The Congress held at Ravenna in November 1968 takes place after a dramatic year.

The student and factory movements explode, a real and true "rebellion", the motion states, "against the immobile equilibrium accepted by the Italian left-wing" and against the alienation "of the bureaucratic system itself" from the democratic forces that have been for too long the prisoner of their "ideological schemes". The detachment of Catholic fringes from clericalism starts to take on consistency. On the international scene, authoritarian, repressive and totalitarian actions are imposed, with or by the military, in both East and West, in Czechoslovakia, in France and in Greece.

While aware of the complexity of these events and of the new situations which they trigger off, the Congress of the Radical Party, nevertheless, feels the need of reconfirming, with the motion approved, and even at the risk of apparently remaining momentarily isolated, the absolute priority of the commitment to the divorce battle, with which it and the LID (Italian League for Divorce) alone are entrusted, and the duty to point out that the overwhelming power of the clergy, founded on the Concordat, is the hallmark of the Italian historical situation at this time. This is the basis for the request contained in the motion for a referendum to abrogate the Concordat. The need was also confirmed of giving libertarian methods and goals to the battles of the old and the new left in order to combat the risks of sectarianism that already tainted the ferment and the thrust of the students movement.

The Congress elected Mauro Mellini as secretary and Angiolo Bandinelli as treasurer.

 

The Vth National Congress of the Radical Party, meeting in Ravenna on November 2,3,4, notes that in 1968 Italian political life was shaken by profound transformations due to the rise of a vast movement of dissent and protest analogous to similar events taking place in the East and the West, in America as in France and in Czechoslovakia.

While the Italian regime and (political) context become ever more rigid through more manifest forms of oppression and repression; while the power of the clergy makes ever more arrogant claims to hegemony over the Italian political situation with attitudes that were stubbornly considered to be overcome, the regime itself lost the cover that it had been furnished by a Socialist Party that apparently works for reform and represents the proletariat, but that is showing ever more clearly its moderate position, its subservience, and its essentially cliental structures.

On the other hand, the fact that the (parliamentary) left of the opposition itself is in crisis, due to a vast and spontaneous movement at its base, constitutes just one more element of insecurity rather than reinforcing the current political equilibrium for the dominant forces in our country. The many demonstrations which have expressed the dissent and protest of the movements in the universities, the factories and other sectors of social and civil life, have been directed primarily against the immobile equilibrium accepted by the Italian left inside the government as well as in the opposition. In this way it expresses its claim to a leading role in the management of political and social life against the authoritarianism and the alienation of the present organisational scheme of the State, its institutions and of production as well as of the bureaucratic systems of the left-wing forces themselves.

These facts demonstrate the inadequacies of the ideological schemes and the organisational structures of the Italian left, while constituting a direct confirmation of the validity of the Radical Party's analysis. This confirmation has been reinforced by the vigorous trend in some Catholic circles towards lay and anti-clerical positions while the traditional left-wing, contrarily, persists in pursuing a policy of dialogue with the hierarchy or in putting value on left-wing "Catholics" who, as such, also belong to the clerical party.

This grass roots movement, with which the apparatus and the parliamentary groups of the official left must come to terms, is the source of prospects for a left wing that presents the Radical Party with problems of comparison and common goals.

The Radical Party is aware that there is a very widespread attitude in sectors of this new left, according to which the transformation of social structures can only take place through a final and global solution to be actuated by a head-on clash with the "system". This presents a risk for these forces of being nailed down to illusory prospects and extremist actions that remove them from the serious problems of the country which they - like the old left - consider to be secondary problems and superstructures, thus taking them away from real contact with the masses. The Radical Party reaffirms the validity of its fighting methods aimed at forming large, articulated mass movements, promoted by direct action in pursuing immediate goals to transform and dismantle the structures and institutions that are necessary to the survival of the Italian social context, its nature, and the regime that expresses them.

The Radical Party thus feels it necessary to consider valid the goals which it has fought for and which have found expression in the deliberations of the Congresses of Bologna and Florence; and it considers that they are capable of producing vast results.

The battles against clericalism, against militarism, against the Concordat, for divorce, for sexual liberty, against the institutional means of corruption, against the clerical monopoly of social assistance, against the neo-corporatism and neo-capitalism of the State, are not only capable of involving great strata of opinion and creating authentic mass movements, but when their goals are realized and in the very way that they present themselves, they are important for helping to create a crisis in the system which, in Italy, is not able to tolerate or absorb struggles and reforms of this kind.

