ABSTRACT: Marco Pannella took up the issues of non-violence, hunger strikes, and the relations between the violent and the non-violent during his address to the conference preparing the campaign to collect signatures for the "8 referendums against the regime" (abrogation of the Concordat, of the military courts, of the crimes of opinion contained in the Penal Code, of parts of the laws on insane asylums, of the laws bestowing special powers on the police for arrests, searches and telephone interception, of the "Inquiry Commission" - the special "court" composed of parliamentarians for preventive judgements on on crimes committed by ministers). Existentially and politically, those closest to the non-violent are precisely the violent. Both of them "offer substance", they put themselves on the line in the face of injustice. But we risk our own lives, they risk the lives of others. Thus doing, the violent easily become the instruments of provocation, tools of those in power; objectively and subjectively they

become "servants of the class strategy and of the violence of the

regime".

Today the only tool capable of bringing about a great revolutionary change in the Italian political picture is not the mass demonstration or the violent clash with police forces, but the call for the eight referendums which will oblige the political forces to make legislation and the PCI in particular to join the ranks either for or against constitutional legality.

(Discourse at the Referendum Conference - March 1977, from "Marco Pannella - Writings and Discourses - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)

I believe, comrades, that it is worth the trouble to be frank. I do not believe that the Radical Party, for the most part, is a party capable here and now of leading the fight for the referendums and winning it, not withstanding the non-violent battle and the hunger strike of its National Secretary and many comrades. The party could have contested the opportuneness of that hunger strike. If it did not believe in it, the party could have posed the political problem of such fasting, at the most for stopping it, and proposed other objectives and methods of struggle. This was not done, and yet only a limited number of members took on the task of concretely supporting the aims of this action: in all of Italy perhaps only one hundred or one hundred ten people. No one asked the other comrades to fast, no one asked anyone for acts of civil disobedience, but to do something in that direction, that is to say in the direction of a non-violent and democratic policy of public order; to do something to avoid the danger of

defeat, of the defeat that this lost battle would mean for the non-violent method as such. TGhis is a party which has a very hard time beginning an action and taking it to its conclusion, even an appareantly so traditional one as the collection of signatures for the referendums. And theefore the problkem is to undersstand what hope there is that this may happen (...).

Let us speak clearly: in the past, every time that a member of our party went on a hunger strike it was because he was obliged to by the lack of his comrades' ideas for a broader, collective commitment. We were compelled to do it for the sake of the party's survival - I would say downright physical survival - that the situation of the moment imposed, orf when some of our essential political struggles and goals otherwise risked being endangered.

Not only parties but ideas too can die, do die,depsite what the rhetoric of the prevailing culture maintains. It is nto true that "for every comrade who falls, ten others rise up and the idea that he represented...". I believe rather that history is made up of the murder of ideas by way of the murder of the murder of the collective body of the political organisations no less than of the murder of individuals. Each time we have had recourse to this weapon - which we ahve alway said was the extreme weapon of the non-violent - it was because we were faced with problems of existence, of the party's survival, of the meaning and thus of the legitimacy of its existence.

When we get to the point where we are now, with independent radio stations at our disposal and Radical Radio in several cities, I think we are all able to recognize it: it certainly cannot be maintained that the Radicals in practice do not move , as revolutionary theory would have it, like a fish in water in the midst of the people. On the contrary, I don't believe that anyone on the revolutionary left can move as much and as well as the Radicals among the people like a fish in water.

Everywhere, on the left and, above all, on the right, in the condition of the sub-proletarian "culture" as in relations with the dominating classes, today more than ever Radical initiatives are a paralysing factor that create contradictions and crisis. Today more than ever, we are continuing to deepen this double function which has been our hallmark in these last fifteen years. Whereas all the other political parties and groups on the left, and above all the revolutionary left, have been fighting to win over the same mass of adherents already belonging to the left, we have always worked - from the divorce fight to sexual liberation, to the battles of these last days, to move the consensus from the right to the left by awakening the refusal to be subjected to class violence and that of the institutions.

