We Want Everything: A Novel - Nanni Balestrini
This edition published in 2022 by Verso, London, UK and New York, NY
Originally published in 1971 as Vogliamo tutto by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editori, Milan, Italia
Translated by Matt Holden
With a New Introduction by Rachel Kushner
ISBN: 978-1-78478-369-3
In the summer of 1969, factory workers in northern Italy mounted massive strikes in an effort to win better wages and improved working conditions. Known as the Hot Autumn, these wildcat strikes were a result of the flow of labor from the farmlands of Southern Italy to the industrial North. As a result of full employment in this region, workers found themselves with the power and leverage necessary to negotiate their wages and working conditions.
Unlike their counterparts in either the Italian Communist Party (PCI) who saw the party’s ability to build political alliances as the most effective strategy to secure power into the hands of laborers or the union leaders who wanted to balance the demands of the workers and their bosses, those within the Operaismo (“workerism”) movement saw the development of capitalism as primarily a reaction against worker power that could only be overcome through insurrectionary action. As such, those within this new radical movement were highly suspicious of already existing left-wing institutions, such as the Communist Party and trade unions. Accordingly, they took action within the factories, forming widespread wildcat strikes and demanding the impossible, as chants of “vogliamo tutto!” (“We want everything!”) filled the streets of Turin. First published in Italian in 1971, Nanni Balestrini’s We Want Everything is a fictionalized account of these waves of strikes during the Hot Autumn that paved the way for more than a decade of social and political unrest.
Overview:
As a product of the Workerist movement in Italy, the novel follows an unnamed protagonist as he fumbles around from job to job before ultimately taking a position within a Fiat factory in the North. As a native of Southern Italy, our protagonist notes how lucrative jobs were shifting North as the agricultural industry of the South was becoming less well-compensated and working conditions harsher. While he has a degree, he cannot find stable employment as he lacks experience in any high-skilled specialist position.
Looking to escape the backbreaking labor in the impoverished South, he takes several summer trips to the North but can only find menial, unfulfilling jobs. The rising costs of rent and his imprudent spending habits force him to donate blood (which he does while highly caffeinated in order to speed up blood production and fill the vials quicker). He manages to make some quick cash while bouncing from job to job before finding creative ways to either quit or be fired in ways that maximize his financial gains. After agitating his bosses enough to let him get his way and get paid out and feigning an injury to exploit the company’s paid leave program, he returns to the South and squanders all of his money on leisure items. Our narrator despises work and desperately wants to escape the poverty of the South while also hedonistically enjoying the fruits of his labor.
This cycle repeats until our narrator finds himself employed at a Fiat factory in Turin. There, he stumbles across some union meetings The tone of the book shifts from a personal narrative voice to a more detached recounting of the various wildcat strikes that occur at the factory. After working 14-hour days doing backbreaking manual labor in blistering heat, the narrator stumbles across a group of disgruntled workers as they begin organizing themselves into a collective. In this section, the narrator is much more politically aware, and he connects his individualized disdain of work to the wider struggle of laborers struggling against unfair wages, squalid working conditions, and long hours.
He becomes swept up in the rising tide of discontent and rage that has been slowly festering among factory workers as they refuse the mediation offered by union leaders, who often side with the employers rather than the workers. These strikes become increasingly heated, and eventually, the fervor boils over into an open revolt. Workers clash with police officers as a violent struggle ensues. They build barricades in the streets as riot police shoot tear gas into the crowds. After a night of violent struggle, the book abruptly ends with the protagonist and others returning home, bruised and bloody.
Commendations:
In terms of stylistic merits, the writing is direct and sparse in its prose (especially in the first half), which leads to a quick and relatively enjoyable read. The novel has a unique rhythm to it that I have not encountered elsewhere, as it switches from narrative prose to political theory and back again. It is a piece of fiction that often feels like non-fiction, as it is closely based on the actual events of the Hot Autumn. As such, the book serves as a fascinating historical document of the era, and one that still resonates with many accounts of workplace struggles today.
