ABSTRACT: On the proposal to arrest Toni Negri the Communists are like the killers of the Third International. Radicals and DP [Proletarian Democrats] are victims of discrimination and excluded from the dividing up between the DC-PCI. The institutional majority violates any residual concern for the formal legitimacy of its decisions.

("IL MANIFESTO", August 17, 1983)

Dear Comrades,

The arrest of Toni Negri has only just been avoided (and only put off until September 13) by the Communist members of the Commission for the Authorisation to Proceed, and furthermore have been obliged to act on "their own volition" like any killers from the time of the Third International.

Am I being too hard? Do I ignore and compromise the "serious internal conflicts" on this score that torment the PCI and make it susceptible to choices opposite to the ones now being put into practice or forced into practice? I do not much believe in corridor battles, those of an oligarchic kind, except perhaps as the sites of defeats. And I act accordingly. The PCI can change its mind on the arrest of Deputy Toni Negri only if in these hours, in these days, it is forced into a public confrontation on this issue. Am I asking too much, dear comrades of "Il Manifesto"? I read with incredulity the sloppy and distracted bits [the press] reserved for this parliamentary affair and our usual excesses and tantrums. Yes, we plead guilty to having held up for half a day the vote of confidence to the Craxi government by presenting ten proposals for action, on which, furthermore, we were not granted one minute of your attention nor one line to inform your readers. We admit to having done this - as we had for some t

ime pre-announced - among other reasons, in order to put you on your guard along with a few others to the gravity of what was happening "clandestinely" which struck us as more than what was being shown and recorded "publicly".

We thus admit to having tried to utilise the time needed for presenting these proposals, each of them dealing with a precise issue and containing precise indications, also in order to prevent:

a) the Radicals and DP from suffering discrimination and being excluded from the illegitimate as well as "institutional" division in the sense of Berlinguer and De Mita of even the last spoils of the Italian Parliamentary practice (inccluding the work premises and the small change of the Army's company administration offices);

b) the Parliament from not taking action on absolutely imperative, necessary and urgent issues in the absence of an institutional agreement among the five-party coalition and PCI supporters (now subdivided into the elected of the PCI, of the Independent Left and of the Proletarian Unity Party);

c) that any quarrel apropos of Nicaragua, Afghanistan, or the speech of Sen. Colajani can be used to the hilt for making an absolutely false summing up of this legislature which is only beginning and which is characterised "on the official level" by Socialist choices taken for granted and pre-announced at the elections, while "on the level of substance" it is characterised by the national unity orientation (far from being an "alternative") and the redistribution in progress of government jobs.

The result has been to exclude from the "institutional majority" - which is thus a "political majority" - the Radicals and the Democratic Proletarians from offices at all levels of the Presidency of the Chamber and the Senate, the Permanent Commissions, the Boards of the Bicameral Commissions, and even to exclude them from the boards and commissions themselves (the Regulating Commission, the one for Authorisation to Proceed, the Commission on the P2, the Radicals of the Anti-Mafia).

The "institutional majority" furthermore has with unprecedented arrogance decided to violate any residual concern with at least formal legality by postponing until September the creation of the RAI-TV [state radio and TV] Vigilance Commission and the one of the Board of Enquiry, since they have not yet reached an agreement on the division of this part of the spoils despite the peremptory instructions of the law. Thus the RAI-TV has remained without an administrative council since March and three of its members working in the routine administration have in the meantime gone to Parliament. Thus the Board of Enquiry will probably see a few minor offences fall under the statute of limitations which in general are more dangerous for the ministers under serious accusations as the Lockheed (1) case demonstrates:

In the next few days we will give the figures and the dimensions of the round-up which has been organised principally by the PCI and of which it has been the principal beneficiary. And we will also send you the stenographic records of our discourses so that you will at least know what this nth example of a few hours of PR "obstructionism" consisted in.

We warn you in advance, however, that we are firmly decided to persist in our error - as always - including on September 1 and 13 on the Board for the Authorisation to Proceed and in the Chamber when once again we will "accede" to and "be useless" against the authorisation to arrest Toni Negri - hoping that one will not be reduced to preparing some belated cry of pain and consternation against yet another "unexpected" error of the PCI.

Perhaps, dear comrades, "we will not die as Christian Democrats" just as others "will not die as Giolittians". Instead we will die under the reign of the great new "party of intransigence" - we too. It has already happened, among others, to Aldo Moro...

No thanks.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) The Lockheed scandal concerned kickbacks for orders of Lockheed Hercules aircraft which involved top-level government officials.