By Angiolo Bandinelli
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 day before Aldo Moro's corpse was found abandoned in an automobile only one hundred meters away from Piazza del Gesù and Botteghe Oscure (*) "Il Giornale" wrote: "Let us look closely at the biographies of two of the old leaders of the Red Brigades. Two essential components are to be found: one Catholic, the other Communist. In the mid 60's the very religious Curcio was a model student in the Sociology Department of Trent where Professor Alberoni, who today invokes the utmost ruthlessness in repressing the terrorists, was seminating the whirlwinds that today fill him with fear... As for Franceschini... he bore all the earmarks of the disappointed Stalinist: an ex Communist who had fled to the East, an ex propagandist for Radio Prague, an ex follower of Secchia (**) who was constantly more disgusted by the progressive
reformist corruption of the PCI.
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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES
*) Piazza del Gesù is the seat of the Christian Democratic
Party (DC) and Botteghe Oscure that of the Communist Party in Rome.
**) Pietro Secchia (1903-73), a Communist leader.
The writer of these lines was Enzo Bettiza, the prince of journalists on Indro Montanelli's newspaper and, as a senator, one of the few products of the Liberal-Republican agreement in the last elections. The article is not an exercise in cultural anthropology but an editorial on a particularly tense day in the recent dramatic history of Italian events. But it is an article of ambitious proportions. "The Catholic-Communist component", the argument continues, "of the Brigades is unmistakable... The Brigades, have double and recognisable roots, however distorted... in the millenarianism of two churches, in palingenetic "Third Worldism", in the Leninism of war, in the Mao-Stalinism that was practised by Vietnam guerrillas in the front lines as well as the back streets: all of them fragments of the "liberating" revolutionary faith that for years saw Catholic and Stalinist pietists in agreement and which we find again, cooled off and upset, in the ideology of the BR (Red Brigades, ed.) guerrillas.
How can one deny to this reconstruction and interpretation of the facts and issues the dignity of an epigraph, however summary, in which more ambitious and ample reflections are contained and synthesised, a philosophy of history with its own values and structure?
What reflections, what structure? For the most part those which in Europe find their major spokesman in Raymond Aron. Even though it is ready to make formal obsequies to his memory, this school does not partake of the thought of this century's major exponent of libertarianism, Benedetto Croce. The latter, in fact, can no longer furnish the categories adequate for supporting the rapid erosion of an industrial society, in its way capitalistic, except by an attentive rewriting which I do not believe has yet been attempted. (Gennaro Sasso's work has quite another intention.) The heritage of Benedetto Croce has become languid and pale. And one could perhaps even say it has been alive for the last thirty years only or mostly in the recuperation of dialectics and polemics made of it by the followers of Gramsci and Communist historicism. For his part, Aron can still offer the hypotheses of a prestigious project, modern and up to par, even if we are far from the years of the country's impetuous growth, when it
was possible for us to entertain the prospect of institutional and political solutions of the French kind in the sense, let us say, of a Giscard.
I am thinking, in particular, of the Aron of "L'Oppio degli intelletuali" ("The Opium of the Intellectuals", ed.), 1954, (Italian edition: Cappelli, 1958), a book written at the beginning of de-Stalinisation when for the first time European liberal-democratic intellectuals were offered the chance to heap on their Communist and progressive colleagues, who were in crisis because of Krushchev's denunciation of Stalin's crimes, the reproofs and sarcasm which they themselves ought to have suffered in a heavy atmosphere of intimidation and even of incrimination. In this book Aron furnishes all the critical and polemical tools with which to embarrass and hunt down the adversary, dismantling first of all the inner logic of its revolutionary myths: "The tendency to justify absolute power, essentially technocratic, by way of historical schemata of Marxist inspiration; irritation with the slowness of reforms; a taste for redemptory violence".
According to an interpretation that is by now ritual, for Aron too the function of the intellectual is that of a free critic of these dogmas, and above all for that dogma which for him remains the basis of Communist ideology. The future of modern society lies in the imminent crisis of ideologies and the strengthening of the scientific, rational and lay method on which to found the reprise and and development of democracy and its institutions (essentially the parliaments) in the liberal articulation of the historical components peculiar to each country.
