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)

We have confused, says an authoritative political figure of the left, the government with the state. What I think he wants to say is that for years we have been directing our opposition to the government as if we were directing it at the state, without distinguishing it from the state. But I am wondering: is it possible to see the state separately from the government of the state? And furthermore: are we not now creating another, different confusion between the state and the constitution?

When I went to school, there was one small text with a white cover. I seem to remember that it was an extract from the Encyclopedia Treccani article on Fascism, an article written in tandem by Mussolini and Gentile. It was called "The Doctrine of Fascism" and it was a subject we were examined on. That book gave birth to my aversion for the state as a mystical, a metaphysical concept. Another small book encouraged this salubrious aversion, a book discovered in a little bookshop in Caltanissetta where one could find books printed as much as fifty years earlier. I still conserve this little book just as I found it then: falling apart, with the cover detached. Adriano Tigher, "Lo spaccio del bestione trionfante. Stroncatura di Giovanni Gentile. Un libro per filosofi e non filosofi", Piero Gobetti Publishers, Turin, 1925. (*)

It is a book that would be worth reprinting at this time. Not because conditions today are the same as they were in 1925; but it does no harm to brush up on what happens when you begin to talk about the state rather than the constitution, when the state begins to appear not as a combination and co-ordination of services but as a "more than physical" entity that goes beyond the fulfilling of needs.

*) The title of the work might be translated: " The Destruction of the Beast Triumphant. Demolishing Giovanni Gentile. A Book for Philosophers and Non-philosophers". Giovanni Gentile was a philosopher who became a Fascist Party official.

("L'Ora" May 30, 1978 and subsequently

in "Nero su nero", Einaudi, Turin)