Many of us, here in the 2020s, know very well what it is like to struggle to find employment. Most of us dislike spending the majority of our days at a job we’re passively indifferent toward or actively hating. Too many of us know what it’s like to dread going to work, making a pittance of an hourly wage while our bosses extract the surplus value of our labor in order to rake in greater profits. As such, many of us can relate to the basal impulses of Balestrini’s unnamed protagonist. While the protagonist is not the most morally admirable character, his tenacity and resourcefulness to avoid work at any cost are impressive and, at times, quite humorous. In our individualist, capitalistic culture, it is easy for us to forget that work is not inherently good or virtuous.
For Balestrini, this characterization and anonymity of his protagonist are purposeful. While our unnamed protagonist was based on a real person, he serves as a representative of the mass of Italian workers. He bounces around from job to job and struggles to find a career path because, while he is educated, he lacks experience. He scrapes enough money to get by, despite the rising cost of rent. With the lack of social safety nets, he uses his cunning to extract as much money from his position as he possibly can (even to the point of donating his blood for quick cash). While he may take extraordinary measures to avoid work at all possible costs, his attitude toward work is something that almost all of us can identify with. Most of us also share many of the same experiences and feelings as Balestrini’s protagonist, even if he takes these attitudes to their logical extremes.
As such, Balestini’s work does well to focus on the experience of the common (albeit, able-bodied and male) worker in Italy. In the spirit of the Workerist philosophy, Balestrini’s novel emphasizes the exploitation of the common factory worker and their efforts to fight for higher wages, better working conditions, and equal pay. Balestrini’s work further highlights the obstructionist role that union leaders played in the struggle, as they worked alongside the factory executives to quell the unrest. By showing this stratification of class interests, this tension illustrates the various strategies that are used to break organized labor movements, many of which are still used today. In these ways, Balestrini’s novel serves as a fascinating piece of historical fiction that highlights the fight for labor rights during the Hot Autumn, while also connecting us to the ongoing labor struggles against worker exploitation that we still face today.
Critique:
Unfortunately, by narrating the events of the book through this narrow lens, Balestrini’s supposedly universal message of “We Want Everything” can often seem to come with a few caveats. For example, what exactly do we mean by “we?” As Kushner notes in the introduction, the events within the book describe an exclusively male revolution. Our protagonist, while supposedly a representative of the average exploited factory worker, is a bit of a chauvinist, as he objectifies women and often views them as simply another avenue to pursue his hedonistic, sexual appetites.
This is particularly the case in the first half of the novel, before our protagonist’s class consciousness has been fully formed. While I could see this as an intentional move by Balestrini (ie. portraying the average worker, despite all of their faults, still as worthy of dignity in their work), it often comes across as a pathetic display of machismo. This focus on the hyper-masculine proletariat only serves to further alienate the collectivization of workers along the lines of gender, which goes wholly unaddressed in this novel.
In addition to his latent sexism, Balestini’s protagonist comes across as brash, manipulative, and overall unlikable. This makes him incredibly difficult to sympathize with, even as he is being exploited by his employers. This may seem like an argument regarding aesthetics and attitude, but I still think it's an important point. The novel’s protagonist is lazy, yet cunning to the level of character, as he seeks any loophole to exploit in order to get out of work. While I understand this perspective (ie. we should not make work the center of our identity), our protagonist's ridiculous antics ultimately work to confirm the right-wing stereotype of socialists and communists as lazy, unproductive citizens who only want handouts from the government.
His actions, especially in the first half of the novel, are strikingly individualist, rather than collective. It is striking that, at least in the first half, his identity is formed more by his fixation on individualist consumption rather than collective action, which later came to define the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and 90s. As such, a perspective of work that serves to support one another in a collective is largely absent from the narrative portion of the book. This is ultimately a result of the workerist conflation of work and wage labor. While we should look to move beyond the wage labor relation that defines capitalist relations, we should not fall into the trap of workerist and post-workerist philosophies that denigrate and try to render work unnecessary like certain branches of the Left tend to do, such as so-called “fully-automated luxury communism.” Regardless of how much technology develops, work in itself will be necessary even in a socialist or communist society. When separated from the wage labor relationship, work will not have the same alienating effect on the worker, even if the work isn’t always 100% enjoyable.