Following rational schemata that by now are even obvious, for thirty years Aron has been defending ideals of civilisation and politics that we usually call "lay". In the interpretation that the French writer gives them, there is no question of a "third force" model. There is in him the conviction that the future is working in the right direction. Therefore one must have the strength not so much to insert oneself into the unstable equilibrium that one glimpses, in the no-man's-land and space between the confronting blocks, ("capitalism-collectivism" or "Catholicism-Communism" etc.), but to explicate and promote the growth of a great planning force based on on principles of liberalism and democracy, in the certainty that it alone, at last, is capable of furnishing valid replies and a solution to the problems and conflicts of our time.
There is no doubt that for more than thirty years Raymond Aron has managed to maintain in France and in vast cultural areas of Europe incontestable precepts which have never been surpassed by changing fashions and are respected even by his adversaries: first of all by the Communists who show that they respect and even listen to what he says. In the confrontation with Sartre he was the one who won out; the "nouveaux philosophes" elaborate many of his ideas in their clever pastiches. The sociology of European culture finds an irreplaceable point of reference in the example he offers.
The explanation for this goes quite beyond and aside from his ability in argument and the rightness of his ideas. Aron's strength comes from the fact that in France there still persist very strong social structures connected to bourgeois models and a "free" economy. These are independently expressed by a strong political class capable of representing their interests and ideals with dignity. Probably the freedom that they preach is a freedom for the privileged few, but it knows how to express itself in any case and to propose widely felt objectives. Aron is the natural and valid interpreter of these sectors.
On this terrain, it seems to me difficult to establish any parallels with the Italian situation. Italian structural models are profoundly different from those prevailing across the Alps. Italian capitalism is above all a state capitalism with subordinate fringes of a formally "private" economy which furthermore is in unarrrestable decline. When the president of Confindustria (confederation of industrialists, ed.) Carli, at a recent annual meeting of the association, dared to champion the restoration of conditions for a market economy, he was subjected to a bombardment of criticism and his proposal judged either extravagant or dangerous. But no one expressed astonishment at the assertion in itself that Confindustria's president was making: that is, that in Italy there is no market economy. And yet the statement is enormous in its implications. If things really are the way the Confindustria president says they are, this would impose a complete revision of the parameters used by the students of politics,
by sociologists and scholars to interpret the Italian situation.
The truth, when one looks closely, is even worse than what Carli says. He limits himself to denouncing the most intense emotional aspects of the situation. In a recent essay, Giuliano Amato, a scholar close to the Socialist sphere, reproved the CGIL (Communist labour union, ed.) and the left of having fought for years and having at last obtained self-financing with the consequent repudiation of income from stocks as "the sinful fruit of capital". The consequences of these choices of the left, according to Amato, are disastrous in terms of structure. There has in fact been a disproportionate growth in "the role assumed by the banks functioning as a necessary intermediary between savings and those who utilise them"; thus, while "pure" capitalism has practically disappeared, the banks have become the new administrators of credit manoeuvres, production expansion and incentives. And to say banks means to say, above all, political power and the political class which is ninety per cent Christian Democratic.
It is possible that entrepreneurs as a class still mean something. The society columns still live on the propensity to dissipation of their offspring. But certainly they do not mean much anymore as a political class able to furnish answers and proposals of their own to the needs of the country. And it is also true that the class of entrepreneurs has largely accepted the beating inflicted upon them by the political class. They have always been used to counting on government orders, on the income from their positions, on protectionism, on the exploitation of small-risk sectors, and on cheap labour rather than on the free and hard game of enterprise, on the free market, on technological development. Thus in the new impositions they have only found an even more comfortable and effective way of pursuing their traditional objectives. Even though constantly lamenting, this class has learned very well how to move around in the political underbrush and among the Roman ministries, aiding and abetting their vices
and distortions. The fetters and barriers for the removal of which Carli has called, are only marginal factors with respect to the truly central questions established by the new relationship between private enterprise and the public sector.
