ABSTRACT: 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)

The "scandal" is not in the declarations made by the MSI senator but in our libertarian statute which we so proudly compare on all occasions to the centralist, hierarchical, power- at-the-top statutes and to the closed, bureaucratic structures of other parties that created those statutes. Our statute does not recognise the right of any party organ to refuse or otherwise condition the membership of any citizen who accepts the mandate established by the congressional motion and approved by 3/4 of the voters and who agrees to pay a modest annual membership fee of fifteen thousand lire. For the same reason this is the only party that has no councils of arbitration, discipline or control and in which no one can be expelled for ideological dissent or be stigmatised as unworthy.

As one can see, it is no insignificant thing because it concerns a heritage of ideals which I think may be the most important thing the Radical Party has contributed in these last twenty years to Italian democracy and the Italian left. This heritage is not only practical but offers a theory of libertarian political organisation which by itself is more important than all of our battles, all of our victories and all our defeats. It is what really makes us different. Now, suddenly, it has been noticed with fear and shock that the party can be taken over, contaminated, overthrown. Suddenly there is the fear that it may be helpless in the face of these dangers.

The reactions can be of the most varied. One may think of introducing some sort of control over membership, but whoever might try this would find that there was no middle way between the libertarian doctrine and practice of the Radical Party and the non-libertarian ones of the other parties: any norm adopted against Senator Plebe would be applicbale tomorrow to any other registered member of the party and could be used against him.

One might instead accept the statute uncritically and refrain from expressing a political judgement on Sen. Plebe's declaration of intent as well as on the problem that it reveals and poses. But in this case, in the name of efficiency and activism, of the urgency of the struggle and the fulfilment of the congressional mandate, the party would be deprived of an important and necessary moment for reflection and debate, it would be disarmed just at its most delicate point, which is to say in its way of conceiving a libertarian, federative, and self-governing association and organisation in its internal democratic structure. And finally, one can formally accept the statute utilising the legitimate and, in my opinion, necessary weapon of a political and ideological judgement regarding Fascism. But in this case the party of dialogue and tolerance towards those who are different would go to hell.

Even in expressing a judgement on Plebe, I personally do not feel like renouncing the right to use my critical intelligence. I have and do judge him on the basis of what I know about him. Not for hi work as a scholar of aesthetics of which I know nothing, nor for his books (which I confess never having encountered in my reading - and this could be a limitation of mine), but for his recent and less recent political choices and for his declarations. I accuse Plebe of political transformism and cultural confusion. I remember the positions he took against the student movement which echoed that of "Pravda" at the time when he was still the only para-Communist intellectual accredited in Moscow (which was already precluded to the likes of Strada and Spriano). I remember him at the Casa della Cultura - contradicted by a dyspeptic Terracini - define divorce in polemics with us, as "a bourgeois right". Was there not in these positions already the germ of his adhesion to Almirante's MSI? If so it would be further

proof of how much secret Fascism there is hidden behind overt Fascism in the culture and practice of a certain part of the left.

This shifting from one extreme to the other has in any case illustrious and not necessarily mediocre precedents on the left - and not only the Italian left, but elsewhere in Europe. Directing Plebe's choices at that time there was probably only the kind of conformity that was typical of many intellectual front members. As in his subsequent attempt to found a European right-wing cultural movement with reference to the involutions of some exponents of the Frankfurt school, there was above all a great deal of vanity and strong, perhaps excessive, but certainly mistaken ambition.

In his recent statements to "Panorama" (a popular weekly, ed.), now that he has accomplished another 180 degree turn about, what astonished me was that accent of futurism, the "futurist conception" that the senator is supposed to have of political action. But does Plebe really believe that our Radicalism, our Socialism, our libertarianism is composed of acts, of gestures alone? A gesture, any gesture, is only a means of expression, of communicating contents, political positions, ideas, programmes. We are far from the times of Prezzolini's "Voce" (*) when in the name of the fight against the dominating positivism of the time such diverse spirits as Giovanni Amendola and Giovanni Papini could make common cause. And it is not a situation that can be repeated today, because the crisis we are going through has different characteristics. There is less possibility than ever for confounding the purely external revolutionary with the fight for a radical reform of society and the state. What always astonishes me,

and not only in regard to Plebe, is the

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

(*) A Florentine cultural review of the second decade of the century founded and directed by the writer Giuseppe Prezzolini.

indifference to values, to the great differences in ideals, to political objectives.

I have invited Senator Plebe to meditate on what I consider a remarkable "state of confusion" in his political ideas, if they can be called that. But having said as much, I refuse to join in

the chant of "get thee behind me, Satan", of the appeals to Radical purity and anti-Fascism, of the hard and unequivocal statements (that sound to me like exorcisms).

Comrade Pezzana, in the name of all the members of FUORI (front of revolutionary homosexuals, ed.) has personally given a kind of ultimatum to the national secretary: reject Plebe's request for membership. And how is that to be done? Pezzana doesn't say.

Other comrades have made reproofs for the lack of a declared judgement deploring the "Fascist" Plebe, expressing disgust and condemnation.

