Letter from a new member to old friends. Of causes lost and battles won.

by Adriano Sofri (2)

ABSTRACT: Adriano Sofri, the former leader of Lotta Continua, talks about the possible dissolution of the Radical Party for want of money. Joining the Radical Party is expensive: for the other

parties, the fact of embracing a belief cannot be reduced to the petty accountancy of the membership fees, and they have asked for public funds and other things; in the Radical Party, you buy the membership card as you would buy any other good, and it costs Lit. 365,000. The other parties have been overwhelmed by the need, and later by the habit, of easy money. The Radical Party could be forced to close because of the paradox represented by the disproportion between the many battles won and the ridiculously low number of Italian members. It takes 30,000 members to survive: "I don't know if this is fair, but I realize it is necessary. I have realized it is a question of money, and in the Radical Party, a question of money is a serious question".

There follows a brief article by Corrado Anzon on the radical party's congress, to be held in Rome from 4-8 February 1993.

(PANORAMA, 31 January 1993)

Marco Pannella (3) once told me he had two concerns: one was not having a lawyer, the other was not having a terrace. The Radical Party's headquarters, in Via di Torre Argentina, has one of the most beautiful terraces in Rome. In fact, it has three different terraces, the first larger and facing the Quirinal, the second higher up and small, which affords a view from Trinità dei Monti to the Gianicolo, and the third is a turret proper, which dominates the entire scenery of domes and roofs, from the Pantheon - which one can almost touch by extending an arm - to the Synagogue, from the spiral of St.Ivo to the corner of the Castle where he folds back his sword, as the night has gone by; but looking at him, one has the impression he is extracting his sword, to fight the current epoch. Though I have often been a member of the Radical Party, I confess I go there much more often now that there are these new headquarters, and I am free to climb up the winding staircase to the three terraces, and enjoy a magnificent v

iew of Rome. All this belongs to me as well, since I'm a member of the party.

The other evening, Pannella told me soon those headquarters will no longer be ours. He said it with nonchalance, and it did not surprise me. The radicals behave, toward their material possessions and their own bodies, like Cellini when his Perseus was melted, to remain in Castel Sant'Angelo; but as I was writing this, my mind went to the hospitals in Sarajevo, where chairs are burnt in the fire, and the old extract the roots of chopped down trees from the earth. May all the houses of Rome burn to heat the next night in Sarajevo: I agree, but I was not taken in by Pannella's words, because I remembered that sentence on the terrace. Now I'm writing these few pages as I would write a letter to my friends, because I hope something can be done to heat Sarajevo and us, and keep our terraces. It's not an easy task, do you know why? Because it's a question of money. A fine paradox, that a question related to money, the easiest and most familiar of our things, is difficult. In this part of the world, we have devised

expressions to mask our wealth. We were ready to deplore anyone who wanted to buy himself a clean conscience with money. But recently we are scarcely incline even to these transactions: we prefer to keep the money, and our bad conscience. The radicals have long chosen to unveil this hypocrisy. Joining the radical party is expensive: or rather, it isn't expensive compared to our superfluous consumptions, but it is very expensive compared to the gratuity or the cheap prices of most other parties. The other parties consider this slightly vulgar: they believe something noble such as joining a party - a faith, an ideal, a program, a statute, a collective identity which is more sacred and solemn than the identity of the people who join it - should not be degraded to the petty accountancy of the membership fees. In order to be up to this sacred notion of the parties and of their need, the other parties have asked for the public funding of the parties. The radical prose - according to which the radical membership fe

e must be bought just like any other good - is the base action of a private emporium compared to the solemnity of the abstract word "financing" or to the magnanimous adjective "public". It must be true, for the radicals, that their unassailable personal and collegial honesty lead the others not to take seriously so many honest citizens who are now erecting the scaffolds to punish the corrupt.

