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Motivations for Refusal

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This peer-reviewed book series offers insights into our current reality by exploring the content and consequences of power relationships under capitalism, and by considering the spaces of oppositio...
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  • 01 July 2026
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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.

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Price: $20.00
Pages: 253
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Imprint: Haymarket Books
Series: Historical Materialism
Publication Date: 01 July 2026
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9798888907924
Format: Paperback
BISACs: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Labor / General, Labour / income economics, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Technology Studies, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Labor & Industrial Relations, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Classes & Economic Disparity
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Acknowledgements

1 Introduction
 1 Crisis, Work, Motivation
 2 Why Work? What Life?
 3 Preliminary Comments on Postworkerism, Affective Labour, and Immaterial Production
 4 Motivation, Refusal, and the Affective Compositions of Capital and Class


Part 1: Labour, Value, Affect



2 Lineages of Value, Theories of Labour
 1 Introduction
 2 Marx on Value: Variations and Ambivalences
 3 Value-Form
 4 Tracing the Lineages of Theories of Value
 5 Foundations of a New Substantialism: the Trinity of Labour-Value-Affect
 6 Notation: against a Productivist Foundation of Politics
 7 Conclusion

3 Class Composition and the Prehistory of Immaterial Production
 1 Introduction
 2 Value and Antagonism
 3 Class Composition Analysis as Method and Perspective
 4 Workerist-Feminist Critiques, Wages for and against Housework
 5 The Emergence of Postworkerism and the Composition of Class
 6 Conclusion

4 Affective Ontology, Cooperation, and the Crisis of Value
 1 Introduction
 2 The Crisis of Value
 3 Cooperation, Autonomous Production, and Measure
 4 From Class Composition to the Foundational Threshold of Political Ontology
 5 The Character of Labour in the Becoming-Rent of Profit
 6 Fragmentation and the Persistence of Mediation
 7 Conclusion


Part 2: Contested Terrains of Affect



5 The Affective Sciences and Managerial Practice
 1 Introduction
 2 Critical Management Studies and the Problem of Affect
 3 Affective Capitalism and the Theorisation of Labour and Capital
 4 The Affective Sciences and Management
 5 Affect as Material of Service Labour and Management
 6 Conclusion: Affective Management and the Technical Composition of Class

6 Affective Capital, Labour, and Emotion Recognition Technology in the Workplace
 1 Introduction
 2 Affect and Emotion
 3 Affective Machines and Problems of Composition
 4 Human-Computer Interaction and Affective Capital
 5 Technologically Fixed Affects, or the ReInversion of the General Intellect
 6 Affective Augmentation, Productivity, and Surplus Value
 7 Conclusion: Technological Determinism or Technical Ambivalence?

7 Ambivalence and the Affective Compositions of Capital and Class
 1 Introduction
 2 Class Compositions: Technical, Political, Social, Affective
 3 Affective Politics and the Affective Composition of Labour: Motivation and Refusal
 4 Affective Sciences and the Technical Composition of Class
 5 On Ambivalence
 6 Ambivalent Affects
 7 Conclusion

8 Conclusion
Bibliography
Index