ABSTRACT: Italy 1973: the student protest has become a mass cultural and political phenomenon. Revolution seems at the door, the myths of armed revolt, of just violence are rife among the majority of intellectuals. It is the period in which it is screamed in immense processions that killing the fascist is not a crime. At the same time, among the young, the drug culture as the best way to express transgression against the bourgeois society is rampant. The Radical Party is swimming against the tide.

It is not drunk with revolutions, but is concerned with the civil rights of majorities and minorities, it is leading campaigns for the recognition of the right to divorce, to abortion and conscientious objection. It is negating the existence of good and bad, red or fascist armies: all the armies of liberation are destined to always become an instrument for the oppression of the people they claim to liberate, always. In Marco Pannella's preface to the book "Underground a pugno chiuso" by Andrea Valcarenghi, leader of the alternative movement, of which we publish certain sections, the historical limits of the revolutionary culture are denounced.

A culture which can only bring about intolerance, violence, murder and defeat. A prophecy unfortunately confirmed by reality: after a few years, this culture produced the monster of terrorism which is spreading throughout Europe. We needed ten years of blood and thunder, of dramatic disappointments, to be able to recognise the justice of the political culture of non-violence, tolerance and rights, which is the real alternative that Pannella and the Radical Party have had the courage to express when the whole of the intellectual class was singing hymns to Che Guevara and Mao-Tse-Tung.

(Preface to "Underground a Pugno Chiuso" by Andrea Valcarenghi, Arcana Edition, july 1973)

Dear Andrea, you are asking me to write a preface to your book "Underground A Pugno Chiuso"(...)

What do you want me to do? Do you really think my name has become saleable goods for the traders in books, or indeed anyone at all, for anyone you would want to read this book? No, I have proof, I know that you know that things are not like that. You don't read my "writings": the thousands of leaflets, press commniqu‚s, pamphlets for the Radical Party. That is all I have ever been able to turn out, usually written in half an hour hastened by the urgency of activists, yesterday in the chaos of the Via 24 Maggio, today at number 18, via di Torre Argentina.

You are a revolutionary. But I prefer conscientious objectors, the outlaws of marriage, the beatniks of the subproletariat, full of amphetamines, the Czechs of the Prague Spring, the non-violent, the libertarians, the true believers, the feminists, the homosexuals, the bourgeois like me, the intelligently indifferent, with their sad despair. I love ancient aspirations, like man and woman, political ideals that are as old as the age of reason, the bourgeois revolution, anarchist songs and the ideology of the historical right wing. I am against all bombs, all armies, all guns, all reasons for reinforcing, even if only temporarily, the State, whatever kind of state it is. I am opposed to all sacrifice, death or crime, especially if it is "revolutionary". I believe in words that people listen to, and in what is said, I believe in the stories that are told in the kitchen, in bed, in the street, at work, when people want to be honest, when they want to be really understood, more than in essays or incentive, in the holy scriptures or in ideologies. Above all, I believe in dialogue, and not just in "intellectual" dialogue. I believe in caresses, embraces, in knowledge and acts that are not necessarily escapist or individualist; and the more they seem "private", the more I will commit myself to having them recognised as part of public and political life. But this is not the time and place to explain to your readers what the Radical Party is, so let us continue.

I do not believe in power, and I will repudiate even fantasy if it threatens to take power. I do not believe in "travel", perhaps because the elderly always tell us that it "broadens the mind" (to be like theirs) of the young, like the army, women, and teachers. I do not believe in the gun...there are too many beautiful things that we could do, indeed that we can do with the enemy to think of doing away with him. And as for "Re Nudo", you who say "all the power to the people"; "grass and guns", I don't like that either. You know, I just don't agree.

Cultivating or smoking grass doesn't interest me, for the simple reason that I've been doing it for a long time. I have a tar nicotine highway inside me to prove it, and there is so much destruction: evasion, guilt feelings and solitary consummated pleasure, that my death can demand and obtain travelling on that highway. Of course I find it logical to smoke other less harmful grass if I feel like it, and to refuse to pay a lot for it: on the market, in the family circle, in society or in jail. So it's easy for me to commit myself unreservedly to disarming the State's hangmen who keep up this "chaos" they call "order", and who need to command, protect, obey, torture, arrest, acquit or kill, in order to live and to feel that they are alive, and who are attempting the impossible operation of transferring their own inner demons (those of the impotent, the suppressed, the frustrated), into the bodies of those they see as different from them. But to make grass into a positive and final symbol of recognition and of shared hope seems to me to be wrong, and wanting. And adding your "gun" as backup will not do.

