The objective of the preceding Congress, to register at least one thousand Radical Party members, is reached and surpassed: at the annual Congress in November the registered members are 1,300. The Congress can thus approve a very broad motion that precedes by at least two years the direction taken in the conflict with the DC that will bring an electoral success to the Italian left on June 15, 1975. The motion also definitively reproposes the project for a popular referendum on civil rights. Furthermore, the Congress is an important factor in the fight to succeed in the fight for conscientious objectors and the liberation of Valpreda which reaches its climax in the hunger strike of Pannella and Gardin.

The Congress confirms Angiolo Bandinelli as Secretary and Giuseppe Ramadori as Treasurer.

The XIth National Congress of the Radical Party, held in Turin on November 1,2,3, 1972, noted that the objectives established at the Rome Congress, as a minimal platform for the debate on keeping the party alive, have been reached and surpassed.

The Congressional proceedings showed that from every democratic political sphere, in a single month, more than seven hundred comrades had decided to join in the project to re-establish the lay party to construct a Socialist and libertarian society and for renewal, unity and a leftist alternative in Italy; the unity of the more than one thousand three hundred registered members proved to be firm and to contain almost all the alternative elements that our society presently knows.

It is the task of the entire party today to mobilise so that this trend of the laymen, libertarians and Socialists, to associate and organise freely and newly, is not interrupted but continues and expands.

The libertarian, federative and federal statute approved at the Congress of Bologna in 1967 is still vigorous and very timely today; an organisational theory that has proved to be original and correct, can and should increasingly assume the character of a solid practice. Again confirms, in conformation with this necessity - but finally with a justified and reasonable conviction that the necessary objective conditions are beginning to be present - that the actuation of the statutory charter is the natural priority task of every Radical for the coming year on every level of responsibility. The first service that the federal party , with its structures and functions, should thus guarantee, is full mobilisation for contributing to the formation of radical parties throughout Italy, parties that are only completely fulfilled on the regional level and that are also of a federal, federated, self-run and libertarian type.

The Historical Block of the Regime

The Congress points out that the corporative, inter-classist, authoritarian, clerical regime - violent and corrupted by the Christian Democrats - shows the two traditional faces of Italian political power which are one and the same: the State and the Church. These are by now ever more solidly entrenched, just as was the National Fascist Party in the thirties in our country.

Ever more slender are the margins, however drastic, of liberty and of civil opposition, democratic dialectics, the very existence of dissent, the popular basis of the constitutional pact.

The historical block that is presently on top has formed and constituted itself into a regime by uniting social levels and interests variously tied to the classist shape - exploiting and violent - of the social "order". The protection of profit priorities, of parasitical incomes, of the robber economy, of the colonisation of social areas and groups, has certainly not been impeded by but rather furthered by the so-called nationalisation of the economy; the line of development from Fascist corporatism to the Christian Democratic variety has, not by chance, proceeded even using the same corporate names from the IRI (Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industrial) to the ones for the insurance and social security systems, to the myriad parasitical and corporative agencies and by way of the same type of directors of the various State and Church bodies, from the police to the magistracy, from the army to the Council of State, form the Court of Accounts to episcopal conference to the "orders", "real estate and financing and religious societies" that are such before the law, but are mercantile and capitalistic in point of fact.

The corporative atomisation, the social splintering, the alienation of the masses, the stimulating of the sector and the structures of consumerist robbery, the massacre of the "free time" sector, of public health and of the honesty and loyalty of all State institutions, structures and services as well as of the democratic, non-violent,lay method of political confrontation; the spread of corruption which is in the nature of the DC as the police were to Fascism, the chaos and the "crises" so useful to make the rich and powerful richer and more powerful, the poor and the exploited poorer and more exploited - these are not the consequence of a pretended historical inadequacy of the leadership, but the necessary and rigorous expression of the interests and the actions of regime's clerical-democratic and clerical-fascist forces.

The legislature, that for twenty years has passed tens of thousands of corporate laws, with the explicit consensus of the democratic, parliamentary opposition, has thus made itself into a really and truly "efficient" Chamber of Corporations, incapable of abrogating in an equal period the few score of laws, Fascist and otherwise, that most dishonour the Constitution; of creating great democratic laws, of putting into effect the Constitution after a quarter of a century, or of approving and actuating reforms.

In 1972 this regime, to assert and defend itself, keeps more political and class prisoners in its military prisons alone than the National Fascist Party needed to keep in jail in 1936.

