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.