If that is how things stand, and I don't see much reason to doubt it, the ambitions of the so-called liberal-democratic lay right evidently must be drastically reduced inasmuch as they would be true "superstructures" with absolutely no claim to a central role in the political confrontation. The hope of a Rosario Romeo to be able to represent a modern point of reference is illusory. There is no doubt that he was right, great historian that he is, in his argument with the Marxists and Gramscians on the meaning of the Risorgimento: whether it was a great liberation movement or an nth imposition on the mass of peasants, already squeezed dry by the attempt to accumulate a capital out of proportion to their needs or that of the other popular classes.
But it is an anachronism today to propose again a weighty and novel meditation on good government in the style of Cavour. All we need is to look at the fate of a De Felice. With his monumental history of Fascism he appeared to be the personification of a tendency to revisionism which was seen as a dangerous sign of a massive expansion of reactionary, or at least conservative cultural, and political forces.
Only a few years were needed to sweep away fears and suspicions. The revisiting or "re-evaluation" of the Fascist economic-structural experience as a fundamental historical fact, irreversible and profoundly rooted in the country, is now going on within the PCI (Communist Party, ed.) by "official" philosophers such as a Tronti or a Luigi Berlinguer. In the end, the Italian crisis, with the problems of the institutions and the economy connected with it, does not bring back to centre stage the "classical" right, the free-economy, capitalistic right, but a different and darker right which, noting the central role of the structures inherited from Fascism, oscillates in an ambiguous (and certainly worried) attempt to overcome if not invert them, but in a heretofore unknown and unexplored way.
A right like that runs through all the parties of the constitutional range, and this is not a reproof but a worried observation.
The last political act of the classic right that had a certain dignity and autonomy was the defense of divorce during the referendum. Papers like "Il Messaggero" and "Corriere della Sera", at the time owned respectively by Sandro Perrone and Giulia Crespi, played a role that in those circumstances that must be considered essential to the victory of the "no" vote (*) by rigorously choosing their position and attacking the entire bad government of the Christian Democrats in their thirty years of power. But as a direct result of this choice those papers immediately afterwards were taken out of the hands of their traditional owners and aligned with the positions of the parties at the moment when the latter had concluded, or were preparing to conclude their constitutional pact with the ensuing division of spheres of influence, particularly between the DC and Socialists.
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*) The "no" vote was the vote against abrogating the law allowing divorce.
After this episode the "economic right" got the antiphony and rapidly changed course. The DC raises its sights in its pretensions to hegemony with regard to them as well as to the rest of the country. The results of the referendum on divorce and the slap-in-the-face of the regional elections of '75 make them aware that further indecision will no longer be allowed. According to several witnesses, already after this election, Fanfani (*) himself pleaded warmly for an organic agreement with his party to a Liberal Party delegation that met with him in the Senate. But this prospect first had to go through other tests and starts, the first of them being that of the "Lay Alliance" by means of which the intermediate parties hoped to avoid being definitively snuffed out during the national elections of '76.
The details of this electoral skirmish are well known. Rosario Romeo uselessly tries to provide it with a bit of cultural and historical support. And even more futile is Gianni Agnelli's (**) not so secret support. The initiative crumbles into dust - not because of the intemperance of La Malfa (***) who can't stand Malagodi (***) and threatens to sink the ship at every step of the way, but because the class of owners is not impressed with lovely words and once again, as under Fascism,
chooses power, real power. And so it is Umberto Agnelli who
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*) Amintore Fanfani, DC leader.
**) President of Fiat.
***) Ugo La Malfa, Secretary of the Republican Party; Giovanni Malagodi, Secretary of the Liberal Party.
enters Parliament and takes a place in the ranks of the DC.
Montanelli also shows that he has the right instincts: when he sees that the alliance has no real chance of succeeding he asks his electorate, holding their noses if necessary, to vote for the party of relative majority, the DC. Are these changes of route, these sudden windings in the road to be wondered at? Not at all. The great economic right has always been - and Rosario Romeo should have known it - deeply and ineluctably integrated in the power system and cannot avoid leaning on the party that has its hand on the steering wheel.