Of course the violence of the oppressed seems to me to be "moral", and revolutionary" counterviolence and the hatred of the exploited whether it is "masculine" or "troubled", as Sartre has defined it, are profoundly natural, or at least, they seem so to me. But I don't deal with morality, except to defend each individual's concrete morality, or his right to assert himself, on condition that it doesn't turn into violence against others; and as far as nature is concerned, I believe that the duty of every person, every human being, cannot be limited to contemplating it or describing it, but to transforming it according to his own hopes. In short, everything living, everything new is always to a certain extent unnatural.

So even if your revolutionary violence, your gun, are profoundly moral and natural, that doesn't interest me very much. But what does concern me deeply is the fact that these are suicidal weapons for those, who, quite reasonably, wish to create a libertarian society, and who prepare it by revolutionising themselves, their own mechanisms, and their own environment, without having recourse to means, methods and ideas that reinforce the very reasons of their adversary, the validity of his political premises, for the simple pleasure of hitting out at him, destroying him, possessing him in the physical sense of the word.

Violence is the privileged area towards which all minorities in power try to guide the struggle of the exploited and powerless; it is the only area in which they can reasonably hope to win in the end. In the long run, all guns are black, and so are all armies and all other institutionalised forms of violence, regardless of the target they are trained on, or claim to be trained on.

If the revolutionary struggle necessarily presupposes the death of the comrades, their "sacrifice", as an "example", and the "seizure" of power, and once power has been seized, or after the conquest, the repetition against the enemy of those acts that made me his enemy; the acts of violence, torture, discrimination, contempt if the revolution presupposes all that, then I am a counterrevolutionary, or a member of the petty bourgeoisie, to be thrown overboard at the first opportunity.

I simply do not agree. I've had the ethics of sacrifice, the heroic struggle, the violence of catharsis, up to here; what I ask of my comrade above all, is what is asked of a "family man": to live and be happy. Since I myself carry hope, ideas and clarity with me, I not only think this is possible, but I believe that there is no other way to create and to experience happiness. But being a "comrade" is neither written in your destiny nor prescribed by your doctor. If our paths separate, we will take note of the fact, and seek to understand one another better. But I for one have had enough of this left wing that is only great at funerals, commemorations, protests and celebrations; these are all black events too; I've had enough of the "Clausewitzian revolution", with its tactics and strategies, its advance guard and its rearguard, its peoples' wars, and its wars against the people, its cleansing, necessary violence, its indispensable gold medals; the "guncentric" or "gunocratic", or merely "fistcentric" or "fistocratic" revolution is simply the system reincarnating and getting back on with the job. The "king" is not the only one with no clothes on, Andrea. The "Revolution", clothed in power and violence, is bare as well. If this letter is to be chosen as the preface to your book, you must bear having that written there. And you will have to tolerate a lot more besides...

You are all, you personally are, "antifascist" and antifascist on the "Parri-Sofri"(1) line, along which the litany of the right-thinking people of our political world has been transmitted for twenty years. We are not connected to that line.

When I see, in the last issue of "Re Nudo"(2), on the last page, a reprint of a 1943 issue of "Unit…"(3), calling on the reader to kill the Fascists wherever he came across them and wherever he could seek them out, because "the roots of the 'evil' must be eradicated", it makes me want to call you an "imbecile". Then I remember that everyone agrees with you, except for us Radicals, and I keep silent, unless, as is the case now, you force me to speak or to write. I understand your reason; you to have to show (to yourselves?) that the Communist Party has become degenerate; that it was better yesterday than it is today; that when it had weapons and revolutionary power, it was more virile, more courageous, tougher and closer to the truth. Whereas the reverse is true (we as a party are not talking about the "Communists" here), it was worse, it was undoubtedly a lot worse even than today.

At all events, it was no better, because it theorised here and there on political and popular assassination as an act of hygiene and a guarantee against "evil". To those who killed him, Trotsky was undoubtedly worse, more disgusting than a Fascist, an even more deep-seated root of "evil". But those of you who exhume yesterday's Communist party newspapers in defiance of today's, thinking that in so doing you are linking yourselves to proletarian, working class traditions, have you really nothing better to resurrect than these barbarian, totalitarian, counterreformist concepts against the roots of the "evil"?

