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)

Radicalism, Liberal Democracy, Socialism

By Fabio Mussi

("Rinascita", June 9, 1978)

The question of "Radicalism" has again become important today. Not so much because, as one actually thought, there is a kind of cultural "third force" between Catholicism and Marxism called "Radical" or "Radical-Socialist" (corresponding to the presence in politics of a PSI half way between the PCI and the DC); and even less because Pannella's Radical Party - the Uomo Qualunque (1) also participated in the events of '68 (2) - represents appreciably "the" modern Radicalism; but rather because in society and in the realm of ideas Radical positions of the old and new type have begun to spread. The phenomenon has only "begun" to be tested, even if, one must admit, prevalently from a pre-bourgeois point of view. In 1974 Pier Paolo Pasolini (3) wrote of a total secularisation of Italy which had pushed as far as the anthropological characteristics of its inhabitants - and as of now on we are all uglier. Gianni Baget Bozzo, in his "Il partito cristiano, il comunismo e la società radicale" in 1976, explains tha

t Radical society is the one that lives "etsi deus non daretur" - as if God did not exist - and as of now we are all more evil. Both of them, one must say, saw the phenomenon clearly.

"Radical" is what aims at the "radice" ["root", ed.]. Originally it applied to the bourgeois faction that was most consistently democratic, most culturally bound to rationalism, particularly enlightened, propagating the full application of the principle of universality of democracy and the least hostile to the insurgent antagonistic movement of the working class. It was also called "bourgeois Socialism". Marx tried to interpret its importance and in any case kept it well in mind. For example, he speaks continually of John Stuart Mill and finds the key to his Radicalism in "naturalism", a potent apologetic ideology: "Bourgeois relationships are pawned off as immutable natural laws of society in the abstract". Radical too was Nietzsche who studied other roots of these relationships: those of will and power. But his road parted even faster from the working class than that of the English democrats, consistent as they were and enamoured of the constitutional state and parliaments.

The separation between Socialism and Radicalism was, however, very distinct right from the start. The attempts for example, of the women's movement already in the early 19th Century to reconcile "emancipation" (Socialism) with "liberation" (Radicalism) - of which Sheila Rowbotham speaks extensively in her book "Excluded From History" - did not succeed. The "social" vision of liberty, of the revolutionary movements of proletarian origin, and the "political" one of liberal origin, became all the more separated later with the formation of the new Socialist states. The entire affair deeply marked, for a very long time, the progress and ideas of reform and revolution.

The historical contrast between Radical and Marxist thought, is, as it were, primordial. There is evidently a class reason for this. But this in turn refers to a basic theoretical point: Marx believes that a Socialist and Communist development of human society can have a starting point in the forces of production developed in the capitalist-bourgeois society: "beginning from" and not by way of "a return to principles" and not merely their "full application". What we know for certain today, however, is that the revolution-liberty-democracy nexus not only has not produced satisfying and fully developed results, but it has gradually become enormously complicated, creating always new problems.

The Italian bourgeoisie has a very dim Radical tradition. As one knows, during the Risorgimento the moderates won out. The first Radical Party in the true sense of the word arose at the beginning of the century and was an inner variant of Giolitti-ism (4), of little significance even in the workings of parliament. The most outstanding Italian Radical is certainly Gaetano Salvemini (5). His arguments against Antonio Gramsci (6) are well known: messianic culture, professional Jacobinism, absolute abstractness of the presumedly concrete, intellectualism, a lack of realism and sense of the historic process. And equally well known are their divergences in the development of at least three decisive issues: the question of the South, the political organisation of the masses and the corruption of the political leaders. Another episode, also in Italy, of the historical contrast between the "Socialism of the bourgeoisie" and the "Socialism of the proletariat".

But one must still have an awareness of the great transformations which the terms of that divergence gradually underwent. In fact, in the meantime, two decisive factors were verified: 1) the incapacity of the established forms of Socialism to produce governments allowing personal and collective liberty comparable to that of the bourgeois democracies; 2) the enormous development and the subsequent more recent crises of the economy and the state in Western capitalist regimes which had induced a gigantic change in the character of civil society even in the sphere of human freedoms. The reformatory and revolutionary movements of the West - in particular those of the working class - today take this as their point of departure. That oscillating between Radicalism and moderation which at various moments was typical of middle class instability in the development-crisis cycle, today tends to become fixed in new forms when an "organic crisis" presents itself and these same classes have grown and changed enormousl

y, just as the part of society cut off from the areas of production and public employment has grown and changed enormously.

The old figures, let us make it clear, keep on coming back. For example, the action, lay and alternative tradition has maintained a certain vitality which has kept simmering for all these years the regrets for "missed chances" (which in the young has sometimes reached the point of caricature in the nostalgia for the right occasion that slipped past six months ago). But the point of no return, beyond which the old figures find themselves patently in exile, is probably that which Giuliano Procacci years ago termed the "American ideology".