We have done it and we will continue to do it. This battle over the prison guards two years ago could have been a battle in the opposite direction, a battle in favour of those who two or three years ago beat the rebellious to a pulp: for "the warders" (...).

Today, as Radicals, let us admit it, we risk one thing most of all: we have, all of us, in one way or another, become Radicals because we thought at bottom that we all were irremediably solitary or different from other people, and so we thirsted for a harder more "radical" alternative than others. For a year, in reality, to be a Radical has come to mean instead a way of for no longer being solitary. It is indubitable. They can oppose us, they can detest us or not, but I believe that if there is a new factor present in the minds of people it is this: either one is for the Radicals or one is against them. There has been an exponential and not an arithmetical growth in the feelings, the curiosity, the interest of people. For this very reason you will the attacks they are preparing and that are a part of the rules of the game. There is therefore this risk that the Radicals will being to be basically content with the situation, because suddenly they have the impression that it is not necessary to do much, becau

se, after all, people talk about the Radicals and people understand, and you find the most curious and unexpected people ready to admit that they are a little bit Radical.

If this condition begins to disappear, we must make the leap from being Radical for only the fundamental individual and existential reasons, emotional and irrational, to being Radical collectively, dialogically, in an organised way as our Statute indicates and demands. This is the only party that in its Statute foresees in reality collective adherence alone and only exceptionally individual adherence; it is the only party that is anti-individualist in its Statute, all the way to the end...

To those who object to the "pen-and-paper road to revolution" we must reply: it is not true. We are in the middle of March and we must ask ourselves what revolutionary use to make of our time in the next forty days. The question is not one of pseudo-theoretical reflections about whether the revolution should be accomplished by pens or by Molotov cocktails. These are beside the point.

We must decide what is the best, concrete, organised use the alternative revolutionaries can make of themselves in the next forty or sixty days.

If we find a better one, we will abandon this action and merge with another. But if this should not happen, the most revolutionary way is by means of this political project and no others. To those who tell us that the streets are the best site for the revolution, we reply: "Just so, let us bring our tables out into the streets." True enough, there are armoured cars in the streets and the squares these days, but it would be hard for an armoured car to move against a table, because if it goes against a referendum table collecting signatures, Cossiga's (DC minister of the interior, ed.) armoured car loses. On hearing the news that an armoured car went against a referendum table even the DC voters and those of the MSI-DN will take the part of those around the table against the armoured car.

I think an observation that is not superficial must be made about what is happening these days.

I am not a non-violent moralist. On the contrary, I think that those who are existentially and politically closest to us the non-violent -if and when we know really how to be it - are the violent and not the others. Why? Because those who choose non-violence choose illegality, civil disobedience. They choose to "give substance" to the word "no" when faced with unjust laws and ordinances: they risk their necks, use violence, with their own non-violence, on the unavoidable mechanisms that the State tries to impose. The non-violent break plates everyday. They break something more delicate than shop-windows and the doors of arsenals particularly if they succeed in suggesting the goals to the masses, to the general public, and giving them the means and tools of non-violence.

Thus the violent have almost all the essentials in common with us except for everyone's individual schizophrenia. But one can also be non-violent because of schizophrenia or paranoia.

It is said that the non-violent person, when he goes on a hunger strike for example, is doing violence to himself; but the violent also must do violence to themselves when they do it to others, because he believes it necessary to respond with organised violence to the violence of the institutions. And the proximity is downright dramatic. When the non-violent from time to time notes his defeat and the insuccess of his theories and practices, he is not compelled to choose to back down, be resigned and inert as an alternative but rather the violence of desperation. Thus in the same way, I believe, if the violent manage to free themselves of this enormous charge of totalitarian cultural mystification that favours violence, because in ideological terms the violence of the revolutionary is justified by the dominating ideology (it belongs to the ideology of the dominating mass, to the bourgeois ideology, the idea that violence is the only answer to violence), if they reach the point of reflecting on the possible de

feat of their methods and their battles, they can understand that today the strongest point of revolutionary force is represented by the illegality and the radical diversity of provocation and non-violent action.