The others have been unlucky: overwhelmed by the need and later by the habit of easy money. Now Oscar Luigi Scalfaro (4) has declared that this expression - public financing - is unpronounceable. On the other hand, the radicals have gotten rid of the admirable disgrace of so much voluntary service (including the revolutionary militancy I formerly belonged to), the spirit of sacrifice and dedication which translates into collecting all one has and giving it to the poor, to the party, to the party of the poor. In that dedication, which I will always long for, there was the confusion between personal and public life, between justice and sanctity. The radical membership card needs to be bought, just like any other item. In this lay character - I know the word is unpopular, but I can't find a suitable one - the radicals are rather naive. They add: "the price of a coffee", "the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes", trying to materially corroborate the request for Lit. 365,000, whereas they thus underline the dispro

portion between a superfluous good and a common initiative which is really worth something. Unlike what its theory proclaims, the world of material goods refuses any possibility of comparison, any reasonable proportion. Were this not true, who could afford to dine at a restaurant for the equivalent of the monthly salary of a family of six in Ghana? Betraying its declared theory, at the price of 365 coffees, the radical party offers an item which is worth a lot more. In fact, those 270,000 lira or 365,000 lira or other are at the same time too much and too little for the current standards of consumption. Those who believe the life of the radical party is worth a lot find that calculating on money is superfluous and even degrading. Those who are willing to give one of the many commendable subventions our society appeals to may judge the radical party excessive. So Pannella's popularity, the esteem for the radicals, their lost causes and their battles won, the common perception that if they didn't exist someon

e would need to invent them, are in ridiculous contrast with the number of Italian members. The Radical Party, its mayors in Sarajevo, its militants from Uzbekistan and Burkina Faso, Agorà and its nice terraces, could all disappear because of this paradox, for want of money. It is a question of money, therefore.

When they illustrate the services the membership card entitles to, the radicals talk about a life insurance and an adoption. I won't comment the first comparison, and the insurance which comes from the Radical Party for the defence of the law and the rights, because I am a well-known example of the accidents that can ruin our lives. But I am truly enthusiastic about the idea of the adoption. It's wonderful that there is a party, and that it holds its congress like a meeting among friends, in which those who have some money pay for the others who can't afford it. Offering a dinner is already beautiful: more precisely, in this case, rather than an expense, it is an investment. We who have always bought the membership card, invest on those members of parliament from Macedonia, on those Serbian deserters, on that Somalian Islamic dissident. The adoption is also an insurance, therefore.

When I try to understand why the active adhesion to the radical party - money - is so incredibly rare, I find other explanations. For example, the impression that the radicals have been precious once, but are obsolete now. This incredible prejudice deserves to be better investigated, especially now that there is widespread passion for everything new.

As a young man, thirty years ago, I appreciated the radicals, but I was convinced that they were obsolete. Here too, the paradox plays an important role; the belief that the radicals have had far-sighted intuitions and confirmed forecasts on a variety of decisive issues damages their credibility, or at least their possibility of being used. With his constantly updated chronicle of the radical prophecy - nonviolence, conscientious affirmation-objection, anti-nuclear position, abortion, divorce, civil rights, public financing, prohibition, anti-Zionist mental confusion, Europe, Yugoslavia, electoral reform, transparty character (a horrible world, by the way) - Pannella is becoming, in the eyes of many people, a sort of rhabdomancer, a wizard who is always right in his prophecies, in his odd and mysterious way. Moreover, the overwhelming presence of Pannella in the radical party's history summarizes the judgments and prejudices of many people in his person and even in the way in which time is changing him. Occa

sionally the prejudice is directly aimed at Pannella: he has been precious for Italy, but he's out of date. Or, on the contrary, one is suddenly surprised at discovering that Pannella is an expert in political games, an elector of presidents, a shadow ruler...One wonders about Pannella's future as a possible minister; in the meanwhile, he presides the municipal council in Ostia. I personally find it a scandal that Pannella hasn't yet been offered a position in the government, in this country and elsewhere, and I would be surprised if he received it now as I would if they had awarded Jorge Luis Borges the Nobel Prize.

I wonder how time acts on Pannella. He himself seems to joke about the link between embodying people's hopes and his own body, that seems to be expanding, possibly the effect of the many hunger strikes and of the threat of new ones. Pannella had the courage to represent hunger through his own body, and mutually forcing to imagine that the millions of starving people were fasting out of their own choice. The shadow of that thin Pannella has never stopped following him, even now that it takes three people to hug him, as with certain trees. A long time ago, people thought Pannella would end up badly, even more than they thought it about Pasolini (5). This has not occurred, and I look at this Pannella, so imposing and dressed in dark like the political forefathers he never stops mentioning, with a combination of concern and consolation. In the summer of 1974, Pannella advocated a penal trial against the political establishment: Pasolini immediately endorsed the idea and expressed it in his own way. Twenty years

later, we may well be witnessing the penal trial against the political establishment. It was bound to happen. Between the political prophecy and the poetic metaphor there is the difference which is under our eyes. Pannella is not a man of the establishment, nor a media man. He believes in the law, in rights, in politics. I don't envy him.

