I wanted to conjure New York as an environment of energies, sounds, sensations. Not as a backdrop, a place that could resolve into history and sociology and urbanism, but rather as an entity that could not be reduced because it had become a character, in the manner that a fully complex character in fiction isn’t reducible to cause, reasons, event. I looked at a lot of photographs and other evidentiary traces of downtown New York and art of the mid-1970s. Maybe a person is a tainted magnet and nothing is by chance, but what I kept finding were nude women and guns. The group Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, which figures in the novel, papered the Lower East Side in the late 1960s with posters that said, “We’re looking for people who like to draw,” with an image of a revolver. I had already encountered plenty of guns in researching Italy—the more militant elements of the Autonomist movement had an official weapon, the Walther P38, which could be blithely denoted with the thumb out, pointer finger angled up. I would scan the images of rallies in Rome, a hundred thousand people, among whom a tenth, I was told by people who had been there, were armed. Ten thousand individuals on the streets of Rome with guns in their pockets.

An appeal to images is a demand for love. We want something more than just their mute glory. We want them to give up a clue, a key, a way to cut open a space, cut into a register, locate a tone, without which the novelist is lost.

It was with images that I began The Flamethrowers. By the time I finished, I found myself with a large stash.

The narrator gets sick leave but discovers that he has no idea how to deal with free time, how to relax or what to do in Turin. The factory not only degrades work; it degrades life away from work. This is alienation, the lived experience of exploitation, but it is demonstrated here without theoretical abstractions: it’s an oral account of a person’s days—that’s all.

Eventually, the narrator decides to dedicate himself totally to making trouble. It’s a commitment to risk everything. “I’m inside here just to make money and that’s it,” he tells his bosses at Fiat. “But if you piss me off and break my balls I’ll smash your heads in, all of you.” And so the struggle begins. But the narrator’s threat, that scene, is not a moment of singular heroism. As literature and history both, We Want Everything is not a story of one remarkable man (history never is, even if novels so often rely on the myth of an avenging angel). The voice in the book could also be said to represent all the nameless and unknown who went North, like Rocco and his brothers, and like the twenty thousand who were hired alongside the novel’s narrator in 1969. It’s the story of the people who worked these awful jobs, blessed and burdened as they were with a masculine pride, a rage and strength and violence that they decided, all at once, to direct at factory bosses.

Nanni Balestrini’s novels have meant a great deal to me over the years. Formally, stylistically, they are in a category alone. Until I discovered them, I had often wondered if a novelist needed to have contempt for humanity, à la Céline, to have a great style. Style and cynicism—the ability to satirize, and to leave nothing sacred—had always seemed linked. In youth, I’d even regarded a lack of nihilism as an artistic weakness. Balestrini gives the lie to this idea. His novels, which are as funny and bleak as Journey to the End of the Night, are fueled not by contempt but instead by a kind of indestructible belief in revolutionary possibility. This may have something to do with the way the books were made. Balestrini was a subversive, an activist, and an organizer lifelong, in meetings, on barricades, outside factory gates, in the streets, in clandestine spaces. Never a voyeur, and always a participant, which must have been why people trusted him when he turned on his tape recorder. He was introducing art—the novel—to the work of rejecting, possibly overthrowing, bourgeois structures of power.

Balestrini had been a founding member, in 1968, of the extra-parliamentary left-wing group Potere Operaio, whose focus was on factories and factory workers, on listening to workers and producing a movement of their voices and direct experience. It’s likely that Balestrini was outside the gates of Fiat in 1969. This method of workers’ inquiry, called “inchiesta” by its practitioners in Italy, has foundations in Marxism. The concept of collecting the stories of workers, the idea that their accounts of work and of their lives would be essential to any revolutionary process, goes all the way back to Marx’s 1880 worker’s questionnaire, which was meant to be disseminated among French factory workers. It is the “workers in town and country,” Marx wrote, who “alone can describe with full knowledge the misfortunes from which they suffer.” Simply put, there is no theory without struggle. Struggle is the condition of possibility for theory. And struggle is produced by workers themselves. But the practice of workers’ inquiry didn’t quite take hold in Europe until after World War II, in the tactics and tenets of the radical-left French group Socialism or Barbarism, which came to influence workerist theory—Operaismo—in Italy.

