URBAN AUSTERITY Impacts of the global financial crisis on

cities in EuropeWeimar, 4-5 December, 2014

Resisting austerity at multiple scales in

Greece1

Costis Hadjimichalis

Most of you know well the devastating effects of ultra

neoliberal austerity and authoritarianism in Greece

during the last five years, we heard some aspects from

Dimitra and Maria, and you will hear more in tomorrow’s

papers. However, the Greek case is by no means unique;

so-called recovery plans imposed by Troika are in

operation across Southern Europe with similar negative

outcomes while austerity policies are nowadays globally

implemented and they will continue to re-emerge as long

as we don’t confront its real causes, i.e. capitalism

itself and the political and economic elites who profit

from it. Although neoliberal austerity policies follow

similar paths they must be contested for their particular

social, temporal and spatial specificities.

Greek society after five years of deep crisis

presents today a contradictory situation. On the one

hand, while there is a great potential for counter

hegemonic reaction, popular resistance and massive

protest, as during 2011 and 2012, with mass

1 Invited paper, Conference Resisting Urban Austerity, Weimar, 4-5 December, 2014.

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demonstrations and violent reactions seems to be slowed

down. Occupying Syntagma Sq for 4 months in 2011 was the

pick of a series of large demonstrations and brutal

confrontations with riot police. Since then only sporadic

and less massive social reaction took place with the

exception of the occupation for seven months in 2013 of

the National Radio and TV network and perhaps last

month’s large demonstrations. On the other hand, there

are hundreds of bottom-up resistance and solidarity

social movements all over Greece, including social health

clinics, time banks, food distribution, struggles against

extractivism, monthly-long strikes and occupations in few

factories, movements protecting public assets including

land and many more, which either help people in need, or

protect the commons and resist privatizations.

These movements take place at different scales some

are local and independent while others are networked

nationally and internationally building strong political

and social alliances. Despite major differences in terms

of target, organization and methods, they have two common

characteristics; first, they highlight the fact that many

people in Greece are active radical agents in social movements of

resistance and solidarity, not passive victims of crude ultra

neoliberal policies applied across Southern Europe.

Second, they highlight that the prime field of struggle against

neoliberal austerity is everyday life in particular socio-spatial

settings, demanding social, spatial and environmental

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justice and defending public space and the commons, both

materially and symbolically.

Political economy has reflected on several aspects

that are important for our understanding of social

movements in anti-austerity mobilizations. In particular

it helped in signing out three spatio-temporalities in

capitalist development: first, a long-term spatio-

temporality refers to general forms of capitalism and its

reproduction through periodic crises; second, a middle-

range spatio-temporality singles out cyclical shifts of

growth and crisis in particular social formations, as the

case of dept crisis in Greece; and third, there is a

contingent spatio-temporality that affects particular

social classes, different genders, ethnic groups and

places. These three spatio-temporalities operate

simultaneously in a multi-scalar framework; they are

dependent on the interplay of endogenous and exogenous

factors and finally they form particular crisis regimes.

During deepening financial and social crisis in

Greece, we can identify a major qualitative turn in

movements resisting austerity with important political

implications. Pre-crisis social movements followed

basically two well known categorisations: along class or

occupation bases focusing more on defensive struggles and

others which were issue oriented. Analysis of

mobilisations at that time focused on the structural

characteristics of the Greek social formation as the

fundamental condition for the emergence of its opposition

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and the main concern was how social exploitation was

translated into protest. In the decades of 1990 and 2000

new political subjects entered the arena of mobilisations

extending the pool of potential members of social

movements. These include people with long involvement in

global anti-systemic networks such as the European Social

Forum, the anti-war movement, the anti-Olympic games in

Athens movement and many more environmental and anarchist

movements. During the same period the massive influx of

migrants from Asia and Africa generated, apart from

xenophobia and racism, strong support and solidarity in

many cities and islands and several constant anti-racist

movements supporting migrants emerged. Finally, high

unemployment among the younger generation with

generalised higher education, including many graduates,

formed the “new precarious class” with informal and

constantly changing low paid jobs. Studies of these new

political subjects avoided determinism pointing the

dynamic and unpredictable way in which structural

positions might nurture the development of a social group

which could then become mobilized.

