if I am not mistaken) where humanity, having by then reached the border of the knowable universe beyond which "one cannot go", spends its time organising long trips to the extreme edge of existence and stops there to throw at Nothingness vain glances which returns to them, as in a mirror, the image of what is at the travellers backs, what they already know, and that from then on will be their unchangeable backdrop.

Many Italians have this impression. And yet we know that "much progress has been made" (don't the election results show it?), that today we are better off than 15 years ago (even if at the price, probably, of having laid the foundations for future crises); and it is also true that in many ways we are freer today (despite the fact that all it takes is the signature of a good prefect to suspend the constitutional rights of three million citizens: now, however, unlike before, he must have the permission of the <> parties). (1)

The fact is that this "progress" and this "improvement" has not been accompanied by any noticeable image of social compensation, of damages paid to one of the parties, of the restoration of equality (on the contrary, new inequalities have been created: see the tax jungle). The "improvement" has regarded "all" society and so is felt to be, at bottom, something "natural". It has happened, in short, that not only has the left not managed to put its own mark on this improvement, but that, power having also been given to it, it is not felt to be a "conquest" but rather an obvious result of the times and the way things are, which, in a certain sense it is.

The strategies adopted by the left have had a decisive part in creating this feeling: the avoiding all clashes as long as possible (and even longer than possible), mediating, negotiating, aggregating. It is not important here to discuss the alternatives; the fact is that in the course of an "improvement" obtained in this way, it has become inevitable that all differences in ideals, all moral tensions, all feelings of challenge and struggle should, little by little, have been attenuated to the point of extinction. One can consider oneself to have been victorious, in fact, only if one feels that one has fought; but for people to feel that they have fought, their must be "symbol" of struggle, that are created and spread: if one likes, a "mythology" of struggle. In a democratic regime, these symbols are the strong attacks on the press, the aggressive demonstrations, the great and bitter parliamentary debates, the mobilising assemblies, a language which doesn't mince words, and certainly not the extenuating

negotiations around a conference table or a compromise situation reached after three weeks of discussions (and of implacable mass media that nightly report that the discussions continue and that nothing has been decided). And to give another example, the electoral conquest of a region can have a strong symbolic character, but to entrust the presidency of that region to the party against which one has fought has a disastrously negative symbolic value.

Political struggle - above all in our times - has always been full of symbols, especially on the left: from the red flag to the hammer and sickle, to the appellation <>. Ingenuous symbols, I agree, but side by side with them has always been a less ingenuous one because it was the concrete prefiguration of a different type of man and so of a different society. I mean an anthropological difference.

The strategy of <> peculiar to the PCI (which in Italy today is the left considering that the PSI was formerly in hiding and today agitates itself uselessly) has become the daily bread of politics and translates itself into the search for unanimity which is exhaustingly interlocutory, more attentive to formulas than to facts. This strategy has had (or is having) the fatal effect of cancelling this anthropological difference in people's eyes.

This is not a superficial observation of the usual man-in the-street. In an imperceptible but always more concrete way, in fact, the left, the PCI, by gaining access to the Palazzo (2), tends always more to adapt its own language (an elliptical, respectful, vague language), its behaviour, its way of conceiving and practising politics, even its very facial expressions to those which have been inside the Palazzo for years. This ends by legitimating again - and it almost seems to stand out silhouetted against an immutably eternal future - everything that the average Italian leftist has learned in decades to loathe with a loathing that is not instinctual or habitual, but which, on the contrary, has its origins in the political judgement of an entire class of government and its way of governing and thus also on its "stars", its ceremonies and its rites: the "wise old owl" Andreotti, (3) the "deep, dark" Moro, (3) the bright-eyed, admonishing face of his twin "thoroughbred horse", the unfailing shift of the

hon. Donat Cattin (3) from right to left (or vice versa), the evasive and reassuring little sermons. All of that is now being served up again and we are asked to believe all of it. Like fifteen years ago, articles in <> [a well known weekly review, ed.] begin: "Wednesday night Piccoli telephoned, embarrassed, to Zaccagnini" and all that follows.

2. In the conceptual baggage and vocabulary of the left there is a word to indicate the sensation that I have tried to describe, and it is a word that one only need pronounce in order to evoke instantly the mark of infamy: "qualunquismo"! This is usually followed by the phrase <> as the execution follows the hangman. I believe, however, that one should not allow oneself to be afraid of words and that one can and should without shame that the Radical Party represents (or tends to represent, or potentially represents, it matters little) the "qualunquista" protest in the country. But of course, at this point, the question is to discover what "qualunquismo" really is.

Let us leave aside that flash fire represented by Giannini whose most singular cause was rooted in that moment of history experienced in the immediate post-war era by the Italian society. In general I would say that <> is a phenomenon almost exclusive to democratic-representative regimes, especially of the "advanced" kind. These regimes are characterised by three elements: first, the tensions among social groups for the division of riches are not "political" clashes but are variously mediated (by the unions, the state) in such a way as to eliminate the excessive spread of intolerable conditions of life with the help, among other things, of large public spending; second, just for this reason politics is ever more reduced to negotiating, to coming to terms, with the result that on the one hand ideological differences disappeared and, on the other, the concentration of enormous power for social decisions in the hands of the governing class that does the negotiating; and finally, there are in

these regimes an anthropological homogeneousness spread among the various sectors of the population, which by now are only differentiated by their incomes, which makes a real ideological difference still more improbable.

It is in this situation that "qualunquismo" grows always more or less massively. This is expressed in various ways: as a habitual desertion of the elections, as meagre "class consciousness" (but not lack of union consciousness, I think), and as a general indifference to "politics". "Qualunquismo", in short, is a symptom of the fact that democratic-representative mechanisms with all of their offshoots are becoming constantly less interesting to the hearts and heads of the people. The people have the feeling that the state-political regime has a will of its own and acts above the heads of the citizens, is essentially extraneous to the people's needs.

