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)

What is the culture of a nation? Currently even cultured people think that it is the culture of the scientists, the politicians, the professors, the men of letters, the film-makers, etc: that is, the culture of the intelligentsia. Not so. It is not even the culture of the dominant class, which precisely by means of class struggle tries to impose it, at least formally. It is not even the culture of the dominated class, which is the popular culture of the workers and the peasants. The culture of a nation is the combination of all these class cultures: it is the average of them. And thus it would be an abstraction if it weren't so recognisable - or better, visible - in experience and as an existential fact, and if, consequently, it did not have a practical aspect. In Italy, for centuries, these cultures were distinguishable even if historically unified. Today - almost out of a blue sky, in a kind of advent - historical distinctions and unifications have succumbed to a levelling that almost miraculously rea

lises the inter-classist dream of the old Power. What is this levelling due to? Evidently to a new Power.

I write Power with a capital P - a thing which Maurizio Ferrara in "L'Unità" (the official Communist daily, ed.) of June 12, 1974 stigmatises as irrational - only because I sincerely do not know what this new power consists of and who represents it. I only know that it exists. I no longer recognise in it the Vatican nor in the Powerful Christian Democrats nor in the Armed Forces. I no longer recognise in it even the big industries, because it is no longer constituted by a number of big industries. To me at least it appears rather as a "whole" (an industrial whole) and what is more a "non-Italian whole" (transnational).

I know also - because I see and experience them - some characteristics of this new Power which is still faceless. For example, the rejection of the old Sanfedismo (*) and the old clericalism, its decision to abandon the Church, its determination (crowned with success) to to transform the peasants and the lumpen proletariat into lower middle class, and above all its so-to-speak cosmic mania to actuate "Development" to the hilt: production and consumption.

The identikit of this still blank face of the new Power gives it some vaguely "modern" features due to tolerance and a perfectly self-sufficient hedonistic ideology. But it also gives it some ferocious and essentially repressive features. The tolerance is false because, in reality, no one has ever had to be so normal and conformist as the consumer. And with regard to hedonism, this evidently hides the determination to organise

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

*) Literally "holy faith", a clerical-led reactionary movement.

everything with a ruthlessness that has not been seen before in all history. So then, this new Power, which is not yet represented by anyone and which is due to a mutation in the dominating class, is in reality - if we really want to conserve the old terminology - a form of "total" Fascism. But this Power has also levelled Italy culturally: it is thus a repressive levelling even if attained by the imposition of hedonism and "joie de vivre". The strategy of tension is a signal, albeit essentially anachronistic, of all this.

Maurizio Ferrara in the article mentioned (as too Ferrarotti in "Paese Sera" 14-6-1974) accuses me of aestheticism. And with that he seems to want to exclude me, confine me. Very well, mine may be the viewpoint of an artist: that is, as the good bourgeoisie will have it, a madman. But the fact, for example, that two representatives of the old Power (who yet now serve the new Power in reality, albeit as interlocutors) would have blackmailed each other in regard to the financing of the parties and in the Montesi case - this could also be a good reason for going mad: that is, for so discrediting a class of leaders and a society in the eyes of a new one as to make one lose his sense of proportion and of what is advisable and throw one into a true state of anomie. One should also add that the viewpoint of the madman is to be taken into serious consideration - unless one wants to be progressive in all respects other than in regard to the problem of the mad and limit oneself to the comfortable solution of putt

ing them out of the way.

There are certain madmen who look people in the face and observe their behaviour. Not because they are epigones of Lombrosian (*) positivism however (as Ferrara crudely insinuates), but because they know semiotics. They know that culture produces codes, that codes produce behaviour, that behaviour is a language, and that in a historical moment in which verbal language is entirely conventional and sterilised (made technical), behavioural language (body language and mimicry) assumes a decisive importance.

So to return to the beginning of our discourse, it seems to me that there are good reasons for maintaining that the culture of a nation (in this case, Italy) is expressed above all in the language of behaviour or body language, plus a certain quantity of completely conventionalised and extremely impoverished verbal language.

It is on that level of linguistic communication that are manifested: a) the anthropological mutation of the Italians; b) their complete reduction to a single approved model.

Therefore: to decide to let your hair grow down to the shoulders, or to grow an early-Twentieth-Century moustache; to decide to wear a headband or to pull a beret down over your eyes; to decide whether to dream of a Ferrari or a Porche; to follow TV programmes closely; to know the name of a

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*) Cesare Lombroso, Nineteenth Century psychiatrist and theoretician of criminal anthropology according to which criminal traits were due to physical anomalies.

few best-sellers; to wear pants and open-collared shirts in slavish conformity to style; to have obsessive relations with girls who are exhorted to be always at your side and at the same time to demand that they be "free", etc., etc. - all of these are cultural acts.

