ABSTRACT: The defence of the nonviolent initiative consisting in a "fiscal objection" to military expenses (not paying the taxes corresponding to the defence expenditure)

(L'Espresso - September 1974 from "Marco Pannella - Works and speeches - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)

The labour unions, the parties, the public opinion do not understand? I don't think so. If ever, they're afraid. Faced to the initiative of the militants of Milan, a question arises (which is also, for the moment, the only answer they are capable of): "What would happen if...". But try to apply this criterion to the traditional strike: what would happen if everyone struck at the same time?

Why on earth should the worker's strike be a democratic, lawful and effective weapon, and why shouldn't the taxpayer's fiscal strike, the consumer's strike on purchases, the strike in the payment of public or private services which are made inaccessible or denied altogether, the citizen's electoral strike, the general strike of a community assailed in its independence and in its existence be?

The fact of not paying the entire fare of the transportation ticket, the entire house rent, the communal taxes because the city does not provide essential services, the taxes corresponding to the budget of the so-called national defence, the purpose of which is being spied, discriminated, assassinated: is all this an offence? Probably. Let us be tried then, one by one. Despite the regime justice system, it will be an occasion to search for the truth, for the responsibility of these situations.

The nonviolent arsenal has barely been explored. The scientific use of the bourgeois legality causes its fundamental contradiction to explode: the contradiction between ideals which only the proletarian "Third State" can assert, and the power which the bourgeois, interclassist parties exert as renegades, in the opposite direction, to maintain it. Disobeying unfair orders, provokingly violating the unconstitutional law, raising objections of conscience against claims of morally intolerable behaviours, freely and responsibly self-managing the social, economic and political areas in which we live, foreshadowing a nonviolent, lay, libertarian, socialist society, also in the methods, the means, have been the weapons of defence and attack of the radical minorities up to now.

But perhaps the main reason for which we practised them and chose them is so that they be accepted and supported by the vast powerless majorities, by the people. It is a winning choice. It will take decades, but we are finally starting to proceed in the right direction.