Anti austerity Protests

The anti-austerity mobilizations that developed after the beginning of the economic crisis brought to the forefront the increase in self-organized, solidarity structures. One of the most popular examples of these alternative forms of resistance is the self-managed factory of Vio.Me in Greece. After the owners abandoned the company in 2011, the Vio.Me workers occupied the factory and decided to operate it under the control of their general assembly. Through fieldwork research conducted in Vio.Me between January and April 2014 and in July 2015, this empirical inquiry examines Vio.Me’s organizational structure, its communication channels and its market environment in order to shed light on the mechanisms that enabled the passage from hierarchy to horizontality.

In Europe there is a ‘piazza’, which is not the one of spread and financial markets but the ‘piazza’ still able to shape the urban space in the name of ‘the right to the city’. Paradoxically that ‘piazza’ is based in Greece, downgraded to PIGS by European financial institutions, specifically in Athens, a social kaleidoscope on the age of the global economic crisis. Starting from the industrial era, the development of the Greek capital proved to be ‘a story of failure’, a day scenario exacerbated for the least four years cause the economic crisis. At the same time, following the fast decline of the quality of life, Athens has been the witness of huge squares movement, that have taken place whether in a central approach (in particular localized in Syntagma, where Greek Parliament is based) or widespread through local assemblies territorialized in every neighborhood. Surely Platia Exarchia, that takes its name from the local district, is the most radical among these ‘piazzas’, holding a strong tradition as an anarchist area that continues to play a leading role for urban movements against austerity. Exarchia represents a unique place in the metropolitan European context due to the low level of acceptance to a strict urban neoliberal enforcement. A mix of different political identities and several underground styles marks the district as a political, social and cultural environment, where ‘cry and lament’ of Lefebvrian memory can be still recognized as the ‘sound of the identities’ in Castells’s meaning. The aim of this paper is to give a first ethnographic reading of Exarchia, starting from its contextualization in the Athenian metropolitan space up to the identities and practices narrative that through it.

The past few years have seen an unexpected resurgence of street-level protest movements around the world, from the rise of anti-austerity protests in Spain, Greece, and Israel to the global spread of the Occupy movement. This collection is designed to offer a comparative analysis of these movements, setting them in international, socioeconomic , and cross-cultural perspective in order to help us understand why movements emerge, what they do, how they spread, and how they fit into both local and worldwide historical contexts. As the most significant wave of mass protests in decades continues apace,

Historically, high sovereign debt and austerity policies have coincided with regime- changing popular uprisings. Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania was no exception. Why, when faced with a sovereign debt crisis in the 1980s, did his regime choose to pay its foreign debt as early as possible, at the cost of economic recession and dramatically compressed consumption? How did these choices relate to the regime’s failure to sur- vive the end of the decade? The article argues that while exogenous shocks shattered the economic bases of the regime, it was the ideas with which the regime understood development and interpreted the crisis that shaped government policy responses in the 1980s. When the price of oil and development finance went up abruptly in 1979, the low energy efficiency of Romanian industry pushed the country into a situation where debt levels became unsustainable. Committed to a view of development that blended nationalist and Stalinist ideas, but with a focus on policy sovereignty, Ceausescu diag- nosed the crisis as evidence that debt-financed development and policy independence were incompatible. Consequently the regime decided to pay off foreign debt through a mix of austerity, import substitution, and export-led accumulation of dollar reserves. By the time all debt was paid off in 1989, the regime’s economic sources of legitimacy were exhausted. In the external environment of 1989, this policy regime change con- tributed to political regime change even in the absence of an organized civil society. In addition to casting a new light on the causal mechanisms of the Romanian revolution of December 1989, the findings of this article contribute to emerging scholarship that stresses the nexus between debt-induced economic crisis and popular uprisings.

F*ck May 68, Fight Now: Exploring the Uses of the Radical Past from 1968 to Today

Session 1: History is a Weapon

June 8, 2018

Department of History, University of Liverpool

https://archive.discoversociety.org/2018/09/04/circumnavigating-the-past-foreclosing-the-future-commemoration-of-the-radical-past-in-the-amnesiac-present/

Η δανειακή σύμβαση (Μνημόνιο) δέχτηκε επίθεση εξαρχής από μια ευρύτατη, ποικιλόμορφη πολιτικά-ιδεολογικά αντιπολίτευση. Οι κατηγορίες εναντίον πολιτικών περί «προδοσίας», προσέφεραν μια «εύπεπτη» εξήγηση για την κατάσταση της χώρας, έναντι της επώδυνης αυτοκριτικής. Ο ψύχραιμος διάλογος και η υποστήριξη της ανασύνταξης της χώρας μέσω αναγκαίων μεταρρυθμίσεων θεωρούνται «προδοτική» στάση.  Μέσα σε αυτό το γενικευμένο κλίμα απαξίωσης των πολιτικών με το στίγμα του σύγχρονου «δωσίλογου», αναδύθηκε το διχαστικό σχήμα «προδότες»-«μνημονιακοί» / «πατριώτες»-«αντιμνημονιακοί». Ο λόγος και οι πρακτικές της εξτρεμιστικής Δεξιάς Χρυσής Αυγής, έπαψαν να φαίνονται «ακραίες» και περιθωριακές και την οδήγησαν στην εκλογική επιτυχία.

