95 From individual rights and inclusion, to common rights, belonging, and abundance

Hardt and Negri’s proposed shift moves first from the idea of individual rights to common rights. Individual rights have often attempted to retain the idea of the autonomous, sovereign, individual subject, and connect this to an abstract universal standard. Common rights, on the other hand, are embedded in a particular vernacular ecology, with its distinctive forms of labour and practice, and its customs that are independent of the law and the state ^[1]. Antonio Pele and Stephen Riley argue that shifting from individual to common rights renews our emphasis on conviviality, shared subsistence, and resists attempts to enclose the commons by people and groups who would seek to exploit it and exclude others ^[2].

The second shift is from the idea of inclusion to belonging. Inclusion has, for many years, been a powerful term for critical theorists and social activists. But as Paul Virno argued, inclusion assumes that individuals have an affiliation with the same universal standard (everyone wants to be ‘normal’, for instance), and a whole that corresponds to the sum of its parts. Belonging, on the other hand, assumes all entities share a pre-individual commons, that we then supplement and build upon; what Virno calls a ‘surplus-commons’ ^[3]. People’s interactions, acts of caring, digital knowledge production, cohabitation, community building, and breathing, are all acts of social production that create surplus intensities: feelings, objects, ideas, and ways of being, that are impossible for anyone to own, measure, standardise, or enclose ^[4]. They ‘cannot be bought off as private property nor can [they] simply be managed or regulated by socially attuned states’ ^[5]. They are ‘generative and productive power[s]’ in their own right, they ‘escape the problem of defining rules of inclusion or exclusion’ ^[6], and contain the ‘habits, training, and dispositions necessary for absolute self-rule of the many by the many’ ^[7]. They point to the possibility of a society built on abundance’, with ‘the only remaining hurdle confronting the “multitude” being how to prevent the capitalist “capture” of the wealth produced’ ^[8].

Peter Frase’s recent work Four futures: Life after capitalism ^[9], tackles this possibility head-on. Faced with a global society in which abundance for all has become attainable, how do we decide how to share what is in common? Frase proposes four possible solutions based on two axes: the first runs from abundance to scarcity, the second from equality to hierarchy. Frase sees the worst-case (of scarcity and the presence of powerful state or market hierarchies) as leading to a very bleak future, what he calls ‘exterminism’. Such a system would see a few extremely wealthy individuals living on floating offshore islands, while everyone else fights to survive.

Frase’s more optimistic vision is of abundance and equality, where hierarchies still exist, but these are not dominated by status and money. In such a society, people would be able to ‘procure [their] basic needs — housing, health care, or just money — without having to take a job and without having to satisfy any bureaucratic condition… you get these things simply as a right of being a citizen, rather than in return for doing something’ (ibid, p.51). And while this may sound fanciful, we should remember that much of the talk about the future of work now points to a future in which our economies decouple the link between labour and income ^{[10][11][12][13][14][15]}. Of course, speculation about the ‘end of work’ has been a pastime of labour scholars for decades (Keynes predicted the ‘end of work’ and a one-day working week in the 1930s), and such speculation often presumes the kind of strong state intervention that makes mechanisms like Universal Basic Incomes or Services appealing ^[16]. Commoning suggests, though, that one of the main reason why we have yet to fully detach work from abundance and equity is because we have always thought that the answer lay in the state or the free market, when clearly neither of these have offered workable solutions; ‘The world order of economics and the educational systems that support it are uneconomic, ecologically unsustainable and intrinsically unjust, and they will continue to find new ways of being so’ ^[17].

How can we re-establish simplicity, conviviality, care, and trust, and develop ‘individuals, communities, a citizenry and a global village committed to simple living and dematerialising resource use’ (ibid), when Western societies place so much emphasis on autonomy and independence, speed and efficiency, purposeful movement and productive function? I have argued here that actively de-centring physiotherapy, stripping away the layers of sediment we have added to the physical therapies, and reviving their use in the commons, are just some of the ways we could contribute to a future society that is ecologically sustainable, egalitarian, inclusive, and diverse.

And playing an active part in shaping a future society is very much part of the ethos of this book. It is absolutely not the case that physiotherapists should simply abandon the physical therapies to anyone and everyone. They are far too precious and powerful to be left in the hands of late capitalist colonisers and state-based bureaucracies. No, physiotherapists will play a key role in the coming years, guiding the move towards immanence and intensity, and reviving the physical therapies in the commons. There will be many docking stations along the way to a transformed physical therapy, some, it is hoped, will be expressions of much greater social justice. Given physiotherapy’s history, it is clear that this will not be an easy task, and many within the profession will struggle with the evidence and reasoning now before them. Hopefully, though, this book provides some of the justification for action, and the impetus for a thousand lines of flight.