Apparently begun only on December 12, 1969, but in actuality only minimised on the surface during the early years of the Center-Left coalition, the destruction of persons, institutions, laws and civilisation has proceeded constantly since 1948 and has now exploded.

The democratic rituals themselves have become scandalously unfair, and those who use the great bourgeois ideals and claim to defend and believe in them, are themselves renegades of those same ideals. There is no longer a trace of true democracy or lay energy left even in the Socialist and liberal organisations: the class conflict today occurs ever more often within the traditional workers and proletarian parties rather than only being activated by them.

The liquidation that has been going on for half a century of the Socialist, libertarian and anti-institutional potential and traditions of the democratic working class movement, while claiming to be more or less scientific Socialism, has ended not by resolving itself in social-democratic proposals and realities, but in hypocritical and grotesque parliamentarian machinations. Bureaucratic and sacerdotal castes, by means of "ideological truths" and "dogmas of faith" whose custodians they claim to be, protect the accumulation and wielding of power in which alone they believe, without reserve or conditions, against any and every dialogical, democratic and lay truth.

Organising the Resistance and the Counter-attack

This regime is afraid of liberty, of civil rights, of peace, of true democracy, of civilisation. That is why anti-authoritari- anism, anti-militarism, and anti-capitalism are banned and

persecuted. That is why official Italy is experiencing to the full the violent restoration of illiberality and anti-democracy. That is why all of Italy's traditional democratic forces, even of the left, are pro-Concordat, corporative and inter-classist in their everyday, concrete, political practice. That is why the attack has passed to union solidarity and once again blows are struck against the democratic class politics that could find in it their elements of resistance and revival.

The XIth National Congress of the Radical Party notes that the clerical-fascist nature of this legislature's majority is nothing but the necessary and largely predictable consequence of this situation.

Therefore we need at every level to organise the resistance and the counter-attack, because only in this way will it be possible to create a defence that is consonant with lay and Socialist aspirations, a defence, that is, which will not make the forces of dissent, the libertarian class forces, subject to or similar to the enemy that oppresses them.

The XIth National Congress of the Radical Party affirms that unity, renewal, the strength to win, in that sense, for the present political generation - and not for a far distant and abstract future - can only be reconstructed and found on the basis of precise projects, intelligible to all, able to be run from below, by the democratic masses and by anyone, by authentic Socialists, Communists, Christian Democrats, liberali gobettiani: by minorities that can truly consider themselves revolutionary because they connect the affirmation of their rights with the fulfilment of those of each and all.

Therefore the Radical Party proposes to the parties and the class democrats, lay and libertarian, (and already proposes it to the imminent National Congress of the Socialist Party) to use immediately this constitutional instrument of the referendum against the clerical-fascist Parliament, against the "bosses" of the State, the Church, the police, the factories, the schools - which merit the qualification - the referendum whose law of enforcement only the great and civil battle for divorce was able to rip away from the twenty-year opposition of the Christian Democrats.

It is the only alternative, unifying measure that can win out over the neglected observation of every fundamental civil right, over the quarter of a century delay in the actuation of the Constitutional pact, over every reactionary law imposed against our democracy, against human rights, against the rights of the workers and the citizens, the recourse to the popular will and the liberating (and Constitutional) power of the democratic masses.

Only thus can one legitimately continue to speak - for those who want to - in the name of Italy and the Resistance and be today credibly anti-fascist.

From now on the Radical Party, for its part, deliberates and proposes its commitment to convene the following popular referendums to abrogate:

a) the laws enforcing the Concordat (including primarily those which may possibly be "renewed");

b) the authoritarian norms (and not only those of "Fascist" origin) of the penal codes (where they include punishment for abortion and those that strike drugs users, whether "light" or "heavy", and makes them equivalent to drugs dealers);

c) the military codes in their totality and the laws which

establish military courts and prisons;

d) the laws (all of them unconstitutional) offering public financing to "private" and religious schools and assistance programs;

e) laws regarding the press and others that clearly limit fundamental civil liberties.

The Radical Party will be fully committed to obtaining the maximum number of agreements for convergence and co-responsibility on this project. But this is a necessary battle and must be waged in any case; but it must not be protracted beyond 1974 for the collection of the signatures, nor beyond Spring of 1975 for the holding of the referendum.

