by Valter VecellioABSTRACT: A collection of documents on the radicals' libertarian antifascism: to recognize fascism means to understand what it has been and above all what it can be. Apparent antifascism too often hides a complicity with those who represented the true continuity with fascism, the reprise of laws and methods typical of that regime. (" WE AND THE FASCISTS", The radicals' libertarian antifascism, edited by Valter Vecellio, preface by Giuseppe Rippa - Quaderni Radicali/1, November 1980)
" An author is a man... who would like to dine quietly with
a Quaker, an Anabaptist, a Moslem, a Socinian. I would
like to go further: I would like to say to a Turkish
brother: "Let us eat a nice plate of chicken and rice
together while invoking Allah ".
(Voltaire, "Tolerance" in the "Philosophical Dictionary").
"I once knew a waiter who, instead of excusing himself and trying to minimise the importance of his errors when his bosses reproved him, exaggerated the importance of his shortcomings and showed that he was the most scandalized of all by what he had done.
- Giacomino, that plate isn't very clean.
- Not very clean? Why it's dirty, very dirty. It's indecent. Just imagine if you can put such a filthy plate on the table. A table isn't a pig sty...
- Giacomino, don't come into the room like that without asking permission.
- But of course! You have to be a real hick just arrived from the sticks not to know things like that. Not even the wildest African savages enter a hut without announcing themselves...
And he went off grumbling against the filthy, rude creature who exploited the indulgence of the bosses by taking such liberties.
Anyone watching these scenes had the impression of two different people: one was the Giacomino who was so indignant about the badly done job and who had nothing to do with the Giacomino who had merited the reproof.
In the headquarters of the PCI (Italian Communist Party, ed.) Giacomino would feel perfectly at home ". (1)
It has never caused me any particular problems, ever, to participate in political demonstrations - whether assemblies, sit-ins, marches or sudden raids to win the "symbolic" right to remain in front of places "off limits" (most of the time because of inscrutable desires and decisions). I never begged off, even if it often meant having to put up with a few blows from a police cudgel or being held for boring and highly irritating identification which, all in all, could be done in a few minutes thanks to the very modern gadgets which the police have, but which despite that last hours and hours.
There is however a kind of demonstration in which I have never participated - those on a fixed date which are a celebration and a ritual with choreography arranged by the Provincial Tourist Agencies of the parties (those, I should add, that bus tens of card-carrying members from the most hidden corners of the countryside and the most distant towns in order to guarantee a "militant" presence in city squares); demonstrations where his excellency and his honour, who fought in the Resistance, read their short discourses from notes; a country has
been formed (yesterday) and a side of bacon (today); the veterans
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1) Ernesto Rossi, in " Il Mondo ", May 31, 1955, and later in " Aria Fritta ", Laterza, Bari.
("veterans are born, not made" said Leo Longanesi with that wicked tongue of his); the certified Garibaldino with his cardboard medal on his red shirt, basted on by Bixio for a forgotten Bronte (2), exhibited for the occasion once a year, then another five minutes in the cellar so that one doesn't get too worn out.
I have never even participated in the "fighting" proletarian demonstrations against imperialism, those in the course of which violence became justified because they were made by the "masses",
and where, to protest the intervention of American Marines in Vietnam, cars were burned in front of the "Corriere della Sera" (the Milanese daily, ed.); Medina and Calley slaughtered women, old people and children at My Lai, but we avenged them by burning the Cadillac of the American tourist who came to photograph the Madonnina.
Those were the days when the cudgelings were branded the acts of Fascist squads if they were done by the youths from San Babila (a right-wing bourgeois quarter of Milan, ed.); but if they were done by a Katanga gorilla at the Statale (3), they became "militant anti-Fascism; even in the cudgeling was done on
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2) The Garibaldian Nino Bixio repressed peasant uprisings in Sicily, in the town of Bronte in particular. (translator's note)
3) The Katanga were left-wing student activists. Il Statale is
the university of Milan. (translator's note)
the head of a UIL (a major labour union, ed.) unionist. (4)
I never took part in those demonstrations.
Perhaps already by then there was no reason for many of us to wait for Lévy and his definition of those times in which reason, if not asleep, was at least drowsing. (5) Domenico Tarizzo reminded us perfectly well about what happened: "...that girl who was "put on trial" because she had relations with a comrade behind her husband's back... that young son of a capitalist who gave children Mao's pamphlets as if they were little pictures of saints... A period that was a dress rehearsal for the new bureaucracy and not only that explosion of the libertarian spirit that everyone, "veterans" or not, wanted
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4) Episodes of this kind are not yarns; I am writing from memory, but the weekly "Panorama" reported on these events telling, among others, of how a brutal squad of the "Student Movement" of the period cudgeled and seriously injured a UIL unionist who was carrying his PSI (Socialist Party, ed.) card in his pocket. He had been mistaken for a Fascist and ended up in hospital. An emblematic and not isolated episode which was brushed off by the Katangians as a "mistake".
5) Bernard-Henry Lévy: "...the natural child of a diabolical coupling between Fascism and Stalinism... one of the blackest dates in the history of Socialism..." (refers to '68,in "La barbarie à visage humaine"; Grasset Fasquelle, Paris)
to believe it was... one almost never encountered workers but almost always only students of the Catholic kind... ".(6)
What do I mean to say?
