Interview With Marco Pannella in Panorama MagazineABSTRACT: Just after the Italian national elections, which saw a great success for the Radical Party (deputies increased from 4 to 8), Marco Pannella - in the interview with Panorama - indicates the most important questions raised by the Radicals: the "Socialist question", the role of the labor unions, the removal of the nuclear threat, disarmament, the fight against starvation in the world.
Panorama - There is talk of creating a lay-Socialist sphere.Are you interestsed in this project?
Pannella - I will repeat for the thousandth time, and who knows Äif the election victory won't help me to be understood? We have been and are the Radical antagonist of the regime, but always ready to affirm a Socialist protagonist in our society. This protagonist will have to include the PCI and the large majority of its militants and voters.
Panorama - You reject a lay-Socialist sphere without the PCI?
Pannella - If in a short time a lay-Socialilst sphere can be designed to be useful, it is welcome. But on the condition that it serve the purpose I indicated before, that there are not the smallest intentions of creating a third force, that "lay" and "Socialilst" really mean something in practice and not in the clarity of Utopia.
Panorama - What does "Socialist" mean to you?
Pannella - It means desiring and acting to "produce" liberty, justice, peace, in the economic sphere as well, in work and production relations, in civil society, in the democratic class organisations themselves, in the parties and unions,in government and law. And this one cannot have without democratic class politics.
Panorama - This is a definition, a concept, but concretely?
Pannella - Let me give you four examples.- First, no Socialism is possible in the coming years without a technological option for soft alternative energy, renewable, widely available and one that can be managed by the people.
Panorama - You would seem to give too much importance to this problem...
Pannella - Not too much. Because if you choose mililtary-nuclear technology, from uranium to plutonium, you also choose a rigidly centralised society, a hierarchy, repressive, with a work-production organisation of a military and hypercapitalistic type, essentially state controlled. If you choose soft and widely available energy, you're betting on a democratic organisation of the economy and production, on stimulating personal initiative.
Panorama - The second example?
Pannella - There is no Socialism which is not radically internationalistic, pacifistic, and pro-disarmament. I am thinking of unilateral disarmament as a method of international and policentric poliltical struggle - perhaps the only way to achieve gradual, general and controlled disarmament. One must construct the armed force (armed with non-violence) of the Chri- stian imperative "thou shalt not kill" - not kill 50 million people a day by starvation.
The third example regards the religious problem. There is no Socialism without a lay, libertarian and classist vision of the religious needs of our times.
Thus to fight against the Concordat means to defend to the utmost the liberty of believers.
Lastly, in Italy there is the problem of the unions. And it must be faced.
Panorama - In what way?
Pannella - The Socialist alternative necessarily walks on two legs: the party and the union. Two autonomous but interdependent forces of class alternative. Otherwise it limps and falls. Therefore, a Socialist Party and a Socialist union.
Panorama - The proposal of a Socialist union is divisionary - right in the one spot where the left is united.
Pannella - But it is an external unity, centralised, paralysed, of a corporative kind. A scheme that in the long run risks turning the union into an interclassist wedge where the State penetrates the world of labour instead of the opposite.
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Panorama - Do you think a Socialist union is a feasible project?
Pannella - I think it is indispensable. And I think Giorgio Benvenuto and Pierre Carniti too could be the men who have what this project takes.
Panorama - Don't you think that everything you say, rather than smacking of unity is subversive of the left's present positions?
Pannella - It is reasonable,and I repeat reasonable, that creating disorder of the constituted disorder is the only hope we have of creating a new and solid order.
Panorama - And agreements with the other political forces?
Pannella - In Parliament and in the country one can immediately find factors of strong tactical unity that upset the power relationships with the DC on many reforms. One could also reach an agreement on consultations. Even a pact on consultations, for example with the PSI. For three years there has been talk of innovations. Let's hope that this time something comes of it. Up until now they haven't even found the time to reply to our proposals for allliances. The PCI, as I have said, is a necessary partner for dialogue.
Panorama - With whom your relationship is anything but good...
Pannella - Perhaps now the Communists will be disposed to use the policy of the carrot with us, since that of the stick has backfired against them. Other partners for dialogue are the PDUP and Proletarian Democracy. And we don't reject the signs of attention and esteem that we are getting from the Social Democrats these days. Even if these seem in contradiction with their persistent pro-Christian Democrat and anti-Communist position.
Panorama - You speak of consultation pacts among these parties. That's no very great prospect.
Pannella - It's a proposal for today. In the future a Socialist protagonist could not help but constitute an organised reality of the federalist and federative type, even while respecting the history of each party.
Panorama - Why exclude relations with the Republicans and the Liberals?
Pannella - I have a lot of liking for Valerio Zanone and for his political style. Less for that of the Republicans. But I don't exclude the one or the other. In Parliament there are two coalition majorities that interest me: that of the left (PCI, PDUP, PR, PSI); and at this point it is up to the PCI to allow the President of the Republic to take into consideration giving the mandate to form a government to a leftist leader (which has about 46%) rather than to a Christian Democrat (who have 38%).
But in second place there is the lay-divorcist coalition which has 54% with Social Democrats, Republicans and Liberals.
Panorama - This seems to be an arithmetical calculation that doesn't take into account the contradictions among the parties.
Pannella - Of course there are contradictions. But on the social and class levels, fewer and less serious ones than with the Christian Democrats.
Panorama - We always come back to the question of the PCI with whom you are always fighting, to say the least.
Pannella - The PCI has covered us with insults, but even more with calumnies, in the Stalinist fashion, to deceive Communists, Socialists and democrats. I replied without mincing words.
Panorama - Exactly. Much more than a fight. And now what has happened?
Pannella - It has happened that in the last ten months we have received an increasing consensus from workers and democrats: The "yeses" in the referendum, the elections at Trieste, at Trent and Bolzano, the June 3 and 4 vote, the European elections. Thanks to all this, a discussion has begun in the PCI, they are thinking things over.
We have always said it: to count in a PCI blocked by bureaucratic centralism there is nothing else to do but vote Radical. Every vote for the PR means strength for any knid of dissent and alternative within the PCI: for the position of Pietro Ingrao, for the lines that lead from Umberto Terracini to Massimo Cacciari to Salvator Secchi, from Bruno Trentin to Giorgio Napolitano himself.
Panorama - But now there are immediate elections coming up. There is the question of the Presidents of the Houses of Parliament. Are you willing to vote for a Communist?
Pannella - We are so willing that we would even vote for... two of them. But we will not accept one in exchange for another Christian Democratic president. To make it clear: in principle, yes to Ingrao in the Chamber and Terracini in the Senate. No to Amintore Fanfani in the Senate in order to have Ingrao in the Chamber.