At the political level I must notice the rapid de-

legitimacion of ruling political parties and the rise, on

the one hand, of SYRIZA, our radical left party, which

succeed to have the majority of votes in the last

European election and still leads the pools, and on the

other, the strong presence of neo-Nazi party, Golden

Down, for both of which I will speak in the end.

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The 300 migrants’ hunger strike and the occupation of

Syntagma in 2011 have been major urban events, often

highly violent, which brought together thousands of

activists from the above different social and political

backgrounds. The first to mobilize were young people

between twenty-five and thirty year old, unemployed or

underemployed. Soon they have been joined by older

working class groups, public sector employees,

pensioners, anarchist groups, neighbourhood associations

and others targeting austerity policies. After the mass

demonstrations and the urban events of 2011 for many of

those involved as well as for others away from Athens,

this way of “doing politics” was not enough or it has

been heavily criticized in terms of “what we do after”.

The Syntagma occupation2 particularly, acted as a catalyst

for many activists in Athens, but this time in other

Greek cities as well, who started working in groups “at

the core of society”, as A. Gramsci says. That means to

organize more stable structures of solidarity and

resistance, supporting the many unemployed, pensioners

and others excluded from social services in various

neighbourhoods, including cities outside Athens. In these

initiatives we meet many of those involved in the

Syntagma occupation (but not the anarchists), those

supported the hunger strike, people with long involvement

in global networks such as the European Social Forum but

2 For the Syntagma occupation and the migrant’s hunger strike see my paper: “From streets and squares to radical political emancipation? Resistance lessons from Athens during the crisis”, Human Geography: a new radical journal, 2:6, 116-136, 2013.

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also individuals without previous experience in social

actions, particularly middle age men, women and many

pensioners. Some of those initiatives have the support of

progressive municipalities but the majority are real

grassroots organizations. I focus to those post-Syntagma

grassroots initiatives, which are neither voluntary

organisations with external funding nor community

organisations or institutionalised third sector

initiatives of any sort. Among those I could mention the

following:

1. Centres which are organised as “social or community

medical centres and pharmacies” and others as “social groceries”.

These centres are either independent, or use facilities

offered by progressive or leftwing municipalities. People

in need, Greeks or migrants, are first registered and

then can have medical care, medicines and food for free.

2. Local and national exchange networks “From hand to hand”

via registration of members and particular products on a

website. The process is simple: one is giving a piano

(photo, description etc) asking for a refrigerator,

another is giving a piece of land for a small apartment

in a particular city and so on, while money transactions

are prohibited.

3. Local/regional Social currencies. By 2013 there were 59 social

currencies in Greece, 19 are Time Banks and 30 are social

currencies proper, where prices are set freely among

scheme members. Individuals are registered on a web site

and the value of the service or product is accounted in

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hours and everything is exchanged with the same time-

unit, e.g. one hour of English teaching equals one hour

of electrical repairs or a certain quantity of products,

etc.

4. Education, migrants support and cultural activity centers in many

cities, (by 2013 more than 35 with different capacity)

provide free courses, teaching assistance to school

children, Greek language and legal support for migrants,

foreign languages, music, dancing and athletics, all for

free.

5. Buying or distributing food “without middlemen” and soup

kitchens started in March 2012 as the distribution of

potatoes at low cost directly from farmers to consumers

and soon expanded to include a large variety of food

products. This has shown how effective the direct

connection between producers and consumers without

middlemen can be, and also the importance of social

intervention outside the dominant value chain.

6. Struggles against extractivism, as the social movement in

Halkidiki against open pit cold mining, and other

movements protecting public land and the commons from real estate

projects such as against the dispossession of former

Helliniko airport and against the dispossession of 95

famous beaches across Greece.

6. Long strikes, occupied factories, production without bosses and other

co-operative initiatives. For seven months workers at the Coca-

Cola factory in Thessaloniki are on strike and demand

boycott for its products while 595 redundant women

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cleaners over 50 years of age occupied the pavement in

frond the Ministry of Economics for 16 months demanding

their re-hiring. So far there is only one occupied

factory in operation by its workers, BIO.ME, a chemical

company in Thessaloniki, occupied and operated by 55

workers, but their experience has been influential for

others such as a textile factory in Veria and some of the

small shipyards in Perama, near Athens. After the brutal

closure of ERT (the Greek Public National radio-

television network) by the neo-liberal government in

early June 2013, 2.000 journalists and technicians

occupied the huge building in Athens and continue

broadcasting for seven months through other channels and

the internet until December 2013. Several other

successful post-crisis initiatives exist in the

publishing sector with a daily newspaper (Efimerida ton

Syntakton) and hundreds of small co-operatives in the

restaurant and entertainment sector in all major cities.