Only that I have never managed to share the sacred, heroic furore that manifestly inflamed so many others. Furthermore my direct experiences of that period were very provincial: Lucania, in no way different from the description Lina Wertmuller gave us of it in " Basilischi ", the unchanged South, still in many of its aspects that of Levi in " Christ Stopped at Eboli ". And then Romagna, an area - perhaps because of the substantial Catholic and historical Republican enclaves it contains - that does not present quite all of the characteristics of the " regime " that one feels in Emilia for example, or in Umbria (more than in Venetia or Apulia). But go talk of revolution in any country town of Romagna and see if they don't immediately deflate you with a horse laugh and send you on your way in your undershorts. And its just as well that there they take everything with a laugh. Solid folk, however that make money, eat the priests alive and send their children to catechism lessons every Sunday. At bo
ttom (Giovanni) Guareschi (the popular novelist, ed.) didn't exaggerate by much; he didn't have to invent anything, just sit in the main street bar of Cervia and take notes. Even today the Peppones and Don Camillos are not in short supply.
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6) Domenico Tarizzo, "Come eravamo, dieci anni che paiono cento", in "Critica Sociale", No.2, February 1978.
One ought to make more and better use of what Gaetano Salvemini already maintained thirty years ago: "Choose the problems, find the solutions". Instead the politics of the Leopard (7) has been dominant and Leonardo Sciasica (the famous Sicilian novelist, ed.) was not wrong when he said with alarm that the North was inevitably winning out. And yet after so much cheap manicheism, the time may have come for mortifying the satraps of thought and the sacristans of dithyrambic incitements.
Ideology is dead at last and being buried. At last the time has come for the commitment to life, to civil rights, to everyone's rights, for solidarity against those who have not recognised these rights and who trample on them, without concern for why they trample on them, in the name of whatever, be it the Catholic
Videla or the comrade of Pol Pot.
Now, there is no doubt that some wiseacre, some guru of certified knowledge, will say that all this is "qualunquismo" (see preface, p.6, note 5). This can be answered with Sciascia's words: " For years now someone is always accusing me of "qualunquismo". I couldn't care less. One needs to clarify once and for all what this blessed qualunquismo is: It seems to be
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7) Reference to the well-known historical novel about Sicily by
Tomasi di Lampedusa (translator's note). The type of politics concerned would be "to change everything in order to change nothing".
moralism. Okay then, I am a moralist and I accept the title ". (8) And it is also to be remarked that these accusers (and the professors of Communist mysticism excel in excommunication) often appear in making this judgement that it is an expedient, the attempt to escape easily from something.
Marc Rakovski has written that "all intellectuals know the frustration caused by the lack of information, just as everyone knows, at least once in his life, the shame of having to identify himself publicly with something that in private he despises and treats with irony". (9)
Among the questions that have led quite a few to join publicly in supporting the dispositions issuing from the stables of a few officials - while privately maintaining the contrary and in any case showing disdain for the officials - I believe one can also include the issues which are the subject of this publication.
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8) Leonardo Sciascia in " Il mio programma è la verità ", interview with Lino Rizzi published by " Giornale di Sicilia ", May 9, 1979, and later reprinted in the volume " Il pugno e la rosa " edited by Valter Vecellio; Bertani, Verona.
9) Marc Rakovski, " Perchè gli intelletuali? " in "Aut Aut", 164 March - April 1978. In reality, Rakovsky is a pseudonym used by a group of young Hungarian intellectuals to sign a volume
- "Vers un marxisme pour les sociétés sovietiques" - from which
the quotation was taken.
This volume is made up of what we may call many fragments or segments of a philosophy which today constitutes not only the essence of an ideal tradition whose roots go back to " Giustizia e Libertà " and the Action Party (see note 6, p.10) - an ideal patrimony that Marxist culture on the one hand mortifies and on the other tries, however clumsily, to acquire and absorb. A philosophy whose life blood is that " bourgeois Utopia " that was personified by such noble souls as Rossi, Pannunzio, De Capraris, Piccardi, Villabruna and Benedetti. The kind of people that kept to the essentials and with wise consistency aimed straight at the target. People of a solid culture which they had assimilated; men who, as Arrigo Benedetti said (10) "by mutual agreement they promoted a political action to escape from the "qualunquista" period that began with the great Christian Democratic victory". They were ex Liberals like Leone Cattani, Nicolò Carandini, Mario Ferrara and Franco Libonati; ex members of the Action Party
like Ferruccio Parri, Mario Paggi, Guido Calogero, Leo Valiani (and whoever says that one improves with age is vindicated); writers like Vitaliano Brancati, Sandro De Feo, Ennio Flaiano... and then the Rosselli brothers, Piero Gobetti, the anti-Fascist anti-Fascists... and then too that "aristocratic" gentleman of two hundred years ago , the Milanese
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10) Arrigo Benedetti, " The Radicals ", in L'Espresso of April 1962 and later reprinted in " Il pugno e la rosa " already mentioned.
Cesare Beccaria who hardly anyone reads anymore. And Bertrando Spaventa... but many, many other names often forgotten could be mentioned. One should make do for all the others: Ignazio Silone. Silone's human and Christian search and thirst for truth and liberty is entirely Radical, which is to say libertarian, tolerant, of the "laity". And then again Bertrand Russell, Cesar Chavez and his campesinos, Camus and Gide - just to have a look outside Italy.