Thus "qualunquismo" takes note of the character of the system which it confronts and it answers: if the system no longer involves any ideological political conflict, well then, it will be against "politics" and ideologies; if the system renews itself by co-opting, then it will be against the political class and for its radical removal;if the system is felt as something extraneous to the people, "qualunquismo" will proclaim its extraneousness to the system.

Now one can say what one likes to all of that, but it is difficult to deny that, things being as they are described above, "qualunquismo" is a perfectly adequate reaction to the effective reality, or at least to a part of it, which, however, in a mass democratic-representative regime is fundamental. It unmasks the formal veils of the pretended "Grosspolitik" of power and shows it with the small miseries and the great damages to the authentic spirit of the institutions.

Due to the soil from which it grows and the feelings it expresses, "qualunquismo" is naturally destined in the end, more often than not, to encounter and become mixed up with populism. That populism of which North American history provides such great examples, and which in this case means positions opposing power and those who administer it on the part of an undifferentiated entity whose connotations are to be "outside" of power itself, to not participate in it and, on the contrary, to feel betrayed by it. It means the idea that the people must regain the power which belongs to it alone and exercise it for the sole benefit of the community. It is altogether to be explained, in the end, that due to the general characteristics of the society in question, this kind of opposition to "power" should be experienced and nourished as opposition to the state and should lead to an anti-state libertarianism.

3. I really do not want to negate the presence of other elements in the Radical Party's ideology, but it seems to me that today its essential trait is the "qualunquismo"-populist one. Essential because it is the one that is most prominent to the outside world in what the party says and does, and - what is particularly important - in the anthropological-behavioural image it gives of itself. The manner of dress, neither formal nor extravagant, the raw simplicity of language so different from the esoteric abstractions of the new left, the authenticity of the faces, the passion - a little showy but real - are all proofs of it.

Those who seem to be most aware (and thus most frightened) of the Radicals' call to "qualunquismo" are the Communists. Like Togliatti (4) thirty years ago with Giannini, they understand the true contents of the discomfort and protest to which the Radical Party lends its voice, as well as its potential for expanding not only on the left but along lines that can go from there to the right, even the far right. All the more so because the PCI knows perfectly well that the predictable development of the historic compromise (5) will only strengthen the causes that have so far impelled public opinion to support Radical actions. THe PR, in fact, is the only political force - democratic and with the potential for a vast following - that by remaining outside the great coalition of 92% is capable of aiming for the role of the opposition in a more or less distant future - a role, it goes without saying, that the PCI has been used to having practically as a total monopoly and from which, having drawn great advanta

ges from it, it would like to continue playing... even while participating in the government.

In this way one can explain the extreme severity of the language - which furthermore they have got back in kind, but in a different way - that the Communists use towards the PR. The terms they use (rogues and roguishness are not infrequent) and the vulgarity of the arguments can in the case of the section cadres reach the point of calling Pannella a homosexual (worse "queer"), which apparently was considered the height of infamy by those who used the term.

The violence of these polemics is, in reality, the most obvious and suitable form for the line which the PCI evidently has decided to take towards the Radicals: that is, to present them as a force of an ambiguous character, not of the "left" and, most of the time anti-democratic and provocatory.

Personally I do not believe that the PR, continuing to be that which it is today, can be successful in this attempt. in fact, it does not take into account a prime element, which is that the kind of Populist "qualunquismo" the Radicals represent is what it is only because of the populist anti-ideology of its presuppositions and its practices, but both the one and the other move on a terrain of the most unalloyed democracy - not only because of the long and "fierce" fidelity the Radicals have always shown to the institutions and the Constitution, but above all because the battles they have undertaken have been directed by the most orthodox liberal Socialism.

For the rest, the fact that it is impossible to consign the Radicals to a limbo of anti-democrats and non-leftists is something the Communists ought easily to realise by remembering the issues and the type of opposition that they themselves practised for many years, even during the darkest Stalinist times. Those issues and that opposition also bore in large part the mark of liberal Socialism within a wrapping of populist "qualunquismo": probably because, let me add, in a democratic regime this is the only kind of mass opposition conceivable.

But just because the opposition of the PCI was always democratic, in defense of the Constitution, inter-classist and free of all working class orthodoxies, it established a tradition for the left. It is now immensely difficult to cancel that tradition and deprive those who carry its banner of the name of "leftists". And just how difficult that is was shown by the attempt, only sporadic for now, of having recourse to other weapons, for example of bringing "criminal" charges against the Radicals as happened in Rome on May 12 this year when the PCI attempted to turn the PR into accomplices of anti-institutional subversion.

In short, the task that the existence of the PR creates for the Communists consists in accepting the fact that in a democracy, just as the parties of the government exist, there can and indeed must exist parties of the opposition as well, and that these are not necessarily pistol-packing Fascists.

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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) Constitutional range parties - Refers to the parties that were involved in drawing up the new Italian Constitution after the fall of Fascism.

2) Palazzo - A common journalistic expression signifying the power-holders in a negative sense as being extraneous and insensitive to the will and needs of the citizens.

3) Giulio Andreotti, Aldo Moro, Carlo Donat Cattin, Flaminio Piccoli, Benigno Zaccagnini - all leading DC figures.

4) Togliatti - Palmiro Togliatti (1893- 1964), a long time PCI party secretary who also established the principle of the Italian Communists' independence from Moscow.

5) Historic compromise - The decision of the Communists to collaborate with the Christian Democrats.