We Want Everything

Nanni Balestrini: We Want Everything (Vogliamo tutto, 1971). V roce 2016 vydalo nakladatelství Verso Books.

Vogliamo tutto — We want everything. All the wealth, all the power, and no work.

The piece rate, for example, is the pay for the number of units the worker produces. So that the worker has to stay on his toes and follow the foremen’s orders, because they determine this variable part of his wage, which is absolutely indispensable to him for living. And this lets the boss maintain political control of the working class. To make the working class accept collaborating in their own exploitation.

But this idea, that the kinds of labour a worker does have different value, that he is paid more or less than another worker, is a completely capitalist invention. The bosses invented it to have another instrument of political control of the working class. Let’s not forget that the Party and the unions support this capitalist invention. They accept that the money a worker gets should be based on the different quality of the work he does.

Then there’s the matter of working hours. Eight hours of work, if not nine or ten, that destroy the worker completely. So not much energy is left for him to communicate with other workers and organise politically.

So it’s clear that the political problem is to attack all the tools of political control that the boss holds and that he uses to bind the working class and force us to serve his productive ends and to take part in our own exploitation. The workers’ weapon for fighting this tool is the refusal of the wage as compensation for the quantity and quality of work. It is therefore the refusal of the link between the wage and production.

Unionists, PCI bureaucrats, fake Marxist-Leninists, cops and fascists all have one characteristic in common. They have a total fear of the workers’ struggle, of the workers’ ability to tell the bosses and the bosses’ servants to go to hell and to organise their struggle autonomously, in the factory and outside the factory

We demand a guaranteed wage, we demand to be paid according to our needs, whether we are working or whether we are unemployed.

Now they tell us that Fiat is building a factory in Russia, in Togliattigrad, and that we should go there to learn how to work the way you work under communism. But what the fuck do we care if workers in Russia are exploited too, if they are exploited by the socialist state instead of the capitalist boss. It means that is not the type of communism that works. And in fact it seems to me that they think more about production and about going to the moon than the people’s wellbeing. Because wellbeing comes before everything else in allowing us to work less.

It is us who created all the wealth that exists, of which they leave us only the crumbs. We created all this wealth by dying of work at Fiat or dying of hunger in the south. And it is us, the great majority of the proletariat, who don’t want to work and die any more for the development of capital and its State. We can’t keep this crap going any more.

Z doslovu autora:

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.

It turned out that, in 1979, when Nanni was going to be arrested as so many were, for so-called insurrectionary activities against the state, this friend outfitted Balestrini with skis and ski gear. Drove him to the Italian Alps, and then crossed into France and waited for Balestrini to ski down on the other side of Mont Blanc, into Chamonix.