Signs of the Great Refusal: The Coming Struggle for a Postwork Society
Tedd Siegel
- Foreword by Tyrus Miller
Published on December 7, 2023 by punctum books
- Pages
- 458 pages
- Languages
- English
- Dimensions
- 5⤫8 in.
- ISBN (Paperback)
- ISBN: 978-1-68571-162-7 (Paperback)
- ISBN (PDF)
- ISBN: 978-1-68571-163-4 (PDF)
- LCCN
- LCCN: 2023951545
- BISAC subject codes
- BISAC: BUS038000, BUS072000
- Thema subject codes
- THEMA: JHBL, KCF
In recent years, developed countries have seen the rise of discussions concerning “the problem with work today.” Since this literature tends to reflect the frustrations of the professional–managerial class (as well as other workers in globalized services industries in the digital age), it is often at a significant distance from the concerns of the organized labor movement and the traditional Left. Much of this literature presents an unacceptable either/or: workers are encouraged either to “lean in,” and become better “human capital,” or else to develop forms of palliative care for these same neoliberal selves by means of personal projects of self-optimization, recovery, and wellness.
In* Signs of the Great Refusal,* Tedd Siegel challenges the assumptions supporting these highly constrained possibilities, asking instead what it might take to deprivatize and repoliticize work itself under contemporary conditions, in order to make a broad-based politics of refusal potentially viable. Where postwork, antiwork, and degrowth discussions taking place today often describe and promote various “postwork imaginaries” in which the decommodification of labor is only implied,* Signs of the Great Refusal* is concerned specifically with the “postwork political imaginary.” Taking up a question formulated by Peter Fleming, Siegel asks, “Can the impossibility at the heart of contemporary capitalism be politically activated to oppose and escape work-as-we-know-it?”
Biographies
Tedd Siegel is a writer living on the central coast of California. He lives with his husband Matt, and spends more time with dogs and goats than with people. Tedd is the co-founder and co-editor of indarktimes.com(opens in new tab), a blog dedicated to overcoming liberal post-politics, and to developing and disseminating new, anti-capitalist critiques tailored to the post-Fordist, neoliberal digital age. Previously, Tedd worked in Silicon Valley for twenty years in marketing and program management roles related to enterprise software, semiconductor, and optical telecom. He also served as a senior manager of Silicon Valley partnerships for the University of California, and was involved with major R&D contracts and initiatives between academia, government agencies, and private companies. Tedd holds an MA in philosophy from the New School for Social Research, where he also pursued PhD studies in moral and political philosophy. Undertaking a dissertation on the normative and utopian foundations of modernity, he realized that he couldn’t finish the last section on hope, because he didn’t have any. Tedd also spent time as a street activist in San Francisco, participating in ACT-UP and Radical Faerie actions and community events in the 1980s.
Endorsements
Arturo Giraldez
author of The Age of Trade: The Manila Galleons and the Dawn of the Global Economy
Tedd Siegel’s book is an extended reflection on the nature of work in our times and the refusal of new generations to embrace its exhausting ethos and precarious conditions. After a serious dialogue with a number of past theoretical perspectives, the author urges collective action to generate a new life regime in which labor is harmoniously part of it. Siegel’s proposal is not a new utopia, but a profound examination of current labor conditions and a call to re-direct processes from private solutions and profit appropriation to social distribution.
Tyrus Miller
author of Georg Lukács and Critical Theory: Aesthetics, History, Utopia
Siegel’s critical argument is grounded not only in a negative judgement of actually existing work today, but also in positive normative beliefs oriented toward the future: that contemporary workers, individually and collectively, are worthy of richer, freer existences grounded in autonomous decisions about how to value their lives and those of others.
Additional resources
Tedd Siegel retired from his career as an academic administrator in late 2019 after wrestling with extreme stress, burnout, and PTSD — caused, in part, by the conditions of work as it is formulated today. He wrote Signs of the Great Refusal: The Coming Struggle for a Postwork Society in part to work through his own experiences and, more broadly, to understand what it was about contemporary work that felt so untenable and unsustainable. Throughout the book, Tedd leans into his background as a political philosopher (he attended the Ph.D. program in philosophy at the New School), grounding his understanding of “work-as-we-know-it” in the political and economic critiques of capital going back to Marx in the 19th century, putting them into dialog with philosophical understandings of work and labor in the 20th century from Arendt and others. The result is an exploration not only of the role and function of work in contemporary society, but what it might take to build a post-work politics out of the nascent anti-work movements alive today.
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Genres
- Capital+Lucre
- Cultural Studies+Critical Theory
- New Left Thought
Keywords
- automation
- autonomia
- class recomposition
- counter-publics
- neoliberalism
- operaismo
- politics of refusal
- post-work imaginary
- value theory