Therefore, there are at least a thousand reasons to endorse the survival of the radical party. But joining it? The most important part of the letter that invites people to join the party is the one that summarizes the party's statute. It would seem to belong more to the utopian or parodistic literature than to the case history of the political parties. Joining the party "doesn't involve any form of discipline"; "you buy the card like you would buy a train or bus ticket, to use a public service, and no one can take it away; no one can express moral or political or statutory judgments on a member". It is a yearly party. It doesn't ask people to sacrifice their freedom to a collective identity; on the contrary, it wants to enhance the freedom and responsibility of each member. "The Radical Party doesn't represent its members...It is an instrument, not a home, a family or a belief". Now, these extravagant characteristics are extremely serious. They completely revolutionize the common notion of party, of its well

-meaning ancient motivation and of its exhausted contemporary protraction. Submitting the personal responsibility to the collective one: the disciplinary unity of the part versus the other part; the idea of an ideological or general programmatic consent: all this has nothing to do with the radical party, which is no more tolerant than the other parties; simply, it believes differences and divergences should exist, be expressed and remain. The party created to side against the enemy should be united within and strenuously aggressive on the outside. A nonviolent party is the place where people of good will meet. It is the place to practice that inflexible friendship which one intends to experiment also in the outer world. People stay there out of need for effectiveness and human affinity.

There are many places you can go to when you want to support a just cause; and, primarily, when you need help. The radical party is one of them, one of the most precious ones. It has decided it needs 30,000 members in Italy in order to survive. I've realized it's necessary, I've realized it's a question of money. And in the radical party a question of money is a serious question.

-------------------------

Delegates from all over the world

by Corrado Anzon

Three days on the back of a camel from Bamako, Mali, through the Sahel desert, to Adibdjan is what Salifou Diallo, parliamentary from Burkina Faso, will have to endure in the coming days. Four days - and four nights - on a train through the bitter cold of Kirghistan and Kazakhstan to reach Moscow is the program for Rahmet Mukashov. Their common destination: Rome. A vow they need to be released from? A spy story? None of the kind. More simply, from 4 to 8 February the umpteenth radical event will take place at the Hotel Ergife. This time, it's the second session of the first transnational congress of Marco Pannella's party (the first was held in May '92).

"Our biggest problem is collecting funds. It will really take a miracle to survive", says Emma Bonino (6). The entire organization of the event depends on her, and the Italian member of Parliament has turned into a acrobat of finance, to collect the funds necessary to cover the expenses: 1 billion and 200 million lire, divided between travel expenses for the poorest of the 700 delegates, the 90 interpreters who will translate speeches, motions and debates into six languages (Italian, English, French, Russian, Croatian, Rumanian), the small "transnational attentions" such as the flags of all the States and minorities attending the Congress. In order to introduce the leadership of the new party to the journalists covering the event and to have the delegates become acquainted with one another, a pamphlet has been published containing the biographical data of all participants. Moreover, the delegates will have a sort of handbook with all the information they will need during the days of the congress: timetables

and itineraries of the shuttle buses that link the hotel with the centre, and, above all, the procedures to change foreign currency which it is hard to change in most banks.

Two thousand people are expected to attend the congress, but the radical "population" in '92 amounted to 10,000 members, 2,583 of whom Italians. Each member pays his membership fee according to the GDP (gross domestic product) of his country. For an Italian radical, the cost is 270,000 lire, for a Bolivian citizen $10, for a Pakistani member $5, and so on. "With this system, we relied mostly on the financial support of the Western country, but we soon realized the majority of our members comes from countries with a very low per capita income, so we decided to launch the campaign for the achievement of 30,000 members in Italy. But to date, only 600 have responded", says Emma Bonino.

Translator's notes

(1) LOTTA CONTINUA. One of the most important and widespread political movements of the extreme left, established in 1969 in Turin. In 1971 it created the homonymous newspaper, which became immediately popular. It detached the extraparliamentary Left from the laborite prejudicial, penetrating the youth and students' milieu, the conscripts, the prisons, etc. Its chief leader was the journalist and writer Adriano Sofri.

