ABSTRACT: The bill forbidding people who hold certain posts to be registered members of political parties is an expression of what the party-power system and the culture that has arisen around it thinks of itself: the lives of decent people are incompatible with membership in existing political institutions. In other places, places that are really high in the ranks of political democracy and constitutional society, they believe quite the contrary.

(L'UNITA',(1) November 9, 1989)

So the Italian parties are preparing a bill to establish that people with free and responsible functions, capable of being (or obliged to be) impartial and intellectually honest, cannot be registered members. The party card, in a word, is reserved only for those who have no social, civil or institutional functions that require an impartial and calm judgement and freedom of decision and action.

At the bottom of this decision is a cocktail of Freudian lapses, demagogy, anti-democratic culture, the incapacity to legislate, in such a way that positive law can be practicable and efficacious.

There are two possibilities: either the parties are the essential foundation of the democratic game and in themselves a school of democracy, or they are the source of non-liberty, dependence and irresponsibility in regard to civil and constitutional rights and duties.

The party-power system and the culture surrounding it (therefore, including the "qualunquistically" (2) anti-party-power attitude) judge themselves in a way consistent with their nature and their history: the lives of decent people are incompatible with membership in the existing political institutions. In other places which are the truly high places of political democracy and constitutional society (and which "naturally" include the usual amount of human aberrations and error), they think quite the opposite on this question. They think that only registered membership in a political party, public and open membership, can guarantee that minimum sense of responsibility and practice of liberty that are part of the basic duties and rights of the democratic citizen.

There they do not confuse the personal, solitary and vainly ambitious "independence" of the individual with liberty and responsibility. There they have always known that the strength and honour of a free person consist in knowing how to choose and control the interdependencies of which human nature is composed and not in negating them. There, on the contrary, they believe that to proclaim oneself a responsible member of a democratic "part" is a public guarantee of a personal and social dynamic that poses the obligation (and the will) to apply laws and duties impartially under the tutelage of public control (and of one's own interests in this control).

There they know that betrayal, submission, omertà (3), uncontrolled and uncontrollable partiality always cover themselves with the banner of being above partiality. There they also show they know that in a democracy those who think they are living above the level of the democratic game have no choice but to live below that level.

Certainly it is a sign of honour and civil strength not to be registered as member of the party in those places where there is only one party with all others prohibited and where there is no democracy. To fear a party, even your own, is certainly comprehensible whenever it represents an entity, a church, separate from the process of institutional democracy by means of various forms of "centralism", be they democratic, bureaucratic, oligarchic or monarchist. In fact, not to fear it has always appeared to me imprudent or presumptuous.

In that sense I have never approved, for example, the fact that the speakers of the chambers of Parliament who are registered PCI [Communist Party] members participate regularly in the policy deliberations of the party when there is and was the obligation for the participants in these meetings to hold to the collective will whatever positions they may have taken during the course of the policy formation.

History as well as logic should by now have made it become part of common culture and taken for granted that it precisely those who proclaim their independence from the parties - whether they are generals, public officials, big managers or proprietors, or even "sans culottes" or fanatics of the "real country" - who are instigators of the great treacheries, omertà, faithlessness, or the inability to respect the basic laws of the state and society (if we can continue to have these "distinct" references rather than others).

The "party of the independents, the capable and the honest" is exactly the opposite of what it proclaims or intends to be unless it becomes a formal, responsible party sustained by (its own) norms of which all can judge; norms and forms that become an indispensable tool for understanding what it will and would do if one day it should govern the institutions, which would necessarily be influenced decisively by its chosen way and demonstrated capacity of governing itself.

On the other hand, it seems to me absolutely unconstitutional as well as anti-democratic to exclude Italian citizens who are serving and functioning in the army or the judiciary from democratically contributing to the formation of the nation's will and choices. And why ever should it be? Are the schools perhaps less sacred for society and the state? And the Health Department and all the rest? The truth is that the party-power system knows itself. Anyone who belongs to it, without realising that the party-power system is "different", competing with or the opposite of democracy, will find himself faced with an insurmountable contradiction on the logical and democratic level. The "partycrat" wants the "defense of the fatherland" and of "constitutional law" to be accomplished by someone other than himself. He is afraid - and quite rightly - that fundamental moments of institutional life will be administered by himself or people like himself.

But for this to be done, for it to be achieved, the only way is to determine that no members of the Radical Party should be able to act in these fundamental moments. The Radical Party back in 1967 established in its statutes that no representative body, parliamentary or other group can call itself "Radical" unless it explicitly excludes from its norms any "discipline" of party, or group, or clan, or family, or friendship, or love etc...

This, obviously, on the part of those who are not Radical and whose vision of law, society, politics, and civil life - their own and others - is based on "prohibitions" of various kinds.

I remain, and always more so, even in this case, an anti-prohibitionist and a liberal. The dead souls of our own kind of [political] laity are not unhappy about this since they seem to want entrust democratic and liberal chances to a kind of "state party" of "independents" detached from the democratic game and its political institutions. And neither are those Socialists unhappy about it who would like in that way to make Italian democracy something like the kind that reigns in the PSI [Socialist Party, ed.].

---------------------------------------------------------------- TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) L'Unità - The official Communist Party daily.

2) Qualunquismo - A common term in Italian political parlance referring to an attitude of diffidence towards political parties and the party system as such.

3) Omertà - The criminal code imposing silence (from honour and often fear) on all who have information regarding criminal acts.