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)

The Radicals and the PCI: A Difficult Confrontation

By Alberto Asor Rosa

(<>, no.5, December '77 - January '78)

The Radical's illusion that they can fight the "system" without including any clear reference to class positions has a long history in our country. It seems strange, in this regard, that no one has remarked more emphatically during recent years upon the existence of a Radical thread that runs through all of our post-unification national affairs more or less, despite long periods of eclipse, and that no one has remarked on the importance of the role played, in the above-mentioned sense, by that first draft of Pannella who was Felice Cavallotti (1).

The judgements on this Radical thread are obviously controversial, but historians have often noted the contradictions that have shown up - and in my experience continue to show up - between the urgent need for an improvement of the institutional mechanisms and civil customs and the blindness to the economic needs and power of the popular masses.

It has been observed that it was decidedly an illusion in the period when the structures of the new unified state were formed to "keep the conflicting interests of large industrialists such as Gavazzi, Perinetti, Rubini, Cengel etc. united around varied and indeterminate programmes; or of great landed proprietors like Mussi; or of the representatives of liberal arts, of the professions and the white collar class like Rampoldi, Pennati, De Cistoforis, Marcora, Sacchi, etc.; or of workers' groups like Maffi and Chiesa" (S. Merli). More decisively others have judged Cavallotti-type Radicals to be "conservatives... even on institutional grounds and still more so on social grounds because they were firm on the bourgeois idea of private property, but in so far as they were progressive spirits opposed the degeneration of bourgeois system into a capitalist system and ended by expressing the aspirations and needs of the lower middle class (suffocated by and envious of the class that was better off) and of the ar

tisans and the other victims of Italy's newly born modern capitalism among whom the proletariat" (L. Bulferetti).

But it is typical of Radicalism to balance between "left" and "right" and it is not, at bottom, a meaningless phrase when Pannella says that he also wants to find interlocutors beyond the classical borders between Fascism and anti-Fascism. The struggle against the system, as a rigid party system that directs the great masses and which can conspire in a Mafia-type hold on power to the damage of individuals and minorities, inevitably is two-faced.

The referendum itself has a history in Italy which is more of the right than of the left. One should recall the polemics of Gaetano Mosca against universal suffrage which had deprived the middle class of its political dominance, and his criticism of the representative system because it permitted, even more efficiently than authentic despotism, an organised minority to dominate a disorganised majority. It is Gaetano Mosca who called Parliament "one of the worst types of political organisation that the true majority of a modern society can permit" (<>, I, Bari 1947, p.209). Isn't there here an element of Radicalism destined to spill over into the aristocratic and authoritarian Radicalism of Vilifredo Pareto, (2) for example? In this framework, the referendum is presented by Mosca as the explicit corrective of despotism to the democratic representative system.

I would say that Radicalism does not in itself have, nor can it have, its own definitive and stable place in politics. It finds this in the course of its relations with other political forces and the way the latter react to its "spirit" and the issues it proposes. Otherwise Radicalism is an erratic body that wanders from field to field following its weighty inner impulses and breaking down boundaries of all kinds in its unpredictable march. One ought perhaps to recall more clearly that the only moment of true alliance between Radicals and Socialists took place during the fight against the corrupt, barbaric and semi-feudal government of Francesco Crispi (3): whereas Giolitti-ism (4) absorbed many of the demands of Radicalism, pre-empting its function and making a fraction of it rise even as far as the government. It seems evident that their different views of the class struggle put a strategically insurmountable barrier between these two forces.

Today Radicalism expresses the rebellion of a minority sector of the Italian middle class against the perils of the centralisation of the state that moves through compromises among the great mass political forces and leads to the reaffirmation or even the growth of the coercion of eminently individual liberties.

This is a line of reasoning which I do not share, in the sense that I do not share the idea that the strengthening of mass democracy ought to lead to the limitation of individual liberties. But it is a line of reasoning that poses problems in the precise sense that it is also a problem when there are citizens who refuse to identify with our system of the organised democracy of the large masses. In the first place it is a problem of conscience, but it is also a political problem when one moves from existential problems to questions on the concrete forms of power in Italy today.

The Radical protest, often so irritating and sometimes uselessly provoking too, when it is based on pure and simple elements of custom, finds its best moments when it puts into relief the bad functioning of the institutional machine, its "old and new" despotism, or else when it assumes the function of a "corrective" of the system (to use not improperly, I think, Mosca's formula).

Naturally, the Radicals' claim often seems excessive to represent - and even to represent exclusively - all of repressed civil society (and even more excessive is their irritation when one lets them see it); but their function in itself is, as I say, indubitable. The problem of the relationship between the Radicals

and the workers' movement, and in particular between the PR and the PCI, is the problem of the relations of the Radicals with the workers' movement and at the same time the problem of the workers' movement with the Radicals. In this case there is not, I mean to say, an entirely linear position easily comparable on the basis of a common strategy (be it even on a long-term basis), but rather a series of broken segments, of highly heterogeneous actions and reactions, of fragmented communications badly disturbed at the source.

The Radicals fluctuate, it seems to me, between a deep and so to speak organic anti-Communist vein, and the rational, oft-repeated public recognition of the Communists as the force most representative of the people and an indispensable interlocutor. Their problem, if I am not mistaken, is to try and understand that a class strategy has a different logic and time schedules than a civil rights battle and that one must force oneself not to put the latter on a collision course with the former: also for the reason that in the historical and institutional conditions of our country, in the power relationships which we know to pertain, one cannot win even one civil rights battle if it is not included in a class strategy.

The Communists, for their part, probably need to understand better the increasingly structural character, "politically structural", of certain civil rights battles. The fact remains that politics, when it is the politics of a great popular force, must always be a combination of choices "coherently put together", and it is not always easy to combine different popular demands, to join up round plugs and square holes, in a crisis whose most vital and immediate problems must be halted and resolved.

Between the impatience and the incoherence of the Radicals (in the sense of rejecting the pace and the "coherence" of the system) and the patience and coherence of the Communists that aims at a more complete and, all things considered, more radical modification of the country, it is very difficult to hold dialogue, but the attempt should not be abandoned.

---------------------------------------------------------------- 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) Felice Cavallotti - (1842-1898) Journalist, politician and man of letters. A leader of the Radical far left and a deputy in Parliament, he died in a duel.

2) Vilifredo Pareto - (1848-1923) Italian economist and sociologist some of whose theories are fundamental to modern economics.

3) Francesco Crispi - (1818-1901) A political follower of Mazzini and the political "brain" behind Garibaldi's dictatorship. He was a leftist deputy in 1861 and turned monarchist in 1864. As prime minister his tendencies were nationalistic and authoritarian.

4) Giolitti-ism - Refers to Giovanni Giolitti (1842-1928) Treasury minister under Crispi, later prime minister. Tolerated the growth of Socialism and the workers' movement and established universal suffrage.