You who have "understood", do you feel that you are Notarnicola's(4) "comrade" (and you did a good job); you who have lived at least as much as the outsiders, how can you fail to see the fascism there is in this anti-fascism? How can you put up with the inadequacy of insult, invective, contempt, the goodies and baddies attitude, the classism, the lack of secularity, the phariseeism, in the class struggle we are trying to experience and to support, through the new, different life that it presupposes and engenders? Why do you too continue, amid the guns, the antifascism and the power (to the people), with clenched fist, to live off this old new left, that you denounce so timely and so effectively in your book?

Like we Radicals, you "Renudists" assert that the so-called "deviants" are just different. In families, schools, factories and offices, there too, the hangmen are generally first and foremost victims. Unless, according to some psychiatrists, the solution is to kill the father, because that does not help you to overreach the institution, the family, or it is not enough, and anyway it isn't necessary.

We too believe that there is nobody who is evil: in the prisons, hospitals, asylums, on the streets and the pavements, in the slums and shanty towns, but there too, just people, who are "different", in spite of the poverty (and what is so terrible about poverty is that it kills, degrades, changes, leads to degeneration: otherwise why would people be fighting so hard against it?), in spite of the centuries-old classist exploitation, in spite of the work that alienates and drives men mad, all of which influence our heritage. We dream, but these are dreams full of rigour and responsibility, of a society free from violence and aggressivity, or at least of a society in which all that can disappear, instead of growing and reproducing itself. We believe that what is "moral" is what appears so to each individual. We are fighting against an institutional (and popular) "justice" that substitutes deviancy for diversity and sin for dissent.

But how can we reinstate in politics, in the city, in everyday life, the concept of "evil", of "devil", of "deviancy"? What you call "Fascists" others call "Conscientious Objectors", "Divorcists", "Abortionists", "Radical Corrupters", and "The Depraved".

"The yellow star" of the ghettos is a dreadful symbol; but it is every bit as dreadful for those who impose it as for those who must wear it.

In all this antifascist history, I do not know where the greatest shame lies: whether it is in the reinstatement and the curse of a violent, anti secularist, clerical, terrorist, classist and barbarian culture that wants to kill the adversary and exorcise him like the devil, the incarnation of evil; or whether it is the immense, practical and indirect service rendered to today's State and its masters, by discharging on these killers and others among its victims the libertarian, democratic, alternative and socialist force of true antifascism.

Fascism is a much more serious and important matter, with which we have often been on intimate terms. It is not just something to be "prohibited" with the "Scelba Act"(5) (will it dissolve the Christian Democrat Party?), or suppressing it by means of a few denunciations and a few policemen, the better to legitimate its anti-worker function, or to lynch it with the anger of the masses. Antifascist anger.

The relationship between Fascism and Capitalism and the Left is complicated, alarming, threatening, ambiguous, present ever since fifty years ago, including 1973.(...)

But enough of that now. If all that I have spoken of up to now, dear Andrea, separates us, none of it is essential in your book, or in the experience that it reveals and makes manifest, an experience I share. You in Milan, ourselves elsewhere, every day for many a long year we had to, were perhaps able to, invent everything, refuse every existing means, every short cut, every facility, to be able to advance, even, if only by a few steps. The means that we were offered, already there, which were the apparent strength of so many others, were not homogeneous, did not prefigure what we were seeking and attempting to build.

Fantasy was a necessity, almost something we were condemned to, rather than a matter of choice; it seemed to condemn us to solitude, you on your side, ourselves scattered over a number of fronts. And we have spoken as we could and as we should; with our feet when we marched, with our backsides at our sit-ins, with continuous sit-in happenings, with grass and hunger strikes, objections that seemed to be "individual" and the "direct actions" of some of our number, in prisons or court rooms, with music or mass meetings; putting everything on the line each time, knowing that a single moment of inactivity would set us back a long way, and would cost us difficult hours of struggling to make up lost ground, too often considered as "different" by our comrades. And yet subjected to permanent surveillance, provocation, and blows (far from soft ones at that) by the police.