Segments of a philosophy that was nourished by the reading of Marx's "Capital" and Dostoevsky's "The Possessed", that treasured those "signs of the formation of a civil, associative and political conscience", as Lino Jannuzzi wrote, of the Goliardi (a students movement, ed.), while throughout the country "the rigid Manichaeism of certain intellectuals masked the humiliating lack of independence and the false intransigence of useless hypocrisy and presumption that was always ready to dissolve into compromise and the flirting with "realpolitik" (11).
These are articles and commentaries that, like most Radical things are hard to get hold of. In fact, it happens that the Radical Party, entirely pervaded by a disorder in their operations that can be likeable, is absolutely incapable, even
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11) Lino Jannuzzi, " I figli del tricolore " in " Critica liberale ", August-September, 1954, and later included in the volume " Critica liberale " 1952-1966. an anthology edited by Gian Piero Orsello, Landi, Rome.
in their central headquarters in Rome, of keeping anything that resembles a periodical library. This could even be to the good if one thinks of the Communist mastodon that as everyone knows has made a point of honour of efficiency, a boast of the organisation, a virtue of engagement, and who in toto produce a monstrous bureaucracy.
Be that as it may, anyone who might want to consult these texts could only do so by applying to a handful of maniacs and the private collections they had managed to put together. About a dozen people in Italy as far as I know.
They are writings connected by a common denominator and they deal with thorny problems, big issues, with questions rather than with answers that have been put to the entire left and even to us ourselves. They have brought down insults, scorn, mockery. And excommunication, anathemas, furore. Almost never have there been arguments presented against opposing arguments. It was easier, less complicated, to exorcise.
It is not a useless task to re-read these texts even after the "contingencies" that they have produced. It rarely occurs that "militant" articles, written for the polemics of the moment, after so many years are still current for today's conditions (the first, by Pannella, " Perchè siamo contro i repubblichini d'oggi ", is dated 1972) (12), just as they
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12) " Why We Are Against Today's Salò Republicans ".
probably will continue to be valid. I have no fear of words and I know very well that this could be another cause of scandal. (13) But one thing clearly emerges from this anthology: Fascism can emerge in more than one way and according to the times and the country, etc. But anti-Fascism is manifested in one way only and that is what subtly emerges in reading these documents.
In " Il suo testamento" Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote: "... Therefore it is necessary to fight for the conservation of all forms of culture, alternate and subalternate. This is what you have been doing in all these years, especially these last years. -----------------------------------------------------------------
13) Furthermore, it is a question of not being less than what Pasolini exhorted us to be in his testament: "... Continue simply to be yourselves, which means to be unrecognisable. Forget at once the big successes and continue undauntedly, obstinately, eternally contrary, to demand, to desire, to identify yourselves with those who are different, to scandalize, to curse". From Pier Paolo Pasolini, " Il suo testamento ", the text of the speech the poet was to have made at the Radical Party Congress in Florence. This is a text that proposes all the issues that marked the final period of Pasolini's cultural and political commitment. A text that gushed out in one breath, written directly on the typewriter, a few hours before his death. The full text of this speech has been published in the posthumous collection of writings entitled " Lettere luterane ", Einaudi, Turin. It is can also be read in " Il pugno e la rosa ", Bertani, Verona.
And you have succeeded in finding alternate and subalternate forms of culture everywhere: in the city centres and in the most remote, dead, inaccessible corners. You have had no respectability, no false dignity, and you have not knuckled under to blackmail. You have had no fear, neither of the meretricious nor of the publicans, not even - and this says everything - of the Fascists ".
What is meant is exactly this "everything said", of the Fascists, of the wanting to be anti-Fascist, of succeeding above all in being it, despite - let this be clear - the "Fascist" anti-Fascism "of the Parri-Sofri (14) line which is the line followed by our respectable political people." (15) One has paid a high price in terms of political isolation and lynching for -----------------------------------------------------------------
14) Ferruccio Parri, partisan leader and head of the first government formed after the liberation. Adriano Sofri, a leader of Lotta Continua. This line of anti-Fascism is directed exclusively at the MSI and ignores its other manifestations, ed.
15) Marco Pannella, "Carissimo Andrea", preface to " Underground a pugno chiuso " by Andrea Valcarenghi, Arcana, Milan. This is a most important text of Pannella's in which he faces many of the questions - the right, the left, Fascism, anti-Fascism - that make up the subject of our book. It has not been included here because it is easy to come by. Besides in Valcarenghi's book, it has also been published in " Quaderni Radicali" no. 1a, a monographic number containing Marco Pannella's articles and
speeches in Parliament from 1972 to 1977.
having expressed the opinions contained in these articles. I have
at hand a partial but indicative review of the press comments, mostly from Communist sources: "Squalore dei Radicali" (Radical Squalor) (16). "Baggianate anticommuniste" (Anti-Communist Rubbish) (17). "Pannella is extraordinary even when he manifests all his opportunism... his latest trick of the contradictory with the hangman (Giorgio) Almirante (leader of the neo-Fascist MSI, ed.) has all the earmarks of charlatanism..." (18). "Pannella can consider himself to be God on earth, the incommensurable strategist of world politics - that is his affair. They become our affair when his opportunism and megalomania put in danger... the efforts of thousands of militants..." (19).
