[Minorcompositions] Counter-Accounting, Refusal, and the Future of the Strike / Upcoming Study Sessions

Tue Aug 25 11:40:45 UTC 2026

*Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 10 Counter-Accounting, 
Refusal, and the Future of the Strike* 
<https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=2004>
Now available on all the usual podcast platforms.

In this episode we speak with Abe Walker and Callum Cant about how 
workers produce knowledge of their own exploitation – and when making 
that knowledge visible risks strengthening the systems of management and 
control they oppose.

Beginning with Walker’s work on counter-accounting, the conversation 
explores workers’ attempts to challenge official narratives through 
alternative records, inquiries and measures. While such practices can 
expose wage theft, impossible workloads and managerial deception, they 
may also reproduce the assumptions of productivity, efficiency and 
accountability embedded in management’s own tools. This leads to a wider 
discussion of workers’ inquiry, strategic opacity and the problem of 
becoming legible to fellow workers without becoming more governable by 
employers. The discussion then turns to quiet quitting, deception, 
sabotage and other informal refusals that often emerge where collective 
organization is weak. Against the tendency to dismiss these as merely 
individual withdrawal, Walker and Cant consider how hidden or dispersed 
acts of non-compliance might develop into shared forms of struggle.

Drawing on Cant and Matthew Lee’s work on the 1926 General Strike, the 
episode revisits the role of rank-and-file workers who expanded the 
strike beyond the intentions of official leadership. From small militant 
networks to mass pickets, workplace marches and solidarity extending 
beyond particular trades, the strike became a means of creating new 
collective subjects across workplaces and communities. The conversation 
concludes by asking what these histories offer workers confronting 
platform capitalism, algorithmic management and increasingly 
authoritarian workplaces today: how can workers use employers’ knowledge 
against them, build power from seemingly minor forms of resistance, and 
transform refusal into collective action?

Abe Walker – Holding labor to ac(count): quiet quitting and the limits 
of the anti-work imaginary <https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/zb2fx_v1>
Callum Cant and Matthew Lee – The Future in our Past: The General 
Strike, 1926/2026 
<https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3483-the-future-in-our-past>

Next event
*August 31st – Fugitive Study, Autonomous Media – Radical Practices of 
Study with Eli Meyerhoff and Giovanni Marmont*
Monday 31 August 2026, 7:00 pm UK time: Online discussion hosted by 
Minor Compositions <https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/92167228774>

What becomes possible when study is separated from the institutions, 
qualifications and individualised forms of achievement that usually 
claim to organise it? How might study instead become a fugitive 
practice: a way of gathering, experimenting and making worlds together 
within, against and beyond the university?

This online conversation brings together Eli Meyerhoff, author of 
/Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World/, and Giovanni 
Marmont, author of /A Studious Use: Designing from the Undercommons/. 
Meyerhoff’s work approaches education as a historically specific mode of 
organising knowledge, development and value, opening towards 
abolitionist perspectives on the university and alternative modes of 
study. Marmont explores study and use as practices that unsettle 
possessive individualism, beginning instead from our shared 
indebtedness, entanglement and capacity to produce experimental forms of 
sociality.

Together, they will discuss the radical practices of study emerging from 
their work: study as collective experimentation, political struggle, 
unlearning and world-making. The conversation will also ask what kinds 
of spaces, relationships and media can sustain such practices when 
universities are increasingly organised around extraction, measurement 
and managed crisis.

The event marks the launch of a new Minor Compositions formulation: 
Fugitive Study, Autonomous Media. It names publishing not simply as the 
production of books, but as part of a broader infrastructure through 
which ideas can circulate, encounters can be organised and collective 
practices of study can take form. The discussion will be recorded and 
subsequently released as a Minor Compositions podcast.

Next Session in the Ongoing Tronti Reading Group
<https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1666>7 September @ 7PM, online 
<https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/9602092748>. Sections: The Labour 
Theory of Value as Watchword; The Class; The Strategy of Refusal, 223-262.

-- 
Minor Compositions. Publishing the unruly, the radical, and the yet-co-come.
https://www.minorcompositions.info

Linktree of all our stuff:https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions
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