The moment of truth comes for everyone. There are certain things which one has to believe in to the end, and which cannot be believed in only half way for the purpose of propaganda or cagey tactics. One cannot believe half way in our libertarian statute and then, at the first test, make a de facto or legal return to the usual mechanisms which we have criticised in other political organisations.

And then too, is it true that this party can be taken over and "corrupted" so easily? Is a Senator Plebe all it takes to create a crisis among us? A Plebe can create a crisis only if our ideas are not very clear, if our nerves are weak, if we have no confidence in ourselves and our libertarian organisation. This statute makes it impossible for anyone to take possession of the Radical Party, nor can the party in turn dispossess anyone of his freedom of conscience and opinion and action. The party is a political smallest common denominator of the ideological positions of each of its members. A 3/4 majority is required to impose a motion. Thus less than 30% of the vote is required to block the passage of a proposal. And the party cannot stop any Radical from trying to advance his proposals on his own once they have been rejected by the Congress. If we abandon this structure, if we remove only one brick, the whole edifice will collapse. We will return to the concept of the church party or the sect party, po

ssibly in the guise of collective self management - the mechanisms typical of the Jacobin tradition, the assemblies that generate committees of public health who will chop of heads - first the heads of its adversaries and then those of its comrades - or who do not produce the unity of diverse groups but sectarianism, fractionalism and division.

The other thing we have to do is decide if we really believe in what we have said and written all these years about the massacres provoked by the regime, the Fascism of the left, the Fascism of the institutions and their killers. Haven't we always said that the witch hunt against the MSI-DN, Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale (**) was exceedingly useful to distract

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**) The neo-Fascist party and two of its far-right movements.

attention from the much more dangerous Fascism in the institutions: that of the DC and its separate bodies, its secret services? I wouldn't want a hunt against the "witch" Plebe or any other witch to be used by us as well, by each of us, unconsciously, to avoid observing that certain amount of Fascist that there is in each of us (that is to say of intolerance, violence and lying), that we carry inside ourselves and which sooner or later comes out in our relations with others.

But, one might object, a political force is judged not only and not so much for what it says and does but for what others make it appear to be. Plebe's membership, together with the amplification worked by the mass information media and the speculation of the other parties could have a pernicious effect on our party.

I answer that this has always been the situation of the Radical Party. Once the regime and its information channels could no longer -as they did for years - keep the public from even knowing that a political force like the Radicals existed, they deformed our image to make it appear as grotesque and repugnant as possible. The people did not get to see us in our true colours. We were no longer the party of struggle against the regime and its fiefs, of anti-militarism, of conscientious objectors, of anti-clericalism, of the fight against the Concordat, for divorce, for abortion, for women's lib, for sexual freedom, for civil disobedience, for non-violence. We were seen in the deforming lights and mirrors set up by the regime. We replied without prudery, without moralising, without self-righteousness. We took possession of that image and threw it back at them and turned it too into an element of provocation, the only kind of provocation that counts, which is the one that comes from the consciousness of one

's own moral and political strength and ideals. We were not in the least afraid of being seen and acting like an army of Don Quixotes defending the odd-balls, like the "street walkers" that others claimed we were: a small unit of defendants and abortionists, outsiders and deserters, homosexuals and feminists, of ignorant common people.

This is what Pasolini knew and said in the speech he wrote the day before he was murdered. He was supposed to give this speech to our Congress in Florence and it has now been published in "Lettere Luterane". In it he asked us to defend the qualities that made us different even in the face of dangers that could arise from a victory in one or another of our battles and advised us to return immediately to what we had been before: "You have not retreated before the greedy and the meretricious, and not even - which says everything - before the Fascists".

But behind all this there is the rigour of our analyses on the "class" data of this regime, analyses which have passed the test of fifteen years of political struggle. THere are our firm ideals, the most important of them being anti-militarism (against all armies) and anti-clericalism (against all kinds of clericalism including that present in lay parties, wherever there is someone who in the name of ideology claims the right to dispossess others of their truth, their culture, their political judgement, even of their language which becomes the language of initiates. There are our libertarian experiments in self-management (a self-management based not on the mythicisation of direct democracy which can give birth, as it has in the past, to the worst forms of totalitarianism) but on the real guarantees of libertarian self-management.

An ideological and closed party can fear infiltrations and take-overs, but a truly lay party cannot fear them because it is not the party but the Radicals themselves who are the repository and the guarantors of Radical ideas. A party which advocates or justifies violence, even in the name of revolution, can become a victim of the regime's violence, whereas a non-violent party can disarm it. A puritan party can become muddied, but not a party that has learned to draw strength even from the mud of the street.

Dangers certainly do exist, but they are different ones. There is the danger that we will become like all the others, that we will not manage to keep faith with the commitment that Pasolini asked of us. And there is the danger that our different culture (and culture of the different) will become a huddle of self-consoling, weeping victims without rigorous analyses or rigorous ideals. But these dangers are not contained in our statute. I see them, if at all, precisely in and behind certain alarmist attitudes that the "Plebe affair" has set off within the party.