We resisted, refusing to just survive; starting again every time, suffering failures, subjects that gave our more stubborn members consistency, but when all is said and done, simple ancient aspirations. We have achieved successes that none can deny us now. You too, but you were more alone. You cannot hide or ignore that in your book. I have always thought of you as a comrade involved in a shared task, in struggles that must of necessity converge and be organised together. You have not done so, and that is where the difference lies. When I accepted, and took on for some time the job of chief editor of "Re Nudo" among so many others, it was not out of habit or indifference. You were not just one more comrade, one of the many comrades for an hour, for a given occasion. It is true that you were an absent comrade. I want you to understand the other side of your book, the struggles we had to undertake without you although it was only right and natural for us to count on you, because you shared them, and you still do. Your movement missed out on all the civil rights battles: the involuntary racism of a generation, a refusal of "politics" (without the "k"), a slight case of ostrichism, and, on this point, many though not you, suffered from paleomarxism, an indifference that has generated catastrophes, especially in Milan. That is why today, and among all your comrades of those years, you are one of the few who are still in the heat of the action, and as for us, we have been lucky.

Will we continue to march divided for long? From time to time, you point to our victories, even if involuntarily you seek to diminish them, making them mine and not as they nonetheless are those of that rare and happy group that is the Radical Party. Today, with the battle we have engaged with the regime's legislative "hornets' nest", through our ten referendums on repeal, the confrontation is, in the eyes of all and in many aspects, total and definitive.

Will it once again go on without you? That does not seem to me to be either possible or acceptable. Your book is the work of a precious Gavroche of our contestation, of a political generation that is perhaps unique in not yet having been beaten by the Christian Democrat (the former National Fascist Party) regime and its undetectable opposition.

Dramatic, solid, rapid and joyful: and too, for me, the surprising, but far from narcissistic autobiography of an activist without a cause (but who has never deserted or allowed himself to be distracted), who tells how everything can be turned into gold and into the mirage of new and free politics: grass, music, pipes, and guns made of words or of cardboard, the military prison, the legal penitentiary, the court room, an evening at the opera, violent games around the great newspapers, a little paint on a movement still to be discovered, a barracks, a hotel, when I am shortly called upon to be a member of the Jury for the Viareggio, Strega, Campiello literary prizes, I shall vote for this book.

It is rather the parents in despair over their lost, protesting children that I would advise to read this book; the well-behaved progressives who are out of incomes and scheduling policies, upset and angered at not becoming your idols, and all those who are staggered and scandalized to see the few seats of the prestigious party of Carandini, Benedetti, and Picardi become the refuge and meeting place of longhaired, subproletarian gangs, revolting students and Communists, Anarchists and Trotskyists, before being filled up with the outlaws of marriage, conscientious objectors, feminists and homosexuals, freaks and abortionists, true believers and vegetarians, nudists, and all sorts of refugees from jail. They would finally understand something about themselves, as well as what they would understand about you and us. And their face would become even uglier and sadder as a result.

Now I have finished. I have to find the first million lire for the Radical Party newspaper. It seems to me that is an urgent task. In fact, if I have got it right, for a newspaper (even a small one, even an "alternative" one), you need something like a quarter of a million pounds a year.

Will you, and "Re Nudo", give me a hand?

(1) FERRUCCIO PARRI, military commander of all the partisan groups in Italy at the time of the nazi-fascist Resistance.

ADRIANO SOFFRI, leader of the Italian extreme left movement "Lotta Continua".

(2) RE NUDO, alternative Italian periodical, of the student protest years.

(3) L'UNITA', Italian Communist Party daily.

(4) SANTE NOTARNICOLA, multimurderer, robber, politicised in jail.

(5) The Italian law: SCELBA, prohibited the re-establishment of the Fascist Party

(6) GAVROCHE, mythical young Parisian who helped French revolutionaries in 1789.

(7) Dc, Christian Democracy, Italian Party with the relative majority conservative and based on Catholicism. In power without interruption since the fall of fascism in 1946, it has maintained the penal codes and the most important laws of the fascist regime concerning individual rights, for over thirty years.

(8) Pnf, Mussolini's National Fascist Party.

(9) "LA SCALA", famous opera house in Milan. In 1968 the student movement violently opposed the "borghesi" (bourgeois), of whom it got the better at the opening of the opera season.

(10) CORRIERE DELLA SERA, greatest Italian daily of the epoch of moderation, opposed by the 1968 Student Movement.

(11) VIAREGGIO, STREGA, CAMPIELLO, famous Italian literary prizes.

(12) PANNUNZIO, CARANDINI, BENEDETTI and PICCARDI, Liberal Progressists who founded the Radical Party in the '50s.