Anthologies. But it can also happen that esteemed and highly quoted intellectuals like the Communist Alberto Asor Rosa maintain: "... It is the mark of the Radicals to hold the balance between left and right; it is certainly not a wisecrack when
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16) "La Voce Repubblicana", January 29, 1977. This and the other titles quoted can be found in "IL pugno e la rosa", Bertani, Verona.
17) "Un Pannella Demistificato", in "Unità", August 24, 1966.
18) "La strana coppia", in "Quotidiano dei Lavoratori", June 22, 1979.
19) "Clausewitz o Re Sole?", in "Quotidiano dei Lavoratori", June 24, 1977.
Pannella says that he also wants to find partners in dialogue outside the usual limits between Fascism and anti-Fascism..." (20).
He is not the only one. Gerardo Chiaromonte who, as everyone knows, is one of the most authoritative and influential PCI (Italian Communist Party) leaders, has written: "It seems to me that it is legitimate to use that word (qualunquismo). For various reasons. Above all for the resemblance that some of the arguments being used against the parties today have with those of the Uomo Qualunque". (21)
Then there is Fabio Mussi who establishes a connection between qualunquismo and Radicalism (22). Mussi, whose writing smacks of Latin, says that "a certain kind of argument against the Nineteenth Century did not entirely miss the mark". Another
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20) Alberto Asor Rosa, in "Raidicali e PCI: un confronto difficile"; "Argomenti Radicali no. 5, Dec. 1977/ Jan. 1978; and also in "Radicali o qualunquisti?", edited by F. Corleone, A.Panebianco, L. Strik Lievers, M. Teodori; Savelli, Rome.
21) Gerardo A. Chiaromonte, "I nuovi particolarissimi" in "Rinascita", July 21, 1978. (Uomo Qualunque (the average man), a weekly review that was published between 1944 and 1960, the spokesman of "qualunquismo", ed:)
22) Fabio Mussi, "La questione del sud e delle grande città", in "Rinascita", June 23, 1978.
erudite member of the party, the official historian Paolo Spriano, has spoken of "new qualunquismo". Berlinguer himself, on more than one occasion, was very rough on the Radicals. Their agitation he said was "...aimed at denigrating the party system, at throwing mud on everyone, at considering democratic solidarity a mob action" (23). Nor should one forget a document that has never been disowned by the Communist leadership, according to which the PR (Radical Party) is "characterised by a confused heap of disparate forces and motives, by a complete absence of programmed political choices and proposals, and therefore something that constitutes a qualunquistic movement dangerous for republican institutions and democracy" (24).
Not things of little import, therefore, not polemics connected to mere, contingent election results. Not the polemics of an expert shoeshine boy for princes like Corvisieri; not the "Krokodil" humour of a Fortebraccio; (25) and not the pleasant
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23) Enrico Berlinguer [1922-1984, PCI general secretary, ed.] "Vogliamo una nuova sinistra? Lo dicano, ma non contino su di noi". Interview in "Paese Sera", April 26, 1979.
24) Document of the Communist Party released after the meeting of May 9, 1979 and published in "L'Unità" (the official PCI daily, ed.) on May 10, 1979.
25) Corvisieri, a leader of the leftist party Avanguardia Operaia; Fortebraccio, pseudonym of the journalist Mario Melloni, ed.
nonsense of a Peppino Fiori or an Emmanuele Rocco, (both left wing journalists, ed.) superlative men who, to say it in Giusti's (26) words, when it is a question of libertarians, they always look at them askance.
Nothing of the kind. Big polemics on heavy issues, essential ones, that illustrate how deep and wide are the ditches that separates the components of the left, of how much work must still be done to fill them in, if there is even going to be time (and the will) to do it.
There was need of Salvatore Sechi, that Italian Jean Ellenstein, to be just and admit, confess, - even if much later in order "not to create the least difficulty for his party in a crucial moment such as the elections always are" - to be "indignant for the 1848 style " (27) in which the PCI had set off the polemics against the PR when the referendum campaign was on to abrogate the Reale law and public financing (28): methods "...of political polemics that disgust me. That are born of violence. That can lead to violence to the point of making an enemy of one's friends and comrades", as Sechi wrote, thus
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26) Giuseppe Giusti (1809 - 1850) a satirical poet, ed.
27) The confusion of a year which saw many European insurrections, ed.
28) Laws on rigorous maintenance of public order and the public financing of political parties opposed by the PR, ed.
identifying in the culture of intolerance the matrix for the accusations of Fascism made against the Radical's considerations regarding Via Rasella (29).