Now then, all young Italians perform these identical acts, use the same body language, are interchangeable. This is something which is as old as the world if limited to a social class or a category. But the fact is that these cultural acts, this somatic language are interclassist. In a square full of young people, no one is able anymore to distinguish a student from a worker, a Fascist from an anti-Fascist by the way he looks. And this it was still possible to do in 1968.

The problems of an intellectual belonging to the intelligentsia are different from those of a party and a politician, even if they may have the same ideology. I would like my current opponents on the left to understand that I am capable of realising that if development were suddenly to be arrested and there were a recession, and if the leftist parties did not support the current Power holders, Italy would simply go to pieces. If, instead, the Development continued in the way it has begun, the so-called "historic compromise" (*) would undoubtedly be realistic as a way of trying to correct this development in the sense indicated by Berlinguer (PCI party secretary, ed.) in

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*) The decision of the Communists to collaborate with the Christian Democrats.

his report to the Communist Party's Central Committee (see "L'Unità", June 4, 1974). Nevertheless, just as Maurizio Ferrara doesn't find my "faces" congenial, this manoeuvre of practical politics is uncongenial to me. On the contrary, if anything, I have the duty to criticise it in my Don Quixote and perhaps extremist way. What then are the problems it gives me?

Here is one example: In the article that aroused this argument ("Corriere della Sera", June 10, 1974) I said that the government and the police were really the ones responsible for the terrorist bombings in Milan and Brescia. Because if the government and the police had not wanted it, the bombings would never have occurred. This is a commonplace. Well then, at this point I will really make myself a laughing stock by saying that we progressives, anti-Fascists and men of the left are also responsible for these attacks. In fact, in all these years we have done nothing at all:

1) to prevent talk of "State-caused attacks" did not become a commonplace and everything ended there;

2) (and much worse) we have done nothing so that there would be no Fascists. We have only condemned them thus gratifying our consciences by our indignation. And the stronger and more petulant the indignation, the more serene our consciences.

In reality we behaved with the Fascists (I mean primarily the young ones) in a racist manner. That is, we ruthlessly and prematurely desired to believe that they were racially predestined to be Fascists and that in the face of this decision of destiny there was nothing to be done. And let us not hide the fact: we all knew that in our heart of hearts that when one of them decided to become a Fascist it was an entirely casual decision, it was only a gesture, unmotivated and irrational, and perhaps only a word would have sufficed to keep it from happening. But none of us ever spoke with them or to them. We immediately accepted them as inevitable representatives of evil. And maybe they were only eighteen years old and didn't know anything about anything and they threw themselves head first into the horrid adventure out of sheer desperation.

But we couldn't distinguish them from the others (I don't mean the other extremists, I mean all the others). This is our awful justification.

Padre Zosima (*) (literature for literature!) was immediately able to distinguish Dimitri Karamazov, the parricide, from all the others who were crowded into his cell. And he could do this because (as he later would tell the younger Karamazov) because Dimitri was destined to do the most horrible thing and support the most inhuman suffering.

Think (if you can stand to) about that youth or those youths who went to place the bombs in the square in Brescia. Wasn't there reason to get up and go to them and prostrate oneself? But they were boys with long hair or early-Twentieth-Century moustaches and wearing headbands or berets pulled down over their

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*) A holy man in Dostoevsky's novel "The Brothers Karamazov".

eyes; they were pale and presumptuous and there problem was to dress in fashion, all in the same fashion, and drive Ferraris or Porches or only motorscooters like little idiotic archangels with decorative girls trailing after them - yes, but modern girls and in favour of divorce and women's lib and of development in general... They were, in brief, boys like all the others. There was nothing to distinguish them from anyone else. Even if we had wanted to we couldn't have gone and prostrated ourselves before them. Because the old Fascism, if only by its rhetorical degeneration, was distinguishable; whereas the new Fascism - which is quite another thing - is no longer distinguishable. It is not humanistic rhetoric nor American pragmatism. Its purpose is the reorganisation and the brutal totalitarian levelling of the world.

("Corriere della Sera", entitled "Il Potere senza volto", June 24, 1974, and reprinted in the

book "Scritti corsari", published by Garzanti, Milan)