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THE ONGOING POPULAR RESPONSIBILITY OF THE LIBERATION  
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Alessandro Portelli
April 23, 2024
Il Manifesto Global
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_ April 25 -- marking the victory of the Resistance in Italy over
Mussolini and German occupiers -- is the day we remember that the
Constitution and anti-Fascism are a daily practice, not an occasional
celebration. _

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Some years ago, on April 25, Luigi Pintor wrote that he wished
for “100 such days.”
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further: 365 such days, April 25 all year round. Alfonso Di Nola, a
great ethnologist and comrade, explained that traditional holidays
represent an intensification of community relations and the liberating
emergence of alternative values and desires to those that are
dominating everyday life.

The festive days of the civil calendar, which include April 25, also
intensify social relations, but – unlike traditional festivals –
don’t practice alternative values for a day, but instead reaffirm
the values and relations that should apply every day and which, in our
case, have a name: the Constitution. April 25 is the day we remember
that the Constitution and anti-Fascism are a daily practice, not an
occasional celebration.

I grew up and was educated in an Italy where the Constitution was not
talked about, where civic education in schools was a marginal subject
and viewed with suspicion, and where we didn’t even know what the
Resistance had been. Then, when I began to hear about the
“Constitution born of the Resistance” (it was in the ‘60s, I
believe), I asked myself: what does that mean? First of all, it means
that if we hadn’t had the Resistance, we couldn’t have written our
Constitution ourselves, but would have received it – like Japan –
from the occupying powers. I doubt that a Constitution given to us by
the victorious Allies would have had that striking beginning: “Italy
is a democratic republic.”

It’s not only about how it arose, but also about its spirit and
contents (by the way, our current rulers, themselves heirs of Fascism,
are claiming there’s no mention of anti-Fascism in the Constitution.
They’re reading it wrong: it’s there in the first line, because
Fascism is dictatorship and a democratic republic is its opposite). I
began to understand the relationship between the Resistance and the
Constitution when I realized that the Constitution is based on a
principle of active citizenship (the people “exercising” their
sovereignty), articulated through a series of instruments (freedom of
thought and speech, trade unions, political parties, public schools),
and that this principle had its origins in the free and voluntary
choice made by the partisans.

No one fought with the Resistance except by their own choice; I have
never heard a partisan say they were just obeying an order from
someone else.

Marisa Musu, a partisan: “We’ve never said that, and we are not
saying it now, [for instance about the] Via Rasella [attack against
Nazi troops], ‘I did it because the Americans wanted me to’ or
‘because my commander wanted me to.’ _I_ wanted to.”

Maria Teresa Regard, a partisan: “I went there on September 8, to
the fighting at Porta San Paolo, but I went there for my country, for
Rome, to save Rome, I didn’t go there because the Communist Party
told me to. The party didn’t tell us to go there. They thought they
had to be given orders. Instead, I went there and I said, ‘This is
how it is, we have to drive the Germans out of Rome.’”

After 20 years of [the Fascist slogan] “believe, obey and fight,”
they stopped obeying and chose what to believe in and what to fight
for.

The men and women who founded the Italian Republic were inspired by
this idea of citizenship, but their only sin was their optimistic
naiveté, taking it for granted that the principles that animated them
were definitive and shared by all. They were convinced that the
democratic principle of participatory equality was so inherent in
democracy that it implicitly extended to its main mechanism: one
person, one vote; every vote counts equally and is equally represented
in the institutions.

So, they wrote a Constitution imbued with proportional representation
principles (see, for instance, the thresholds required for its
reform), but did not think to set that out in writing. The erosion of
the Constitution began precisely at the moment when – with the
active consent of the left – we replaced the central role of
participation and representation with the central role of
governability and delegation, introducing a majoritarian logic thanks
to which the (post-?)Fascist right wing of today is able to consider
tampering with the Constitution (enhanced role for the prime minister,
differentiated autonomy), thanks to their disproportionate majority
guaranteed by electoral laws that may not go against the letter, but
go against the very spirit of the Constitution.

Similarly, they dictated the “fundamental principles” in the
glorious first 12 articles of Part I, as well as the duties and
functions of the State, but they didn’t deem it necessary to equip
them with “teeth,” as they say in America – that is, the tools
to enforce the application of these principles, the fulfilment of
these duties. For example, Article 9 (amended and enriched in 2022):
“The Republic shall promote the development of culture and of
scientific and technical research. It shall safeguard the natural
beauties and the historical and artistic heritage of the Nation. It
shall safeguard the environment, biodiversity and ecosystems, also in
the interest of future generations.”

But what if the Republic doesn’t do that, or does exactly the
opposite – how can we force it to do so, what tools do we have at
our disposal? Or the unforgettable Article 3: “It is the duty of the
Republic to remove economic and social obstacles which, by limiting
the freedom and equality of citizens, prevent the full development of
the natural person and the actual participation of all workers in the
political, economic and social organization of the country.” But
what if the Republic doesn’t do this, and Italy – one of the most
unequal countries in the West – becomes more and more unequal: what
can we do, who do we sue, to whom can we turn?

The truth is, we have an answer in none other than Article 1:
“Sovereignty belongs to the people, who exercise it …” The point
being: the Republic is not just the institutions, the government, the
apparatus of the state; the Republic is the citizens, the state is us,
we are sovereign and we have the task of exercising this sovereignty.
Protecting the culture, the landscape, the environment, removing
obstacles that prevent the equality of all human beings, repudiating
war – this is, first of all, our task.

If the country is breaking down at the local level, if Italy is
unequal, if we’re spending more on war than on schools, this is also
because we, the citizens, have neglected the care for the local
territory and weakened the struggle for equality and for an active
politics of peace. Therefore, let us recall that remembering and
marching on April 25, as we did in Milan almost 30 years ago at the
invitation of Luigi Pintor (and coming back to do so again on May 1,
on March 8, and so on), is not only an act of protest and struggle
against those who are governing us and who don’t represent us, but
it is, above all, a way of reminding ourselves of our responsibility:
our task of exercising, on a daily basis, the sovereignty that the
Resistance won for us.

_Il manifesto has for decades been unaffiliated with any party or
political doctrine, though such affiliations are common in Italy.
However, we have kept the heading “quotidiano comunista” on our
front page as an acknowledgment of our historical and cultural
heritage. We oppose the plutocracy of old and new oligarchies,
imperialism in all its forms and environmental destruction. We are
against dogmas, but we are resolutely for peace, social solidarity and
economic justice. We advocate inalienable human, civil and cultural
rights in an age of globalization that too often runs roughshod over
democracy._

* Anti-Fascism
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* Italian Renaissance
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* World War II
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