ABSTRACT: We need to re-write the rules and the reasons of democracy for a world which has never known them, or which is losing them. We need to make them live and to assert them. The democratic elected representatives and activists of nonviolence risk being overwhelmed by history, which has once again become tragically hostile, if they do not organize themselves and arm themselves with concrete methods and common discipline. Immediately.
(The Party New, n.2, July 1991)
Amnesty International has documented the growing use of torture and of the practice of political assassination, carried out in the name of the state, all over the world, and the degradation of the law and of rights in the very heart of the democratic world.
In the US the death penalty is carried out and called for more and more, in the USSR of the perestroika over ten thousand people have been executed in the last few years. In Brazil the police are unable to solve the problem of the tens of thousands of teenage killers, even though "death-squads" are organized to eliminate as many of them as possible.
And yet the vast majority of men of culture, democratic activists and scientists hold that the death penalty leads only to negative effects and to a deadly illusion.
Do we want to set up an organization of parliamentarians, in the first place, to allow us to work with cogent force for the approval in our parliaments and by our governments, and at the UN, of the prohibition of the death penalty and torture, and the outlawing of those who practise them?
Do we want to set up an organization of democratic elected representatives who aim to make the great and vital question of disarmament include the disarmament of society, and not only of states, by putting forward laws aimed at abolishing as quickly as possible the right of civilians to produce, sell, and detain lethal weapons, restricting the possession and the regulation of the production and use of arms - for now - to public "armed forces"?
Do we want, in this way, to initiate a process of unification and of institutional, supernational legal reform, giving an činternational scope, at a structural and political level, to the legislative proposals of all our groups, of each one of us, within our parliaments (or our parties)?
Do we want to offer the democratic elected representatives and the democratic activists of nonviolence and rights the chance to organize themselves, get to know each other and work with the instruments of modern technology, no longer only or principally within the framework of individual nations, now that problems are increasingly shared by all countries and their solution increasingly essential for humanity, the planet, civilization and survival?
Do we want to represent the rights of those who elected us and carry out our duties correctly and effectively?
Or do we want to continue to fight for "victories" without a tomorrow, without adequate effects, or for "glorious defeats" for the sake of show?
Do we want to live in isolation in our national towers of Babel, or in the illusion that we can avoid doing so after the experiences of this century?
We meet more and more frequently at conferences and congresses, but the decisions and resolutions taken are not put into effect adequately. Or in the heart of tragedies that we are unable to prevent: wars, repression, catastrophes, defeats and human (or inhuman) grief.
Many people state, and many more believe, that nonviolence, civil rights, ecology, development, and liberty are being defeated time after time even though they seemed to triumph, or to be able to triumph, just one year ago.
But in the world today there is no political organization of nonviolence, tolerance, democracy, ecology, and civil rights that is čstimulating conflicts and making projects. We need to announce and create such an organization, and give it a form, a voice, a soul. And as many as possible of us need to work to this end.
The instrument that can fulfill this hope is the Radical Party, which we invite you to set up with us, every day, by joining it, by becoming part of its governing bodies, and by using its strength and potential.
The Soviet poet Majakovski saw the "Party" as "a hand with a million fingers clenched in a single powerful fist". That monstruous hand has fallen into the mire. There is now no longer a single party; what we have now is "partycracy", the polycentric system of ruling parties which is suffocating the development of democracy and taking over the mantle of Fascist and Communist regimes, except in the Anglo-Saxon world, or in much of it.
This new system is destroying not only national states but also the United States of Europe, which seemed to be on the point of being realized.
We need to react, to act. We are not asking for anything. We are offering a chance, a possibility, a solidarity that is solid rather than for show. Simone Weil said that politics should "conceive of new possibilities" and not restrict itself to the possibilities of the past. The transnational transparty (the political struggle is also a semantic struggle) which we are calling the Radical Party - for the moment at least - is devoted to this end.