But something, who knows, is beginning to happen: the waters of the pond are no longer stagnant. In the "substantial, important and positive report" to the Conference on " The Theory and Practice of New, Socialist and Libertarian Party ", Angiolo Bandinelli (a PR leader, ed.) observes: "... On this accumulation of problems and dangers the Radical Party's opinion is clear: it comes from far away. Those who kept the party going in '61/'62 along with Ernesto Rossi noticed with perturbation the persistence of Fascism. Not so much in the immediate and theatrical aspects of neo-Fascism which then was vigorous and triumphant, but rather in those more secret and structural aspects of the society and the state. They were the first, in
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29) Salvatore Sechi, "Radicali e Communisti: due logiche politiche e culturali" in "Quaderni Radicali", no. 8/9, January/June 1980. [ In Via Rasella a bomb was set off by Resistance fighters that killed German troops. The Germans retaliated by the massacre of Italians at the Fosse Ardeatine. The Radicals were attacked for throwing doubts on the wisdom and the motivations of those who planned and executed the Via Rasella action which for the left represented a sacred and heroic moment in the story of the Resistance, ed. ]
fact, who had the courage to affirm that a substantial continuity connected the structures of production, social organisation, institutions and the logic of power, as these had been realised by Fascism, with the essential ganglia of the anti-Fascist republic. They were the first who had the courage to refrain from demonizing Fascism, and thus not to look on it as an "emergency" situation, atypical and exceptional, but as a historical situation with which the country was very far from having closed all its accounts. In 1972, in the midst of a campaign promoted by the extra-parliamentarians to ban Almirante and the MSI (Italian Social Movement, neo-Fascist, ed.), Pannella wrote the article
" We Are Against the Salò Republicans of Today ", in which he refused to heap on the MSI the responsibility of a continuity whose centre was nowhere else but in the DC (Christian Democrats, ed.). At the time such an affirmation appeared scandalous. And again in 1972, at the Turin Congress, where we presented the equation DC=PNF (National Fascist Party, ed.), not as a defamation but as an affirmation.
"Five years have passed: at a recent conference called by the PCI on the theme of the institutions, a scholar such as Tronti, after having recalled to mind what great experiences of government reforms had taken place on the international scene around the thirties (from the New Deal to "the creation of Socialism in a single country"), was able to affirm: "These were two great experiences that in the '30s faced each other; and pay good attention, we in Italy shared in part these experiences. It is not true that we have been kept out of this kind of world history; because the Fascist experience is also, among other things, an attempt to utilise the political factor... as a force for solving the great social and class contradictions". And after having conceded something to Perna (a PCI leader, ed.) and the other supporters of the thesis of a "break" with that past - a break that was accomplished thanks to the Resistance and the subsequent political course - then reiterated that "... there has remained a lin
e of continuity that must in some way be traced back, and this line of continuity is precisely in the type of government apparatus, in the type of objective political mechanism which, in effect, has survived the Fascist experience itself. On the same occasion, Luigi Berlinguer (brother of PCI Secretary Enrico, ed.) said: "How far do we go in still considering Fascism, in reality and unconsciously, to be a parenthesis, and not rather an organic element of Italian capitalism?..." We are certainly faced with a broader historical experience in Europe as in other parts of the world, a landing place of contemporary capitalism with a peculiar form of government..."
"Fascism, therefore, dealt with problems that are still current, as is admitted here. Which? But just that one, above all, of the entrance of the masses into the State. It is true. The first historic entrance of the masses into the State, the peasant and worker masses, was accomplished for the first time in Italian history, not in the form of revolution, nor of liberal democracy, but as Fascism in the form of the corporative-welfare State. At the fundamental turning point, the forces, the profound tendencies of the country chose at the time and actuated that form of government. And today, it appears, we are faced with analogous problems in a continuity that is not superficial" (27).
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27) Angiolo Bandinelli, "I radicali e le istituzioni", introductory report to the conference "L'Antagonista Radicale, la teoria e la prassi del partito nuovo, socialista e libertario". The acts of the conference have been collected into a volume ("L'antagonista radicale", edited by A. Bandinelli, and M. Teodori under the auspices of the PR Federative Council) and contains the speeches of Bandinelli, Teodori, G.F. Spadaccia, Pergameno, Stanzani, Ciafaloni, Radiconcini, Fossetti, Savelli, Lipperini, Vecellio, Billi, Gaudioso, Negri, Taschera, Vattimo, Chiaberge, Ignazi, Bettinelli, Panebianco, Rodotà, Rutelli, Strik Lievers, Zeno, Ferarri, Bresso, Corelone, Boato, Ceccolini, Tramontana, Aglietta and Pannella.
For lack of time Bandinelli's concluding reply to the work of the conference was omitted from the volume. It can however be found in "Quaderni Radicali" no.3, June-August '78. ("Un convegno utile?"). In the same volume of "Q.R." Roberto Guiducci's speech is printed (" Le istituzioni di base come nuova opposizione-costruzione") which was also not published in the volume containing the acts.
We have now reached the point of inquiring into the question of Fascism.
In an essay published in "L'Espresso", Vittorio Saltini wrote "... In '68 (student uprisings, ed.) the only group that picked up the impulse and was efficient in relation to its numbers was the Radicals, who, without many Marxist-worker illusions, understood that the possibilities which had been opened up were for a change in customs and therefore in the laws limiting civil liberties; and with their activities, as the divorce referendum showed, they helped the growth of the entire left. The effectiveness of the Radicals, despite the limitations of their leadership, gives us an idea of what could have been accomplished from '68 until today if thousands of intellectuals and youths had not gotten lost in the conformistic dreams of Il Manifesto, Avanguardia Operaia and Lotta Continua" (Manifesto, Worker's Vanguard and Continuous Struggle, small Marxist parties, ed.) (28).
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28) Vittorio Saltini, "Quel che resta e quel che è sparito", in "L'Espresso", no.5, of February 5, 1978. Saltini's article was part of an ample re-evocation and accounting done by the weekly review ( "Quell'incredibile '68", edited by Paolo Mieli and Mario Scialoja) with contributions from Eco, Paratore, Provenza, Dalla Costa, Ravera, Piperno, Scalzone, Boato, Capanna, L. Bobbio, Cafiero, Petruccioli, Rossanda, Negt, Cohn-Bendit, Colletti, Saltini and Flores d'Arcais.
