Motivations for Refusal

A sharp and comprehensive critique of the postworkerist school of autonomist Marxism.

Motivations for Refusal develops a critical account of how the affective politics of capital and class are formed and contested in contemporary arrangements of work. Drawing on value critique and class composition analysis, he challenges core assumptions of postworkerism and related theories of affective labor, while retaining their core insights. Moving beyond the limits of postworkerism, the book analyses how the integration of the affective sciences into management and workplace technologies constitutes a terrain of contestation in conditions of immaterial production. Motivations for Refusal explores how affective politics emerge in the contestation between labor and capital in their affective modes.