“Tedd Siegel’s book is an extended reflection on the nature of work in our times and the refusal of newgenerations 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.” ~ Arturo Giraldez, University of the Pacific, author of The Age of Trade: The Manila Galleons and the Dawn of the Global Economy (2015)

“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.” ~ Tyrus Miller, UC Irvine, author of Georg Lukács and Critical Theory: Aesthetics, History, Utopia (2022)

Signs of the Great Refusal: The Coming Struggle for a Post-Work Society

by Tedd Siegel

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

In recent years, developed countries have seen the rise of a popular literature and social media discussion 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 what amounts to an unacceptable either/or: workers are encouraged either to “lean-in,” and become better “human capitals,” or else they are being offered palliative care for these same “neoliberal selves” by means of admonitions to undertake personal projects of self-optimization, recovery, and wellness.

In Signs of the Great Refusal, Tedd Siegel challenges the assumptions supporting this set of highly constrained possibilities, asking instead about what it might take to de-privatize and re-politicize work itself under contemporary conditions, in order to make a broad-based politics of refusal potentially viable. Where post-work, anti-work, and degrowth discussions taking place today often describe and promote various “post-work imaginaries” in which the de-commodification of labor is only implied, Signs of the Great Refusal is concerned specifically with the “post-work 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?”

About the Author

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, a blog site 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 the 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, involved with major R&D contracts and initiatives between academia, government agencies, and private companies. Tedd holds an M.A. in philosophy from the New School for Social Research, where he attended the Ph.D. program, focusing on 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. Prior to living in NYC, Tedd spent time as a street activist in San Francisco, participating in ACT-UP and Radical Faerie actions and community events in the 1980s.