In its use by Balestrini, who was not just a militant and theorist but a poet and artist, a writer to the core, inchiesta became something more, something else: a singular artistic achievement and a new literary form, the novel-inchiesta. If the novel, traditionally, is a work of introspection, in Balestrini’s hands it is instead a work of refraction: a way to refract that which “is already literature” even before its existence in a book, as Umberto Eco wrote of the voice in We Want Everything. One could argue that the passing thoughts of a worker on the assembly line are also already literature. And Balestrini skiing down the Mont Blanc, his scarf flapping—this is literature, too.

Mysteriously, Marguerite Duras gave her friend Georges Bataille her share of windfall profits from Hiroshima mon amour. It isn’t clear why. In 1957, she’d interviewed Bataille on the subject of “sovereignty,” a theme he’d addressed in a 1949 essay on Hiroshima, in which he wrote that the instant of the nuclear blast was the only sovereign truth Hiroshima offered us. He’d gone on to declare that instant, that blast, “a vanishing splendor.” Duras was herself not such a sick puppy as Bataille, but the common interpretation of her script for Hiroshima mon amour as “anti-nuclear,” a treatise on peace, is not quite correct. It’s more accurate to say that Duras both condemned human suffering and then again framed it as the only vital condition for the possibility of meaning.

Much of her publishing career was an encounter with misogyny: in the 1950s, male critics called her talent “masculine,” “hardball,” and “virile”—and they meant these descriptors as insults! (This kind of confused insistence on gendered literary territories has still not gone away, sadly.) The implication was that as a meek and feeble female, she had no right to her aloof candor, her outrageous confidence. And it’s true that you’d have to think quite highly of your own ideas to express them with such austerity and melodrama, but that is the great paradox, and tension, of the equally rudimentary and audacious style of Duras. “People who say they don’t like their own books, if such people exist, do so because they haven’t learned to resist the attraction to humiliation,” she wrote in one of her journals. “I love my books. They interest me.”

At the end of the day, the kids made a presentation to the broader conference, announcing, to Gilmore’s surprise, that in their workshop they had come to the conclusion that there were three environmental hazards that affected their lives most pressingly as children growing up in the Central Valley. Those hazards were pesticides, the police, and prisons.

“Sitting there listening to the kids stopped my heart,” Gilmore told me. “Why? Abolition is deliberately everything-ist; it’s about the entirety of human-environmental relations. So, when I gave the kids an example from a different place, I worried they might conclude that some people elsewhere were just better or kinder than people in the South San Joaquin Valley—in other words, they’d decide what happened elsewhere was irrelevant to their lives. But judging from their presentation, the kids lifted up the larger point of what I’d tried to share: where life is precious, life is precious. They asked themselves, ‘Why do we feel every day that life here is not precious?’ In trying to answer, they identified what makes them vulnerable.”

Prison abolition, as a movement, sounds provocative and absolute, but what it is as a practice requires subtler understanding. For Gilmore, who has been active in the movement for more than thirty years, it’s both a long-term goal and a practical policy program, calling for government investment in jobs, education, housing, health care—all the elements that are required for a productive and violence-free life. Abolition means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead, of vital systems of support that many communities lack. Instead of asking how, in a future without prisons, we will deal with so-called violent people, abolitionists ask how we resolve inequalities and get people the resources they need long before the hypothetical moment when, as Gilmore puts it, they “mess up.”

Between 1982 and 2000, California built twenty-three new prisons and, Gilmore found, increased the state’s prison population by 500 percent. [...] Gilmore outlines four categories of “surplus” to explain the prison-building boom. There was “surplus land,” because farmers didn’t have enough water to irrigate crops, and economic stagnation meant the land was no longer as valuable. As the California government faced lean years, it was left with what she calls “surplus state capacity”—government agencies that had lost their political mandate to use funding and expertise for social-welfare benefits (like schools, housing, and hospitals). In the wake of this austerity, investors specializing in public finance found themselves with no market for projects like schools and housing and instead used this “surplus capital” to make a market in prison bonds. And finally, there was “surplus labor,” resulting from a population of people who, whether from deindustrialized urban centers or languishing rural areas, had been excluded from the economy—in other words, the people from which prison populations nationwide are drawn.