Only that the ideology has produced a very wide-ranging reality. From the end of the Fifties and the end of the following decade,, Italy - even without a leadership capable of "planning" a general reform or at least overcoming the most strident historical imbalances - underwent the most radical transformation in its history. The axis of production shifted to the factories and that of life to the cities. Individual consumption grew in an unheard-of way. The state took on a new economic and civil weight. All of this did not provoke the death of the myth. Ernesto Galli della Loggia, in a piece published in the volume "L'Italia contemporanea" took up the phrase "American ideology" and turned it into "mythology of development". That it was "mythology" was proved by the following crisis which brought with it the combined effects of a society that was still backward in many sectors and yet had rapidly reached a phase of advanced integration with the centres of industrial capitalism. However a large part of the

ideas that regulated life, and interpreted it, collapsed at that time thus giving birth to a new anit-mythological measure. Thus the country was "laicised" and "modernised". It soon entered into conflict with a political and economic direction which, not knowing how to develop these most marked aspects of progress, nor how to cope adequately with the crisis that had developed at the end of the Sixties, soon lost its consensus.

The major beneficiary of these lost consenses was the Communist opposition, especially in the period between the divorce referendum and June 20. On June 20, 1976, in the sides taken and the votes cast by the intellectuals (a concept which is valid, by now one must never forget it, "only as a concept in relation to a mass") the Radical component was very strong. In the demand for good government - founded on a justified criticism of evident facts - there also took shape a Salvemini kind of figure, in harmony with a movement - of young men, women, students - that was attempting to affirm as its content the transformation of civil society and the conditions of urban life.

Once again this Radicalism entered into conflict with the movement which has the working class at its centre. What today is being called "the Marxist crisis" does not arise "internally", as it were, from a critique of "conscience" (as happened with the neo-Ricardian polemics on the transformation of values into prices, or, at other moments, with the attempt to show up the falsity of other parts of "Capital"), but externally as a real movement of forces that criticise Marxism on: 1) its organic claims (the leading of the analyses of capitalism back to "one" theory); 2) its lacunae on the problem of politics; 3) and, finally, its "full application" (the case of the "new philosophers") in the Socialist countries.

The polemics on hegemony, which took place with a great expenditure of if intellectual energy immediately after June 20, contained many of these issues. There was already a distinct aloofness to the PCI, by way of Gramsci. But things took off on their own and pushed the quarrel much further. The solution to the conflict proposed by [Agnes] Heller of leaving the problem of change to the subjects themselves by way of the theory of "Radical needs" already showed itself to be impracticable. A new extremism flowered, individualistic and anti-political with a Radical-regressive set up.

The cultural and political peril to which the country is exposed is great. Several of the movements which have developed in the last two years emphasise it. It would seem to me, however, that they have not done enough, despite the ideas being worked out at the Elysée Palace, to avoid that once again the "Socialism of the bourgeoisie" and the "Socialism of the proletariat" separate at the cross-roads. All the more so if one considers that Radicalism - when pushed to an extreme in a war against the Catholics and the Communists, becomes destructive - appears always more... like the tip of a vaster submerged neo-liberal continent - or better, "liberal-democratic". One imagines that it contains only one theoretical-cultural possibility, that of a "divided vision" of reality; and one thinks that the Communist left's claim to the reconstructive concept - in defining the crisis and overcoming it - contains an authoritarian and restrictive potential. Here is still the gushing fount of the most classic - and i

f you like traditional - idea of "a civil society of freedom" and of a "state of judicial guarantees". As separation will have it.

Once the limits have been ascertained the problem for us arises mainly from the fact that this "liberalism" is in any case an episode of the new culture - if it is true, as it is true, that in the first place the real conditions for classical liberalism no longer exist. In the second place the contents of human freedom in these developed societies have changed so much that they require a new political reply which takes into account the evolution - which with us is common even among a large part of the Catholic world - of the very concept of personal and collective freedom. And in the third and final place, that the road of Socialism in a democracy, before and during the transition, and that of reaching an agreement with the Communists for a European vision of the revolutionary struggle, involves establishing a relationship between the working classes with a Communist majority and the other workers' movements with Socialist and Social Democratic majorities and with bourgeois, Socialist, Liberal and democ

ratic forces.

For all these motives and others too, I think that a dialogue should be opened and pursued - not closed.

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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) L'Uomo Qualunque - Literally "the average man", name of a weekly published in Rome from 1944-60 under the direction of G. Giannini. It was the voice of qualunquismo as a political movement.

2) The events of '68 were rebelliousness on the part of students' and workers' movements and the emergence of such minority movements as women's liberation.

3) Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) - Poet, novelist, film-maker.

4) Giolitti-ism - Refers to Giovanni Giolitti (1842-1928), Liberal statesman, long-term Prime Minister, who favoured industrial development and tolerated the peaceful growth of Socialism and the workers' movement. He underestimated Fascism and only came to oppose it actively at a late date (1924).

5) Gaetano Salvemini (1873-1957) - Socialist historian and politician.

6) Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) - Political thinker; among the founders of the Italian Communist Party.