It is for these reasons that since '68 until today I have never polemicized specifically against the errors committed by those who choose the method of violence, which have been the suicidal errors of the Movement (MSI, ed.). I was able to do so because I did not stand around watching and I tried to represent an insurance policy with - as far as I am concerned - my non-violence in respect to the possible failure of the prevailing strategy and ideology.

But taking these days as a point of departure, I must say that the very attacks, the conditioned reflexes of the Movement, seem to me such troglodytic manifestations of political praxes, that I cannot be silent. And this reflection, this polemic if you will, is not an evasion of the commitments and the urgent deadlines of the referendum project. On the contrary, I believe that the campaign for referendums must base itself precisely on this reflection: on what are the right choices for a revolutionary, violent or not as the case may be, in the next 40,50, or 60 days.

What is it we hear said every time a comrade dies? It is a provocation of the government, of the police, it is said. It would be foolishness to say or think that it is a deliberate provocation, organised by Cossiga, by this or that member of the government, or by the government in its entirety. But it is right to say that it is objectively a provocation: it might have been Cossiga to provoke it, just as it might have been the anti-Cossiga within the government, the DC or the separate bodies of the regime: that is, it might arise from the regime's internal contradictions. But if it is correct to say it is a provocation, we must stop and ask ourselves: a provocation of what?

How has the Movement reacted in the last ten years to assassinations and to the violence of the government? I believe we all know it and can reply: on the following day the occupation of the university and a mass march in Via Nazionale and Via Cavour. Thus if someone murders one of ours, it is to provoke the next day at a fixed date and place, hour and method, already foreseen, pre-determined. Cosssiga, or someone on his behalf, if he wanted to provoke, he has succeeded, but his success was guaranteed in advance because it is the instant, conditional reflex of the Movement to do... what? That which we are ordered to do.

That which was said the evening before the incident during the debate at the Casa dello Studente (university students' center, ed.) is that which Cossiga probably would have written as a memorandum for his police and his Carabinieri, for Santillo's (the police commissioner, ed.) gangs, if he wanted to draught the scenario of what they would have found the next day and of how they would have had to behave. They said everything possible in that debate in all its diversifications and different accents - from the comrade who wanted a peaceful demonstration to the one who said "peaceful, yes, but not like jerks", to still another who added "peaceful, yes, but one must react to the police aggression", up to that comrade who specified - I heard it myself - that it was necessary to consider the mere presence of the Carabinieri an aggression.

But excuse me, we are "revolutionaries" and do we want to demand an accounting from the Carabinieri of the fact that it is supposed to have been one of their officers who killed comrade Lo Russo (an extraparliamentary who was assassinated, ed.)? But following this logic let us all go this very day and erect a monument - not to Brigadier Ciotta, but to the PS (public security police, ed.) because a democratic policeman was vilely assassinated in a cowardly ambush in a Turin street. In this too the Movement allows itself to be involved, to be conditioned by the bourgeois cultures reflexes and habits of social condition, caste and class: the Carabinieri and the Army as opposed to the police; in the same way within the armed forces: the Navy as the noble corps, the Air Force as the young sporty branch as in the past the cavalry was considered to be in opposition to the Army and the Infantry... with the result that the Army will now say to thee Carabinieri: "You see, its you they're after, you that they're goin

g to massacre in the streets and not the highway patrol anymore..."

Why does this happen? It happened yesterday to Ciotta at Turin, it happened to the agents of the highway patrol. Meanwhile, let us say it straight out, to murder one of us they need to provoke our ceremonies. It is evident that yesterday Cossiga, or someone on his behalf, needed one hundred thousand people, because if there were no incidents or provocations (and how could there not be some among one hundred thousand people?), if there were not some among the hundred thousand to sack the arsenals, then thirty of forty plain clothes agents would be enough, mixing among the crowd, to provoke the incidents, to kill a student or another agent.

