Simply refusing maintains the structural conditions of burnout under austerity---politics is necessary to struggle for decommodification and defending public services.

My perhaps minimal suggestion is recognition of this contradiction is the first necessary step. This returns us to ‘traditional’ problems of how we might intervene and negate the forms and forces of labor that mutilate and control our existence. Yet the discourses of the refusal of work or techno-libidinal fantasies of liberation from work do not operate. What are particularly absent are institutions and collective forms in which to engage the negation of work while considering the necessity and possibilities of sustainable existence. We encounter a capitalism that is, sometimes, quite happy to refuse us work while, at other times, to place extreme demands on us for work. A working solution, to be deliberately ironic, is to struggle for decommodification of our lives. Campaigns against privatization and for the return of privatized services to public control try to reduce our dependence on work by attacking the way work is supposed to account for all of our self-reproduction. These struggles are in parallel for struggles to defend public services, protect benefits, and sustain social and collective forms of support. While they may be unglamorous, especially compared to space travel, these struggles can negate the conditions of the impossibility of work by trying to detach ‘work’ from its ideological and material role as the validation of citizenship and existence. In relation to the Nietzschean rebels of absolute communism or absolute acceleration these struggles can be dismissed as reactive, but they react precisely to the contradiction in which we are currently bound. This is also true of the defence of workplace and employment conditions against new waves of privatization and outsourcing. The struggles at the University of Sussex over the outsourcing of support work, under much worse contracts and conditions, has forged an alliance of workers and students on the grounds of the precarity and impossibility of labor. It has also involved new experiments with forms and organizations against unresponsive unions and neoliberal management strategies. This impossibility of labor, I’m suggesting, does not simply mean abandoning work as an impossible site in the name of a dream of exit. Instead the negation of capitalist work can also be the struggle to free that true choice Timothy Brennan indicates by breaking our relation with constant ‘accelerative’ demand that we attend to the commodification of our lives.