Neo-capitalism in Italy, in fact, while touching high points of development and the growth of consumerism, has no prospects of realising - unless through clericalism and corruption - the modern and efficient structures for conditioning the masses and for social organisation that it has realized in other countries in another form.

Corruption takes on an institutional form for shoring up the regime, for controlling the channels of information and of conditioning all political activity in the ambit of the system. Clericalism is the corner stone of every conservative and reactionary block and every retrogade and authoritarian attitude.

Therefore no fight against the "system" can be given a valid form if it does not take into account the concrete articulation on which the power is held up by a regime that is at once clerical, authoritarian and class-based. Thus, far from being a secondary element, this difference in political and social organisation in respect to other countries creates elements of contradiction, even on the international level, that must offer authentic reformist and revolutionary forces valid opportunities for battle.

The very contradictions and cracks in the system allow for action by even organised minorities with vast and conclusive consequences. In this direction and with this goal the activities of the Radical Party have largely operated, and they must continue and intensify along these lines so as to involve large sectors of the population, forces of the new left and the old left as well that do not accept the closed bureaucracy and the schematic ideology of their organisations.

New opportunities for Radical action will be offered next year by the expiration of the NATO Pact and the fight over its renewal. Onto this must be grafted: the campaign against militarism and international support for the reactionary forces in our country; the crucial phase of the divorce fight; the accusations against some of the regime's most clamorous forms of oppression in the field of social assistance, hospital and psychiatric care.

The Congress maintains that national and international military organisations represent a much greater danger in the light of the grave political events, internal and international, that have taken place in 1968 (the Vietnam war, the consolidation of the colonels' regime in Greece, the calling up of De Gaulle's army during the (student's) May uprising in France, the repressive intervention of the army in many American cities, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, developments in Italy regarding the Sifar affair). Therefore the Congress commits the Party to promote an anti-military movement capable of detaching the masses from the military structures and from Italian nationalistic myths by means of the fight against military organisations, their international connections, the logic of their expansion, their prevalence over civil institutions and requirements and the authoritarian spirit that is their presupposition and which they disseminate. The militarist and authoritarian reaction, while exhuming national and nationalistic myths as a source of strength and survival, in reality is based on an international system of repression that impedes and represses the development of any and every independent and spontaneous evolution of existing societies. In this context, support must be given to conscientious objectors and all other means of fighting oppression by the military.

On the international level, the left must reply conscientiously and intransigently to the international political police and fomenters of openly anti-democratic actions, ever more in evidence, protected by the military blocks (NATO and the Warsaw Pact). Consequently a new international campaign must be started within the Western countries and in confrontation with the governments of the European Communist block, that rejects power as a valid instrument for fighting imperialism.

One and a half years after the approval of its new statute and in the face of the paralysis that has taken hold of the traditional parties, the Congress calls the attention of all reformist forces to the federative and libertarian type of structure which it has chosen as the most suitable for leading the fight against authoritarianism on the most varied fronts. Only through a structure of this kind is it possible today for all the demands for renewal fermenting in Italian society today to express themselves politically. An essential condition for countering this regime's tendency to reinforce itself, is to succeed in giving a coherent political expression to these realities. Therefore it will be a primary task of the party to act politically while keeping in mind the priority need to put its statute into effect within the perspective of both its own adequate organisational development and the goal of offering concrete proposals for political organisation to the other forces interested in renewal in the radical sense of the Italian left. The Congress urges the party to create the widest range of unity with all the other forces that share its goals. The participation of its active members and even of the traditional left can be an efficacious means and irreplacable contribution to shake up and renew old bureaucratic structures that are responsible for immobility through independent actions or from below. Encounters in battle (and not through organisational or top-level ties), sought for and promoted with all sectors of the new and old left, is the alternative that the Radical Party proposes in contrast to the sectarianism that threatens to paralyse the Italian left as it has paralysed the fictitious united front.

On the Concordat

The Vth Congress of the Radical Party, meeting at Ravenna the 2, 3 and 4 November, commits the party's executive to initiate a national referendum campaign for the abrogation of the Concordat between State and Church on the first day after the referendum law goes into effect.