7. The latest category, an outcome of recent months’

developments, is mobilizations against house evictions. Until now

there was a kind of protection of the first family house.

But the growing ineptness of Greek families and the

pressure of Troika multiplied the cases of house

foreclosures and this has generated strong supporting

movements in many cities.

In the thematic map we can see the spatial distribution

of some of these initiatives, around 252 in 5 groups

mainly in urban areas (see map in the end)

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On going research on these grassroots initiatives

indicates that in the initial phase of establishing an

initiative the growing participation of younger educated

unemployed in combination with impoverished middle

classes and working poor and with a relative gender

balance. However, in latter phases and during the

everyday operation women and public sector pensioners

predominate. Other research based on surveys indicated

that in Greece (as well as in Spain), opposition to

austerity as well as participating in these grassroots

mobilizations increased with worsening of personal

financial situation and was combined with vote for a

left-wing party. In fact, 30-40% of Greeks who took part

in protest and later in voluntary organizations were

mainly coming from the Left. Social workers and welfare

users have been at the forefront, often with common

mobilizations in defense of public health or public

education.

Similar experiences are well known world wide from

times of war, economic, social and physical disasters

such as in Palestine, during the Yugoslav war, in

Argentina, New Orleans, Cuba and now in SE countries. In

Greece, while militant protest against austerity in

streets and squares seems to be slow down, with few

exceptions, a less militant but equally strong form of

protest and resisting austerity at multiple scales

acquire a key role in social movements. Some of these

initiatives are “accommodative”, others “transformative”

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and no one knows how long they will last. But what those

cases demonstrate is a struggle to acquire political

hegemony over everyday life for thousands of people in

poverty and despair.

I will argue, however, that they can be seen as

emancipatory if we include the context in which they take

place. Twenty years ago in Europe such an approach could

be easily dismissed as tangential, even obfuscatory, in

the context of devising more radical policy approaches.

In the present crisis and under ultra neo-liberal attack,

when the whole society and country is turned to a

“territory of exception”, we have to fight for what we

not so long ago regarded as given basic rights of

citizens in democratic societies. And finally, these

cases are occurring in a highly polarised political

environment in which SYRIZA, is the main opposition in

parliament, first in the pools and with chances to form a

government in the coming elections, while the neo-Nazi

party Golden Dawn succeeded in gaining 7% of the national

vote, relying on the unemployed, macho and marginalised

segments of the population. SYRIZA in Greece like Podemos

in Spain, die Linke in Germany, the United Left in

Slovenia, the Bloco in Portugal and other radical

political forces across Europe, come out from mass

protest and movements as those described above. Now they

work within institutions, in their national Parliaments,

in regional and municipal governments and in the European

Parliament to resist and challenge austerity at different

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fronts and scales. But this cannot happen until a radical

new type of welfare state is re-established and a major

democratic re-organization of the unequal and unjust

Eurozone and EU takes place.

These new left parties are faced with a well know

dilemma: although they are well aware that the welfare

state was the result of a historic compromise between

labour and capital, they are forced to fight for a new

type of welfare state because it is the last shield in

defence of the healthcare system, education, pensions,

social security and the environment. So the question is:

how to avoid the mistakes of the past and not again fall

into the trap of strengthening capitalism?

Taken together social movements, militant protest,

events, grassroots solidarity initiatives and the working

within institutions towards radical political

alternatives at the political scale, all challenge head-

on the one-dimensional emphasis that runs through neo-

liberal policy concepts and policies that “there is no

alternative”. And if in the longer-term these struggles

could be combined to contest issues and divisions

oppressing our daily life along with the imperatives of

capital, they can be seen as emancipatory. The road is

long….

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The geographical distribution of solidarity m ovem ents in Greece, August 2014

Source: www. solidarity4all.gr

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