ABSTRACT: Marco Pannella is carrying on a thirst strike to solicit the approval of the popular initiative bill to save three million people who otherwise will die of starvation and which entails the appropriation of funds amounting to three billion dollars. In the article published in "Manifesto" (1) he defines the strategic objectives of this battle, recalling to mind how the campaign for divorce was considered a "politically" marginal issue by all the political commentators. They only noticed their mistake when the political and electoral upheaval took place following the referendum.

On this occasion too, official culture shows it is not aware that the battle against hunger may create a social and not only political front "against rearmament and even for unilateral disarmament" and that "we are dealing with a policy in progress which manifestly contains the power to state the problem of a social block and alternative policy in a new and concrete way which can create a most evident crisis for the values and goals of the Catholic-clerical sphere of Italian politics which is the Christian Democrats".

("IL MANIFESTO", July 25, 1928)

The divorce battle - for at least five years - was considered at best to be an important battle, certainly morally relevant, commendable as a civil action, but politically marginal in comparison to the "politics" of the other parties, to politics "tout-court".

The doubts that this was not the way things were began to occur to observers, statesmen, historical leaders and political scientists once they saw the results of the 1974 referendum which we were absolutely the only ones to desire (even its promoters had in fact abandoned it) and they ended up surprised when in 1975 they saw the first great shift to the left in the regional elections, and in 1976 when PCI, PSI, PR and DP (2) reached and surpassed 49% of the vote.

Unfortunately the Radical Party alone has consciously pursued these results over ten years on an explicit and daily basis, since the others let the success, which they had neither wanted nor believed in, go to pieces.

Once again we have waded half-way across the stream, and once again no one among the doyens of our political culture, our official politics, has noticed that we are on the eve of a new shift to the left of our electorate (and of a "real" left) and of a great growth of the Radical Party which is preparing it. An anti-Nazi, humanitarian and humanistic struggle against the holocaust; that one - which is different - against the present North-South relations and its ensuing underdevelopment and exploitation of a large part of the world; the one - again - that creates a social and not only political front against rearmament and for disarmament (even unilateral) in favour of investing in the immense area of the new Italian poverty the tens and tens of billions that the [parliamentary] majority is earmarking for armaments and for inserting in a subaltern and very dangerous way the Italian productive structures into the military-industrial complex after having done the same with the agro-industrial complex which

is dominating and destroying our agriculture along with that of all Southern Europe.

"Let us use hunger to get rid of hunger" by remaining fixed to this democratic, class and internationalist battle of civilisation and life - this is the apt slogan of Franco Roccella which was his reply to the detailing of this line in my report to the PR's Federal Council.

In this context one must read the things that are happening these days on the institutional front.

In the end one can also treat with irony the front which is uniting 80 Nobel Prize winners with the European Parliament, thousands upon thousands of Communist, Socialist, and Christian Democratic mayors in Italy and other thousands throughout Europe, 180 foreign cardinals and bishops, and more than 30 Italian bishops along the Radical line: "Alive for development " and "immediate life for at least a part of the dying", inasmuch as it doesn't matter if they are dying from hunger and exploitation, declared wars or cholera, when everyone is after all in agreement that it is due to (the lack of) a political choice and the dominating international disorder.

Due to the fact that, like all Radical battles, this one too takes place underground because of ostracism by the RAI-TV [Italian state radio and TV] and the dominant culture (of the right, the center and the left), one could also continue to ignore that we are confronting a policy in progress which manifestly has the power to state in a new and concrete way the problem of the social block and political alternative which can create a most evident crisis for the values and goals of the Catholic-clerical sphere of Italian politics: the Christian Democrats, incapable of grasping the always more necessarily limpid and firm word of the Church and to explode the contradictions between this word and a policy that today, in the government and in Parliament, is nothing but the superstructure of the realities of rearmament, of the IOR (3), of necessarily classist policy, all the more in establishing itself as corporatist, interclassist, and anti-popular, incapable of any impetus or even of the launching of new myt

hs and pseudo-values.

If one adds that the battle is not merely one of position, of Radical political initiative, the signal and the message of aggregation and hope which it thus also involves semiotically as well as logically with regard to the area of Italian poverty and of the proletarisation of the middle class and the intellectual bourgeoisie; if we note in these same days the error of the political experts and the fact that the DC, the government - far from granting themselves a fistful of millions - are starting out on a crusade against the mayors' bill, the Nobel winners manifesto, the goal of a life-saving action against the holocaust and the mortality rate from hunger in the world, one could smile, but also be terrified by the new, nth distraction of the official left, of the blindness of too many of its leaders who once more have before their eyes - throughout the country, in the concrete culture and socio-economic conditions of the large majority of the citizens, even more than in the case of divorce, of abortion

, of public financing - values, goals, choices and alliances of a true and victorious alternative.

The dozens and dozens of women and men - not infrequently of a political origin that in the past was the opposite of our own - who day and night publicly announce on Radical Radio and Teleroma 56 (4) that they have taken out membership in the Radical Party, often offering dues above the minimum (200 lire a day, 73,000 lire annually) in mid summer - are made to measure for a party that has never exceeded three thousand registered members in all Italy. For the most part these new comrades of ours are in the following order pensioners, the very young, the unemployed, hired workers.

What would happen if these battles pertained to or were advanced - and not "in extremis (just like and worse than the divorce, abortion and Fascist laws issues) - by the "big" political organisations of the left?

Life, right here, - and not merely the quality of life - depends as in the Thirties on saving the lives of those who are being exterminated elsewhere. On saving men and women, not on immolating them on the altar of a new society or a "new man", a "new development" and a "new international economic order".

If, as appears to be the case, in spite of us, in Italy in these days and these hours the silent decree of extermination is confirmed ("because it is useless to save them if in the end...", we Radicals will not have been defeated, we will "only" have fallen short of the goal which we did everything possible to attain. Three million people will have been exterminated - at the very least - and their deaths will have served, for the first time, to strengthen the front for the salvation of the others who follow them; their necks will have been sold, for the first time, at a high price.

We will not be defeated, we Radicals. But the others? But the left? But democracy, peace, life? -----------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) "Manifesto" - A leftist daily.

2) Respectively the Communist Party, Socialist Party, Radical Party and Democratic Proletarian Party.

3) IOR meaning Istituto Opere di Religione - the Vatican's banking institute.

4) The PR's television station.