For 1973 the Congress has committed the Party to other battles as follows:

a) the anti-militarist fight to begin a radical conversion of the structures, the services, the rights of use, the military expenditures in structures, services, civilian expenses, against all armed forces for the functions and ideological and political meanings that they have in the organisations of the State and society; against the Italian armed forces for its peculiar and characteristic historical anti-democratic and anti-constitutional functions; for the defence, here and now, of the rights and the liberties that it contests, denies or threatens;

b) for the fight against the clergy and the Concordat; for the intransigent defence of the Fortuna divorce law against the proposals to abrogate it and "improve" it in a class sense or by the Sacred Rota, even and especially if promoted by parties with pretences to lay or pro-divorce standing; to oppose the parties in favour of the Lateran Pact requested by the motion signed by Andreotti, Jotti, La Malfa, Orlando, Bozzi, and Bertoldi during the last legislature; to defend the rights of all citizens and in particular the community of believers who find once more, against their conscience and their liberty, Caesar and Peter, the "Italian" Republic and the Vatican "state", mobilising in tandem.

c) the fight for the liberalisation of abortion, in support of and agreement with the MLD, without excluding the collaboration with various lay and libertarian feminist movements; this fight must be understood as a concrete attempt by all Radicals to contribute to the cause of women's liberation, the object of a class system of double, savage exploitation by a society based on the pretence of "superior male values" as opposed to "female" ones.

d) the fight to assert the full political character and the necessity of winning a lay and libertarian sexuality, with the consequent distinct and loyal support of the Radical Party of all those homosexual movements, as well as feminist ones, that affirm in this camp too the moral and revolutionary value of lay and libertarian ideas and behaviour.

Right here and now laws can and must be championed and acquired that prohibit the State and all institutions, majorities or minorities, or anyone at all and in anyway, to prohibit freedom of conscience and of opinion, to dispose of their own lives and bodies, of every man and every woman, according to their own morality and their own responsibility; this must be done with the force of tolerance, of dialogue, of lay non-violence with respect to the truth, the conscience, the bodies of all others. The decay of the State, of power, of the violence of institutions, is an indispensable condition for the Radicals, for the creation of the new Socialist, lay, libertarian, pacific, and internationalist society, for the moral growth of individuals, for a radical and revolutionary democratic class struggle.

The Congress solemnly declares that the fight for civil rights of all minorities (and majorities) and generations, all ethnic groups, all "moralities", all the oppressed and the exploited, constitute the primary justification if not the only reason of the political action of the Radical Party and of its re-founding.

The Committments for 1973

The XIth Congress of the Radical Party commits all active comrades - on whatever level of responsibility they may operate and whatever their function - and on the statutory level in particular, commits the elected organs of the Radical Party to assure the actuation of the following initiatives:

1) conscientious objectors: a) assure the positive result of the civil disobedience action and of direct non-violent actions such as the 34-day hunger strike conducted by Marco Pannella and Alberto Gardin along with more than one hundred comrades for the purpose of obtaining the immediate commitment of the Parliament to pass laws necessary for the liberation of conscientious objectors and comrades Valpreda, Gargamelli and Borghese; b) assure an adequate and unified mobilisation to guarantee that the law for conscientious objectors be as good as possible considering the nature of the present Parliament; c) assure the rapid presentation of a new bill on conscientious objectors that will be the new point of reference of the political anti-militarist, non-violent battle for the abolition of military service and the conversion of military structures into civilian ones; d) begin a campaign for an amnesty for military crimes;

2) promote knowledge of and the debate on the principles and methods of non-violence as a libertarian and revolutionary weapon consonant with the creation of a new Socialist, lay, and pacific society and a politics of the new left and the affirmation of class democracy;

3) organise, in collaboration with comrades from Venetia Julia and Friuli, the VIIth Anti-militarist March with objectives, means and routes analogous to the one held this year;

4) convene for November 4, the Vth National Anti-militarist Congress;

5) assure the maximum contribution of the party to the anti-militarist movement, to its growth, its ever more precise and strong characterisation, to the service of all groups that in their absolute autonomy demonstrate that they share the battle and its aims;

6) prepare the creation of an "open" and libertarian nursery and clinic or out-patient clinic for not later than next autumn;

7) assure the publication of "Notizie Radicale" (Radical News) at least every ten days;

8) assume organisational as well as political initiatives to prepare for and solicit the campaign for the referendums of abrogation as earlier foreseen in this motion.