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.