The "impulse" and the "efficiency" that Saltini discerns have their origin in something quite precise. It did not happen by chance. There was a fertilising element that inspired every act of that "limited leadership". A fertilising element that Angiolo Bandinelli understood and expressed very well in a series of reflections published in " Socialism '70": "... As Radicals we are strong by virtue of an analysis that has guided and sustained us in all these years. The problem of Fascism by now is stated and analysed differently than it wars fifty years ago. To an economically developed society, the eighth strongest industrial country in the world, one can no longer apply either 1932 style Fascism nor that of the Greek colonels. Any authoritarian choice imposed by the regime today presupposes in this country the permanence of several formal " liberties ", of a superficial democratic covering that cannot be guaranteed by politicians like Pino Rauti (an MSI leader, ed). The Fascism of neo-capitalism is not
the Fascism of half a century ago. An authoritarian regime that guarantees all of this - an essential authoritarian basis with a minimum of formal balances - is not far off or invisible however.
It is the regime that the DC and clericalism have been constructing in all these 25 years, a regime which has the consensus of the masses and important classes bound together by old miseries and new uncertainties, by a perennial condition of neediness and dependence on the immense and omnipotent, corporative and parasitical "welfare" structures of Fascist origin that the DC has carefully abstained from dismantling in all these years... and, quite the contrary, on which they have created and consolidated their fortunes. The erosion of the parliamentary functions, the concentration of important political and administrational powers in the state industry structures... the guarantees and the cover given to state bodies by a political force that is always and essentially clerical - the judiciary, the bureaucracy and the patronage system in the schools, the army the complex of government controlled agencies and industries, etc. - constitute stages and conquests of this power, the amalgam in which it has made
for itself an absolute hegemony in which the left cannot participate except at the price of renouncing its liberal and libertarian ideals and submitting in acquiescence to a corporative, anti-institutional and class logic. The cudgel in this structure is the accessory: the consensus can be and is reached through the regulated use of the structure itself" (29).
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29) Angiolo Bandinelli, "Regione, antifascismo e sinistre" in "Socialismo '70", no. 35-36, Dec. '71 - Jan. '72; a monthly directed by Antonio de Caprariis. This is a "nomographic" number which collected "an efficacious documentation, if not necessarily a complete one, which is strictly connected to an old, liberal Neapolitan tradition, among the greatest in our history" (A. Bandinelli). Among others, that number of the review contained contributions by Bandinelli, Mellini, Severino,
Teodori, Basso, Rendi and Pannella.
These are considerations and reflections that inevitably require a re-examination of the concepts and categories whose traditional definitions are beginning to show considerable signs of wear.
Words such as "left" and "right", for example - what do they mean today? One is tempted not to give them any meaning at all by now and consider them as waste, the residues of dead situations, buried and decomposed. It is a temptation, however, that can lead one off the track. It is still worth while, I think, to nourish the hope that "left" and "right" are distinguishable things. To get to the point: What exactly is the "left" ? The attempt to answer this question has filled libraries. It happens that one reads that "the left is a practical-theoretical phenomenon in which belief and practice interact with each other" (30). More simply I would say that on needs to think that the left means progress: Not, for example, the inter-classism or the application by the Communists of the Rocco Code (the Fascist penal code, ed.). And the right would be the conservation of a society that needs radical transformation.
There is no escape from a re-examination of the traditional categories. That is what for years, in a quiet way, in the midst of incomprehension and polemics, one has tried to do. "These
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30)Ruggero Guarini, "Un lunghissimo tramonto", in "Tra il prinicipe e la massa", edited by R. Guarini and G. Saltini; Cappelli, Bologna.
anti-Fascists are today's Fascists, the only real ones, and if unmasked, fatally dangerous", Marco Pannella has maintained (31).
The analysis proceeds pitilessly, lucidly, "scandalous", literally unheard-of: " We accuse them of abuse and of the betrayal of the anti-Fascism they claim to represent. In this Pasolini is correct, today's anti-Fascism is the opponent of yesterday's anti-Fascism and not of Fascism whose continuity, on the contrary, it assures with a subservient role in regard to the DC (ex PNF). All real Fascism always has need of its thugs and hangers-on, of its Farinaccis and Duminis, its Almirantes and Degli Occhis; and another group, respectable and righteous, cultivated and bourgeois, it little matters, so long as it is corporative and transformist and anti-popular. I have written and I repeat: we of the left cannot look on Fascism as mere hooligan or Nazi violence, but we must recognise that historically whatever we may be - Republicans or Socialists, unionists or populists - not rarely an ambiguous relationship has connected us to its manifestations, an intimacy that is being repeated today more insidiously tha
n yesterday. It is something useless and pitiful, this exorcising of Fascism by re-inventing a comfortable demonology, betraying our non-confessionalism for a Manichaean and terrorist vision of political differences, attaching the same
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31) Marco Pannella, "Signori, i pazzi siete voi" in "Mondo", August 8, 1974 and subsequently included in the volume "Il pugno e la rosa".
yellow of the Jews to the miserable paleo-Fascist remains, to the poor ingenuous, frustrated and ignorant, or to "common" delinquents (who are always, in reality, political products).
