How does the avant-garde create spaces in everyday life that subvert regimes of economic and political control? How do art, aesthetics and activism inform one another? And how do strategic spaces of creativity become the basis for new forms of production and governance? The Composition of Movements to Come reconsiders the history and the practices of the avant-garde, from the Situationists to the Art Strike, revolutionary Constructivism to Laibach and Neue Slowenische Kunst, through an autonomist Marxist framework. Moving the framework beyond an overly narrow class analysis, the book explores broader questions of the changing nature of cultural labor and forms of resistance around this labor. It examines a doubly articulated process of refusal: the refusal of separating art from daily life and the re-fusing of these antagonistic energies by capitalist production and governance. This relationship opens up a new terrain for strategic thought in relation to everyday politics, where the history of the avant-garde is no longer separated from broader questions of political economy or movement, but becomes a point around which to reorient these considerations.

"“Shukaitis's project is further distinguished by his emphasis on using avant-garde artistic practices as a means of mobilizing labor’s autonomy within deterritorialized capitalist spaces. [T]his is where the drift of his research moves into high gear.”" - Critical Inquiry

"Stevphen Shukaitis's new book makes a forcible and compelling contribution to a rejuvenated discussion on avant-garde art and politics. . . .This is much to appreciate in Shukaitis's book. . . .[It is] a strategic vision, and Shukaitis's Dada games and partisan misdirection make for a spirited experiment in pataphysical writing in the context of the real subsumption of labor." - Afterimage

"This is a really thought provoking book, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to think about art in ways that are thoroughly social, and that try very hard indeed to rescue a radical politics from the global institutions of art capitalism." - Culture Machine