Vogliamo Tutto: The novel of Italy’s hot autumn

We want everything – all the wealth, all the power, and no work.”

Torino, 1969. Fiat’s giant Mirafiori plant is a magnet for thousands of young southern workers, who go north to escape oppression, poverty and underdevelopment and find only exploitation and abuse on the assembly lines.

“Vogliamo tutto” – “We want everything” – is the chant of angry workers in the wildcat strikes during the season of rebellion that sparked a decade of political upheaval in Italy.

Vogliamo tutto is also the story of one young southerner’s experiences, a story of emigration, the revolt against work and the birth of political consciousness.

Nanni Balestrini draws on interviews, flyers and the movement’s bulletins to document workers’ experiences on the factory floor, in the meetings and demonstrations and, finally, at the barricades, creating a poetic remix of a novel, a searching documentary and a call to arms for a just society.

Franco Berardi (Bifo): “Only Balestrini … has succeeded in reconciling the tragic-epic spirit of the revolutionary movement and the ironic-combinatorial spirit of literary experimentation … Vogliamo tutto is probably the most important Italian literary work of the 1960s.”

Translated from the Italian by Matt Holden

Telephone Publishing, 2014
English, 
Softcover, Dust jacket can be folded out into a poster, 224 pages
205mm x 135mm