(2) SOFRI ADRIANO. (1942). Leader of the Italian extraparliamentary movement "Lotta Continua". Journalist and writer. Tried and convicted to twenty years of prison as the presumed author of the assassination of police commissioner Calabresi. Lucid and disillusioned memorialist.

(3) PANNELLA MARCO. Pannella Giacinto, known as Marco. (Teramo 1930). Currently President of the Radical Party's Federal Council, which he is one of the founders of. At twenty national university representative of the Liberal Party, at twenty-two President of the UGI, the union of lay university students, at twenty-three President of the UNURI, national union of Italian university students. At twenty-four he advocates, in the context of the students' movement and of the Liberal party, the foundation of the new radical party, which arises in 1954 following the confluence of prestigious intellectuals and minor democratic political groups. He is active in the party, except for a period (1960-1963) in which he is correspondent for "Il Giorno" in Paris, where he established contacts with the Algerian resistance. Back in Italy, he commits himself to the reconstruction of the radical Party, dissolved by its leadership following the advent of the centre-left. Under his indisputable leadership, the party succeeds in

promoting (and winning) relevant civil rights battles, working for the introduction of divorce, conscientious objection, important reforms of family law, etc, in Italy. He struggles for the abrogation of the Concordat between Church and State. Arrested in Sofia in 1968 as he is demonstrating in defence of Czechoslovakia, which has been invaded by Stalin. He opens the party to the newly-born homosexual organizations (FUORI), promotes the formation of the first environmentalist groups. The new radical party organizes difficult campaigns, proposing several referendums (about twenty throughout the years) for the moralization of the country and of politics, against public funds to the parties, against nuclear plants, etc., but in particular for a deep renewal of the administration of justice. Because of these battles, all carried out with strictly nonviolent methods according to the Gandhian model - but Pannella's Gandhi is neither a mystic nor an ideologue; rather, an intransigent and yet flexible politician - h

e has been through trials which he has for the most part won. As of 1976, year in which he first runs for Parliament, he is always elected at the Chamber of Deputies, twice at the Senate, twice at the European Parliament. Several times candidates and local councillor in Rome, Naples, Trieste, Catania, where he carried out exemplary and demonstrative campaigns and initiatives. Whenever necessary, he has resorted to the weapon of the hunger strike, not only in Italy but also in Europe, in particular during the major campaign against world hunger, for which he mobilized one hundred Nobel laureates and preeminent personalities in the fields of science and culture in order to obtain a radical change in the management of the funds allotted to developing countries. On 30 September 1981 he obtains at the European parliament the passage of a resolution in this sense, and after it several other similar laws in the Italian and Belgian Parliament. In January 1987 he runs for President of the European Parliament, obtaini

ng 61 votes. Currently, as the radical party has pledged to no longer compete with its own lists in national elections, he is striving for the creation of a "transnational" cross-party, in view of a federal development of the United States of Europe and with the objective of promoting civil rights throughout the world.

(4) SCALFARO OSCAR LUIGI. (Novara 1918). Italian politician, Christian Democrat. Lawyer, former minister of transport, minister of artistic property, minister of the Interior. Man of great integrity, he enjoys the esteem of the laics as well.

(5) PASOLINI PIERPAOLO. (Bologna 1922 - Rome 1975). Italian writer and director. Novels ("Ragazzi di vita", 1955; "Una vita violenta", 1959), verse ("Le ceneri di Gramsci", 1957, etc.), plays, cinema ("Accattone", 1961, "Il Vangelo secondo Matteo", 1964, etc.), but especially powerful polemist and moralist, he denounced the evils of the "bourgeoisie" and severely criticized the Italian Left for its shortcomings. Sympathizer of the Radical Party, on the subject of which he wrote some beautiful pages, the day after his death he was supposed to go to Florence to take part in a congress of the party.

(6) BONINO EMMA. (Bra 1948). President of the Radical Party, former member of the European Parliament, as of 1976 member of the Italian Parliament. Among the promoters of the CISA (Information Centre on Sterilization and Abortion) and active militant in the campaign against clandestine abortion. She was tried and acquitted in Florence. Participated in the conduction, on a national and international scale, of the campaign on World Hunger. Among the founding members of "Food and Disarmament International", promoted the circulation of the Manifesto of Nobel Laureates.