The Fascists too, and they first of all, are entitled to the respect for their ideas and their errors by Radical and authentic "anti-Fascists". We must only disarm them when they try to kill without becoming like them, without taking them as an excuse for a suicidal transformation of ourselves. Fascism is the violence of the institutions, the violence of the government, the violence against democratic laws and the rights of the people, corporative and oligarchic discrimination, hatred and disdain for any organised minority that represents or threatens to represent the generality of the citizens in their constitutional aspirations and demands, or their broad majority groups united to defend essential rights and ask for liberal and lay reforms, libertarian and liberating for all.
The depoliticising of the masses and the confiscation of democratic political rights by more or less powerful minorities in order to use them as the privileges of a political caste - this is another Fascist practice which the exigencies of contemporary capitalistic profit making, freed of its original puritan and Calvinistic contradictions, rediscovers, reproposes and reimposes in a more violent, more aggressive, more insidious and only in appearance more tolerable way. The new Fascism seems to have discovered that the most characteristic point of the individual's life is in his central nervous system rather than in his muscles or his intestine, and they have adjusted their violence accordingly. Their tortures no longer consist of castor oil and cudgelings in private but of TV advertising skits, the artificial inculcation of needs that make us slaves not of the "media" that make us freer. As well as Chile, Greece and attempted or accomplished Atlantic and European coups. It must depoliticize us, disinte
grate us, atomise us personally and socially so that we become consumers - of machines or cosmetics, of sexism or ideologies or sandwich spreads, it little matters.
As long as one becomes it in a system of frenetic waste, of the dilapidation of oneself and others, of lugubrious and frustrating pleasures, never of happiness and hope, worshippers, the one and the other, of the eternal organising disorder of life and creation" (32).
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32) Marco Pannella, "Signori, i pazzi siete voi".
33) The greatest stroke of genius developed by the Western Ciommunist movement seems to be the concept of "Eurocommunism". At thsi time it would really be easy to be ironical about Eurocommunism. Just to give one example, the Spanish Communist scholar Pedro Villanova, author of the book "Che cosa è l'eurocommunismo" making a speech to the conference "Marism, Leninism, Socialism" organised by the "Mondoperaio" cultural centre (28-29-30 November, 1978) had to recognise that "we don't know exactly what Eurocommunism is; only what it isn't".
It is a target that can easily be widened. The misery and the failure of "real socialism", in Moscow as in Peking, in Havana as in Tirana; the political sterility of Western Communism (33) accompanied by the highly visible cracks in the theoretical edifice of historical materialism and scientific Socialism - all of these are creating ever greater questions about the theory and practice of the Marxist model. Hence, without prejudices, with a clear and candid eye, several categories that some have wanted to see immutably "fixed" ought to be "revised". Are we so certain, for example, that "capitalism" always and everywhere deserves that negative connotation that the left has hung on it until now? And is it not about time to re-examine certain concepts such as "Marxism" (which with benevolence can be defined today as a nebulous ramification of diverse and often contradictory ideas); such as "liberalism" (a term that certainly should be cleansed of the conservative connotation that has always been attached
to it; such as "Socialism" and "democracy"?
This is an inevitably long argument. Nevertheless it is urgently necessary to start it going, and it has to be the left to do so.
But let us return to the original matter that is close to our hearts. "Whether on the left or on the right one is always involved in a relationship with a point of view which is the boss's point of view, the point of view of the one who gives the orders, who lets you speak or shuts you up", warns Laurent Dispot who then warns: "You can't be further to the right than Brezhnev, Husak and company" (34).
Perhaps we are beginning to get close to one side of the question.
When Marco Pannella indicated his intention to invite the "hangman Almirante" to a public debate all hell was set loose. "No discussions with the Fascists" was the watchword which went well together with the slogan: "It's no crime to kill a Fascist".
The desire to "speak" in public with Almirante, the same Almirante with whom the "intransigents" and the proud opponents of the debate had more than once "had commerce", but "in private" - this was the nth provocation, the ultimate scandal. Presidents of the Republic were elected with Almirante's votes, Fascists were accepted at the table of public financing because that was the only way of dividing up a tasty pie. But talk to him, no; only a wretch could want to do so.
Other "dialogues" come to mind, other "handshakes" against which no word was or is breathed. Thus everything was OK when the Chinese Communist leaders flew to Teheran to congratulate the Shah Reza Pahlevi, to be photographed smiling with him, just a few days before the latest blood bath prepared by the Savak. And no one was perturbed by the flood of arms sold by the Soviets to
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34) Laurent Dispot, "La machine à terreur"; Grasset Fasquelle, Paris.
the Catholic dictator of Argentina Jorge Videla. But to tell this whole rosary means going through a long list: Communist China's immediate recognition of Pinochet's junta of Chilean gorillas; hostility towards Israel which is, despite Begin, an honest country with a democratic regime, whereas the countries of fulfilled Socialism are not stingy in their support of primitive and feudal Arab countries, bloody dictatorial regimes where a few oligarchies reign uncontested and employ death sentences, stoning, floggings and other such delights. The hon. Pajetta (PCI,ed.) goes to visit the likes of Brezhnev, Suslov, and other Communist bureaucrats but does not even try to have a meeting with Sacharov. Berlinguer goes for a rest to the Crimea while hundreds of others are sent to rest in Siberian exile. Pietro Ingrao (a PCI leader, ed.) distinguishes between the "good" dissidents (Bartho, Havemann) and the "less good" ones (Solzhenitsyn, Bukovski) and says that in the East the regimes are not dictatorships but "trans
itional" systems... and if there are deaths, we kill only for good reasons (and we are the ones to judge when they are good).
