Nanni Balestrini talks at length in this il Fatto Quotidiano video about the time he spent around the strikes and other actions at Fiat’s Mirafirori plant in Torino in 1969 – and how this lead to the creation of Vogliamo Tutto. In Italian, no subtitles

A taste:

“This phenomenon was a central fact in the history of Italy. It was the great movement of transformation of the Italy of the early 1960s, what we call the economic miracle that transformed Italy. These thousands, these hundreds of thousands who migrated from the south to the north completely changed the structure of this country; they changed our way of life, they changed the faces of our cities, and they also changed the Italian language: before, we all spoke dialect in different parts of Italy. Florentine Italian was used on rare occasions by few people, and it was necessary to invent a common language so we could understand each other … a writer could not ignore this, could not fail to involve himself in this phenomenon.”

“More and more the automation of production, and also the possibility in general of trusting almost every type of work and activity to machines and computers, requires a laughably small quantity of human labour power. Therefore why shouldn’t everyone profit from the wealth produced by machines and from the time freed from labour? Today, absurdly, work that is no longer necessary continues to be imposed because only through this is it possible to conceive of the distribution of money, allowing the continuation of the cycle of production and consumption and the accumulation of capital. Continue reading →