The other card also fails - and it could not be otherwise - the one played by exponents of the "historic" meeting between progressive capitalist forces and Piero Gobetti's (*) advanced labour class on the common objective of defeating the parasitical incomes and pockets of organic waste that are jeopardising the country's prospects of modern development. This thesis, so Amendolian (**) and apparently lucid goes to pieces as soon as the Christian Democrats put on the brakes. Finally, when the lay intellectuals within and without the newly founded "Associazione per il Rinnovamento della Cultura, dell'Economia e della Società" (ARCES) (Association for the Renewal of Culture,
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(*) The ideologist of liberal socialism and anti-Fascist forced into exile in France.
(**) Liberal politician forced into exile by the Fascists.
the Economy and Society, ed.) tried to put themselves across as the modern conscience and the thinking head of the large body of Catholics, the Catholics reply to them in kind, refusing to be encased in a subordinate position. In the monthly "Prospettive nel Mondo" ("World Prospects") Domenico Settembrini proposes "radical laicization" for the "Christian Democratic" body. The Catholic Sergio Cotta replies by refusing so mechanical an operation as joining a lay "head" to a Christian Democratic "body". One is at least permitted to doubt, the Catholic intellectual proudly admonishes, that "the Christian "body" is entirely lacking a head".
If today one scrutinises the dispersed parts of so-called liberal-democratic culture, one notices with certainty that the opposite is the case: it is the lay intellectuals who, slowly becoming resigned, flow back towards Christian Democratic bastions. At the conference "Stato e Libertà" (State and Liberty) the introductory address was given by Garosci and Gonella together. Other analogous indications are certainly not lacking, on the contrary there is a plethora. It appears that the decline cannot be stopped, the prospects for a new April 18, (*) with another flight of the Italian bourgeoisie and all of its intellectuals under the wide-spread, protective wings of the DC, appears imminent and without any alternative.
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*) The date in 1948 when the Christian Democrats won the national elections against the leftist popular front.
The Aron alternative is thus not an exportable commodity - at least not to Italy. Several basic presuppositions are lacking to enable it to catch on. The liberal-democratic theses become constantly more frayed, do not manage to be considered in the debate or the political confrontation. Several of them that were essential yesterday, questionable but important for defining a traditional image, disappear entirely: we need only think of the very central criticism of party power in defense of important and characteristic Parliamentary powers. The theme becomes a Radical Party war horse while "Il Giornale" embraces the theses of the unrelenting champions of so-called "efficiency" even when it is Parliament itself to pay the price.
The polemics lose bite and conviction. The opposition to the feared marriage becomes querulous and insubstantial, lacking in credibility. There is not a single alternative project. Anti-Communism becomes obsessive. In his "Labirinto Marxista", Domenico Settembrini forces himself to demonstrate that the entire body of Communist doctrine is a conglomeration of maxims without any scientific rigour and thus incapable of furnishing tools for understanding the complex realities of modern life or possible hints for the future. "Il Giornale" grinds out daily items regarding the internal contradictions of Eastern European countries, their economic and social difficulties. On the domestic front, the predominant commitment is to hunt out and unmask "crypto-Communists" - those who, obeying a deceitful design or from simple stupidity, betray their duty as citizens, as officials, as judges, due to ideological deviation or laxness towards the hated enemy.
While bourgeois entrepreneurs demonstrate ever more clearly day by day that they are by now mere appendages of DC controlled bank credit, the democratic lay culture seems to go back to exploiting the conditioned fears of the lower middle class, the most frustrated class, according to an old and abused but still effective line. Thus it becomes the recipient of votes that are recalcitrant towards the DC. That an operation of this kind is going on at the same time that the PCI is also trying force a breech as the party of order among the same classes is the only element of curiosity and uncertainty.
For the rest, this right has no possibility or probability of playing an autonomous role or function. It is only because of necessity and to play the game that the left indicates that it gives it any importance and fears its growth. By a curious inversion of roles, to rejuvenate and bring up again some of the great issues that once were the property of the liberal-democratic right, today one must go to the ever growing extra-parliamentary fringes, of which a Stame (a leftist intellectual, ed.) is the authoritative and unsuspected expression.
("Città e Regione", May 1978)