And so the disdainful and furious "righteous left", with the PCI at its head, of course, behaves towards the Fascists, it seems to me, rather like the old Romagna republicans - anti-clericals who hate the priests, but only the ones of their youth. Those of today, no; they serve them. The "righteous left", and the PCI in particular, is very "anti-Fascist": Mussolini the hangman, Almirante hung head downwards... But the Christian Democrats, that is to say the real Fascists, not them. They serve them. And woe to him who says that the DC has succeeded in thirty years in establishing a regime of corporations such as not even Mussolini managed to do. They will say at once that this is qualunquismo. Prohibited.
All forms of zeal always hide something not very pretty, even anti-Fascist zeal, wrote Pier Paolo Pasolini. There is no doubt that the PCI is a very zealous anti-Fascist party. Firm, indestructible as was said of Croce (Benedetto Croce, Neapolitan philosopher, 1866-1952, ed.), it is a train that is never late, never early. It is however disposed to compromise with the DC, composed as it is known to be of real gentlemen - like one Gioia (whom the Turin court decided was not being defamed if someone, like the writer Michele Pantaleone, called him a "mafioso") ; and then there is Ruffini, Gulotti, Lima, Cianciamino - all very enterprising guys, but trustworthy. Even when they were in school their discretion was such that if they were asked what is the capital of Italy, they replied: I don't know anything; I don't remember. A party, the DC is, composed of true gentlemen, like Gava (35) (father and son - the only difference is in their age), so that when Biagi went to interview them, they say: In Naples chol
era goes away, Gava remains. And Biagi mutters ferociously: it's always the best who go away. Real gentlemen like Andreotti
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35) Gioia, Ruffini, Gulottio, Lima, Cianciamino, Gava - all prominent DC figures suspected of Mafia connections. Gava until recently was Minister of teh Interior.
(Giulio, DC, ed.) with an enviable list of aristocratic friends, like the judge Alibrandi and the Senator Vitalone; the generals of the coups and the illegal financiers; the Caltagirones and all the rest of Latium's building speculators; mafiosi like Michele Sindona (36) and the secret service men, used to spying and keeping quiet, except when it is a question of putting the noose around the neck of a colleague, a party vice secretary, whose misfortune it is to have a terrorist for a son.
A "righteous left" that has theorised about "Socialist realism", that has ranged itself on the side of Palmiro Togliatti and against Vittorini, (37) that has not even lifted an eyebrow over the events of Berlin and Hungary... Is this the anti-Fascist left? Or is it not rather the right, Fascism itself? Are these the anti-Fascists who claim the right and the ability to instruct us? Or are they not rather Philippine faith healers who promise the way, the truth and the light and, instead, tell us lies, lead us into blind alleys, produce death, generate monsters, because they chloroform reason?
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36) Sindona - Financier who was jailed for illegal activities when his financial empire collapsed in Italy and the USA. He died in prison of cyanide poisoning - whether by his own hand or otherwise was never satisfactorily explained.
37) Togliatti - PCI Secretary from 1927-64; Elio Vittorini - a well-known writer.
To say it with Leo Longanesi, they are "people who have caught the habit of intelligence but are idiots". They belong to the mineral kingdom: the look, but they don't see. They are stones among stones.
"Political struggle... has always been full of symbols, especially on the left: from the red flag to the hammer and sickle to calling each other "comrade". Ingenuous symbols, agreed, but alongside them has always been another less ingenuous one, because it was the concrete forerunner of a different type
of man and thus a different society - I mean to say anthropologically different. The strategy of "improvement and advancement" in concord, made by the PCI itself... becoming daily politics and translating itself into the practice of unanimity, extenuatingly interlocutory, more attentive to formulas than to facts, it has had the fatal effect of cancelling in the eyes of the people this very anthropological diversity... the left, the PCI, entering the halls of power, becomes conformist, tends to adjust its own language and models of behaviour, its way of understanding and practising politics, even its own faces, the expressions they wear, to those that have been in there for years..." (38).
Instead, as Sciascia says, (39) it is necessary to talk with
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38) Ernesto Galli della Loggia, "Il qualunquismo e i radicali" in "Argomenti Radicali", no. 3/4.
39) Leonardo Sciascia, "Il mio programma è la verità", already cited.
everyone and to be able to do so without accusations of being Fascist or friends of Fascism.
"Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently" wrote Rosa Luxemburg. If this is true (and it is true), we are not very free.
A lot of talk goes on about Fascist squads, leftist terrorism, dangers and threats to democracy. Certainly these are serious dangers and threats for us all. but Giorgio Galli (influential journalist, ed.) convinces me when he observes that it is "...not impatient revolutionaries or declared conservatives who create the environment most suitable for the development of the far right, but the reformists who make projects without realising them, who make promises without keeping them" (40).
Exactly. This seems to me to be the essential question. To be an anti-Fascist therefore means much more than to turn your back on an Almirante, it means to keep your promises, realise your reform programs. All things that together with the DC cannot be done, that with the DC no one can do.
Valter Vecellio
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40) Giorgio Galli, "La crisi italiana e la Destra nazionale", Mondadori, Milan.