And that is how the Movement, with its conditioned reflexes, ends up, objectively and subjectively, by being the tool of the regime's strategy of class and violence.

But what happens when the Movement manages to have reflexes and methods of struggle different from that of the regime? Santillo's armed bands were not invented in Rome in the last few days, and not even during the clashes in Reggio Calabria. We encountered them in Rome, still under Santillo before he became police commissioner. These things have not been invented today, nor even in the aftermath of 1968. These things already happened in Rome in 1946, the day after the referendum on the Republic. But what did we do after we discovered Santillo's plain clothes agents?

We handled it as pacifists at that time. We said it was inconceivable that plain clothes agents carrying pistols were mixing among the crowds so that they could not be recognised. They couldn't be recognised as agents by the crowd, by the citizens, but not even by other agents and so perhaps wounded or killed by their own colleagues. At the time such common-sense considerations, such need for a minimum respect of the law was accepted by practically everybody, even Malagodi's Liberals stated their agreement with us. For a certain period the use of armed plain clothes agents during demonstrations was impossible. Today it is considered normal, Santillo's armed squads by now are part of our public order norms, accepted as normal by the Movement because it has decided to do nothing to block the growing mechanisms of violence of the institutions.

Camouflaged and armed in the midst of the mass-demonstration crowds, Cossiga's and Santillo's plain clothes men, however, are disarmed by the use of the streets and squares that can be made with tables and pens in the exercise of constitutional rights. If a hundred thousand comrades, used to marching in 30 or 40 demonstrations a year of the kind we are talking about, were clearly informed by our revolutionary organisations about where to find a table and a pen and were induced to undertake a daily action of this kind, I believe that we would by now have realized something explosive: a legitimate, legal implementation of the Constitution that would force Italy's entire political world to face up to it. If one hundred thousand comrades in all Italy were given the chance to get ten other signatures onto eight referendums in thirty days, we would have provoked not the revolution, but certainly the biggest revolutionary action of these last years (...).

A movement is alternative when it creates alternative situations, not when it performs the deeds that the regime wants to bring about. We do not claim that this is revolution. We only say that when the regime, by killing one of us, provokes the things it wants - that is, yesterday's demonstration and incidents - so in the same way, if we manage to bring these millions of signatures to the Constitutional Court, we will have forced them to do the thing that we have provoked: they will have to move to approve some of these reform laws (...). At this point the PCI will have to choose either to actuate the Constitution along with the majority of the country, of else to try to deprive the overwhelming majority of these referendums. And in any case we would put an enormous negotiating power regarding the Constitution into the PCI's hands (...).

If a hundred thousand students would give a tenth or a hundredth part of the time they dedicate to assemblies and marches to the "pen-and-ink road to revolution", we would have definitely determined the fate of this legislature and the political rails on which it runs (...).

We reply to traditional provocations with a wrong idea of mass struggle. The same idea that the police have: killing. That is, we react like plebes rather than proletarians. The way the plebes behaved before becoming proletarians. Because the idea of waiting for a gendarme to come yet again, representing the violence of the State, to take one away and kill him, to hide in the shadows waiting to ambush and kill the tax exactor - this belongs to the historical tradition of the peasants' revolt and to the bread strikes of the popular quarters of Paris that the absolutist governments provoked, and not to the tradition of organised proletarian struggle.

I will say it once again: Gandhi has little or nothing to do with our kind of non-violence. The oriental tradition has nothing to do with it. If anything it may be Gandhi that took over occidental methods of liberation in these struggles for freedom. The proletariat becomes such, ceases to be plebeian, when it discovers the way - apparently acted-out, non-violent - to cross its arms and stop production instead of killing the boss of the iron factory or his delegate and burning the factory.