The second half of the novel has a strikingly different, if no less frustrating, problem. Just as the signifier of “we” in We Want Everything is exclusively male and able-bodied, the stubbornly and persistently undefined signifier of “everything” becomes so vague and vacuous that it loses any definite purpose or meaning. By making impossible demands, the workers that came to define the Operaismo (“workerist”) movement in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s hoped to challenge the status quo and imagine new ways of organizing labor apart from the party or unions. Yet, this movement ultimately fizzled by the early 1980s due to internal divisions as members broke off and joined other Leftist movements that had greater cohesion. This disparateness can be seen in the structure of the novel.
The novel’s tone takes a sharp turn in its second part. All of a sudden, the protagonist is no longer an individual, but rather part of a political collective that organizes anti-work actions across the factory. When he stumbles across a collection of his peers chanting slogans about Mao, although he has no idea what they are talking about, he decides to join them in an act of spite against Fiat. While the first section of the book reads like a traditional novel, the second half consists of a series of reports of the strike actions that occur throughout the factory. In an effort to separate the common worker from the Marxist intellectuals he’s critiquing, Balestini is trying to emphasize the daily concerns of the worker.
Yet, we as readers get no real sense of the protagonist’s political transformation. In terms of style, the writing transforms from direct, punchy narrative prose to more theory-laden political writing. Rather than the straightforward story that we read in the first half, what we get in the second half are long lists of strike actions that occur on various levels of the factory floors, which gets repetitive rather quickly. While this section is interesting in certain ways (namely, the aforementioned focus on the anti-labor actions of union leaders), it reads as exceptionally dry non-fiction.
When the narrative picks back up in the last few pages, it depicts a violent clash between fascist police forces and the workers. While exciting when compared to the pages preceding it, this final section ends in an anticlimactic conclusion, as the narrator and his comrades climb down from the rooftops and simply go back home. While I can appreciate an author leaving their book’s ending ambiguous (and I can understand Balestini making the point that the current struggle is unresolved and the future is open for unrealized possibilities), it just seemed incredibly abrupt and completely rushed.
Conclusion:
Overall, We Want Everything serves as a fascinating historical snapshot that gives us insight into the increasingly militant labor movements in Italy during the late 60s and early 70s. By blurring the lines between fiction and actual history, Balestini’s work reads more like a novelization of the political and economic theories of the Italian workerism movement. If you read the novel with the complex context of the Italian political landscape that led to the Hot Autumn in mind, then Balestrini’s novel serves as an interesting companion piece to the historical record of working conditions in Italy. However, without this context, it is easy for the reader to get lost in the direct, sparse prose and brash characterization of the central protagonist in the first half and dry lists of wildcat strikes in the latter half.
Nevertheless, the contemporary Left can still learn much from Balestini’s novel. After decades of active suppression in the United States, labor movements are increasingly utilizing railway strikes and other unionization efforts throughout the country. Despite the alienated nature of the working class, workers are slowly banding together to demand greater protection from exploitation and fairer wages.
On the other hand, the Left still faces significant opposition. Right-wing populist leaders in Europe such as newly-elected Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni continue to prey on the fears of citizens by pinning the issues of economic stagnation and youth unemployment on immigrants and other minority groups. Rather than empowering workers, the ever-fluid gig economy that defines our current stage of platform capitalism only creates greater precarity and serves to further alienate workers from the fruits of their labor. If we on the Left are to combat this rise in right-wing nationalism and challenge the status quo of neoliberal technocratic capitalism, we need a cogent strategy around which to organize.
Through the benefit of hindsight, we on the Left can learn from the mistakes of the Italian operaismo movement of the 1960s. As a rupture within the Marxist tradition, workerism was a deeply impactful revolutionary theory and praxis in the twentieth century that rightly emphasized the role of labor in disrupting the ordinary machinations of capitalism. In good faith, we can also critique it from a feminist perspective, as well as its overreliance on any one group, especially skilled workers, as the primary drivers of social and political change.
Instead of fantasizing about a militant revolutionary action that serves as the flashpoint for overcoming the capitalist order, Leftists need to seriously consider the hard work of class organization and coalition building that would lay the foundation for such an event. Rather than romanticizing revolutionaries and decrying work as an evil to be overcome, the Left should attend to the more boring work of fighting for the provisions of the basic material needs of the average worker and abolishing the wage-labor relationship. It may seem not seem as exciting as a militant factory strike, but, if history shows us anything, it may prove to be more lasting.