Subject: (3) from THE RADICALS AND NONVIOLENCE
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WHERE IS THE VIOLENCE, WHERE IS THE BLACKMAIL?
Interview with Marco Pannella
- According to some people, your hunger strikes are just acts of masochism
which are in conflict with your declarations of love for life and in
general of "happy" struggle for Socialism.
I have an answer which I've been giving for some time, as you might
imagine, but which I have continued to develop: the difference between
risking life and risking death. I am convinced that people die because they
have lost interest in life. Those who refuse to see life cut off, on the
other hand, because they see hope rather than castration and resignation,
can risk losing it: it happens. But if they win, they live much better and
much more than other people. I would add that risking your own life without
risking that of others is another step forward (even those who commit
suicide somehow know they are putting other people in danger). Let's take
an example, another step ahead, because in these matters we move forward by
taking steps in the dark. Who were really putting their lives at risk in
Italy in 1937-38 (that is, in Italy under Fascism, editor's note)? Those
who had understood the logic of dictatorship and therefore knew that "war
was near", and engaged in a dangerous battle to try to avoid millions of
deaths; or those who were afraid of the short-term risk and ended up dying
later, together with millions of others?
Masochism? There is masochism when there is suffering, when there is
awareness of pain. But my experience, and that of all my comrades, is that
a hunger strike does not cause suffering, at most it causes discomfort.
Some people, however, ruling out masochism, talk of a self-destructive
tendency. Well, anything is possible, even dying of happiness. But I know
that even if I were different I couldn't feel better than I do today, and I
could easily feel less well, physically, like most of the people who suffer
forced hardship. And let's not forget that our hunger strikes are always
collective initiatives, experiences of political growth.
Finally, there is another no less important factor: this method is
successful, it works: and it is in line with our political belief in
libertarianism and nonviolence. We maintain, in fact, that if the struggle
for Socialism is violent, it prefigures a movement and therefore a society
organized in a violent, authoritarian manner.
- And yet you have been accused of practising blackmail with your hunger
strikes, that is of doing violence to others.
We do not fast to protest or suffer, but to reach an objective. In general
the objective concerns the morality of others, not our own; through our
hunger strikes we do not ask for precedence to be given to a particular
bill, but that laws that others have imposed or proposed should be
implemented. Let me explain more clearly: we do not try to impose our
principles or our beliefs, we demand the minimum, we demand, that is, that
the government of the city respect its own laws, we demand the restoration
of the violated rules of democracy. In reality it is the only answer we can
give, beyond destruction, to a city which betrays its own laws. So where is
the violence, where is the blackmail?
- How do you explain the fact that these methods are not practised by the
masses?
Because we are a non-conformist, absolutely minority element compared to
the values prevalent today. But it's not true that they are not, in
principle, methods that can be practised by the masses; it depends on the
development of certain processes. Workers' strikes can be considered the
first great example of nonviolent mass protest, because they take place
when the workers discover that it is more productive to lay down tools than
to destroy machines or kill the factory-owner.
- Starting out from hunger strikes, we have come to nonviolence in general:
another choice for which the Radicals are criticized.
Much less so now than in the past, just as another ridiculous accusation is
no longer heard, that is that these methods are not "virile"... But let's
make one thing clear: why do these critics - let's call them violent -
always lose? [...] They lose because they resort to opportunist, activistic
tactics; because they represent rebellion pure and simple, the mob, before
it becomes the proletariat, if it is true that the proletariat is the
nonviolent mob.
What lies behind the difference in methods between the Radicals and the
other left-wing forces? They believe in "power"; we, on the other hand, aim
for the "weakening of power", that is of the violence of the institutions.
A process that can only reach completion over history, not through the
violent destruction of power, as the anarchists believe. Our position,
then, is anti-centralizing, anti-Jacobin, against short cuts, though
admittedly with all the risks of Jacobin exploitation. This is what we mean
by libertarian, the weakening of power as the result of the growth of class
and of Socialism, not a postponement to the moment power is assumed.
It is, therefore, a different way of going about politics, of living, of
undertaking struggle.
- So you claim that nonviolent methods are a Socialist practice, a winning
practice, a claim you would not make for the traditional methods of the
left.
What do the forms of struggle that we call traditional communicate to the
outside world? Molotov cocktails communicate violence, and even if we know
they don't do any harm, they can justify the fact that the police respond
with guns. Demonstrations that block the streets don't annoy Agnelli (1),
but the workers. And why should they have a positive reaction? Are they
lacking in class conscience? No, they are conscious of their rights, and if
they say "go to hell" it's the right reaction.
Marching in columns through the streets is the occupation of the city, a
military parade, possession. There are thousands of people, there is the
exaltation of crowds, of aggression, power which asserts itself over others
because it is strong and violent. And what do the people watching feel? The
thrill of the red flags, true, but this is the same as what they feel at
military parades. Apart from that I can't see any sense in demonstrations.
But walking in single file on the pavement, at the edge of the road, with a
signboard each (and you are in charge of yourself, whereas at
demonstrations you don't even communicate with your companions), means
writing a long, legible story. At the anti-militarist marches, the police
told us to walk in single file past the Military Sanctuary of Redipuglia;
and we agreed; a procession of three hundred signboards, people passed and
read them. A person on hunger strike is saying: "You are making fun of me,
I am unarmed and I can do nothing but demonstrate and denounce this".
May 1976
(1) The Chairman of Fiat.
