Motivations for Refusal

Work, Value, and the Limits of Postworkerism

Series: 

Author:
Mark Gawne
In Motivations for Refusal: Work, Value, and the Limits of Postworkerism, Mark Gawne develops a critical account of how the affective politics of capital and class are formed and contested in contemporary arrangements of work, and offers a comprehensive critique of the postworkerist school of autonomist Marxism. Drawing on value critique and class composition analysis, the book challenges core assumptions of postworkerism and related theories of affective labour, while retaining their core insights. Moving beyond the limits of postworkerism, Gawne 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 labour and capital in their affective modes.
Copyright Year:
2025
E-Book (PDF)
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Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-73018-2
Publication:
14 Apr 2025
Hardback
Availability:
Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-67893-4
Publication:
24 Apr 2025
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Mark Gawne, Ph.D. (2015), University of Sydney, is Lecturer in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. He has taught widely in critical sociologies of labour and political economy, and writes on themes of work, class composition, and deindustrialisation, including “Love Is a Battlefield: on the Affective Politics of Crisis”, in The Love Collective (eds.), Love: Art, Ideas, Music, Politics (Kembla Books, 2020).
Contents
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
This book will be of special interest to all those interested in Marxism, operaismo and autonomist Marxism, the political economy of labour, service work, critical perspectives on work, work and organisation studies, critical management studies, and affect theory. Academics, students, and labour activists are readers for this book.
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