In the spring of 2011 journalists were surprised as they fruitlessly intended to contact, as in an extra-terrestrial invasion, with the leader of an unexpected and unprecedented political challenger. “The Facebook revolutions” had arrived, and their leaderless nature is still an unresolved mystery to which the social sciences intend to contribute. The role of social media in political mobilization is uncontested by scholarly and media accounts of the recent wave of contestation worldwide since the Arab Spring uprisings in 2010. Contentious responses all over the world have followed on the successful mobilizations by the Indignados/Occupy in many countries and their communication practices have been adopted for varied issues and circumstances. This includes anti-austerity contestation in Europe by trade unions in response to policies aimed at overcoming the economic crisis that threat workers’ interests.

Youth politics in Tunisia today can be understood through a differentiation between ‘civil’ society in the form of non-governmental organizations from two ‘contentious’ cadres: ‘land/labor’ protests, on the one hand, such as Weinou el Petrol (‘Where Is The Petrol’), and ‘leftist’ movements, such as Manich Msema7 (‘We Will Not Forgive’) and Fech Nestanaou (‘What Are We Waiting For’), on the other. Membership and participation among these three forms of political participation are often shared, and activities sometimes overlap around common struggles for “Work, Freedom, and National Dignity,” constituting what Manheim labels a distinct ‘generational unit.’ But the divisions among this trifurcation of civil society are significant, particularly in the ways in which geography determines and shapes grievances. Differences in their tactical approaches, local vs. national scope, and organizational and decision-making strategies are also prevalent, and oftentimes follow, from this geographic distinction. Significantly, these differences militate against unified political action and often play into the hands of regime strategies to coopt and instrumentalize (civil), repress (leftist), and divide and conquer (land/labor). Opposition to the corporatist, elite-led model of democratization and neo-liberal mode of governance thus remains largely unsuccessful despite being repeatedly checked and vociferously challenged.

The mainstream narrative of the Greek financial crisis blames Greece for being the architect of its own financial crisis. This narrative reduces the complexity and global nature of the Greek financial crisis to an internal and national focus that justifies a strategy of structural adjustment and austerity targeted to reduce the public debt. Yet, Greece's public debt has grown over the course of treatment. This paper contends that the strategy intended to resolve the Greek financial crisis is not a resolution strategy at all—it is more accurately conceptualized as a crisis management strategy, which is insufficient to reduce the public debt and instead fuels a deflationary spiral in Greece. The Troika, consisting of the European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund, alongside the Eurogroup, credit rating agencies, and private investors endorse a crisis management strategy that has engendered an unprecedented wave of discipline, surveillance, and control alongside a neoliberal restructuring of the Greek economy that has functioned to protect private interests. In effect, power is increasingly wielded by unelected international political and financial institutions, which not only temper the sovereignty Greece, but also undermine the functioning of democratic processes.

Περίληψη Απέναντι στη λιτότητα και στις οικονομικές αναδιαρθρώσεις που επιβάλλονται από τις ελληνικές κυβερνήσεις σαν συνέπεια της κρίσης χρέους στην Ελλάδα, αναπτύσ‐ σεται μια πολύμορφη εκστρατεία αντίστασης. Η συστηματική μελέτη αυτών των δράσεων έχει μόλις ξεκινήσει με τη χρήση ερευνητικών πρακτικών, όπως αυτή της ανάλυσης των γεγονότων διαμαρτυρίας και της ανάλυσης πολιτικών διεκδικήσεων (Κούση 2013, Kousis and Kanellopoulos 2014). Σε συνέχεια αυτών των μελετών, η παρούσα έρευνα εστιάζει στην ανάλυση των οργανώσεων που συμμετείχαν ενεργά ή/και διοργάνωσαν τις μεγάλες κινητοποιήσεις των τελευταίων χρόνων. Η μεθοδο‐ λογία που ακολουθείται βασίζεται στην ανάλυση των κινηματικών δικτύων (Diani and McAdam 2003). Στην παρούσα μελέτη θα παρουσιαστούν: α) οι βασικές παρά‐ μετροι της ανάλυσης των κινηματικών δικτύων, όπως εμφανίζονται στη σχετική βιβλιογραφία και β) τα βήματα και οι ερευνητικές πρακτικές που ακολουθήσαμε – η συγκρότηση του ερωτηματολογίου και η διάρθρωση των συνεντεύξεων – οι επι‐ λογές και τα προβλήματα που αντιμετωπίσαμε στη διεξαγωγή της έρευνας μας. 1. Εισαγωγή Η καπιταλιστική κρίση στην Ελλάδα, τα μέτρα λιτότητας και οι πολιτικές δημο‐ σιονομικής προσαρμογής που επέλεξαν οι ελληνικές κυβερνήσεις για να την αντιμετωπίσουν έπληξαν ιδιαίτερα τους μισθωτούς, αλλά και τους αυτοαπα‐ σχολούμενους και τους εμπόρους, εκτίναξαν σε δυσθεώρητα ύψη τα ποσοστά ανεργίας και απορρύθμισαν καίριους τομείς του κοινωνικού κράτους. Απέναντι στη λιτότητα και στις οικονομικές αναδιαρθρώσεις αναπτύχθηκε μια πολύμορ‐ φη εκστρατεία αντίστασης στις πολιτικές λιτότητας. Από το Φεβρουάριο του * Ο Κώστας Κανελλόπουλος είναι Πολιτικός Επιστήμονας, Ερευνητής ΕΛΚΕ, στο Τμήμα Κοινωνιο‐ λογίας του Πανεπιστήμιο Κρήτης, Η διεύθυνση του ηλεκτρονικού του ταχυδρομείου είναι: kanellopoulosk@social.soc.uoc.gr .

This much is certain. The world as it exists is not true. It is false. It is false because the satisfaction of human needs is merely a sideshow. What counts is the profitable accumulation of some abstract form of wealth, of money that yields more money.

ETHOS project global aim is to explore, theoretically and empirically, the fault lines of justice and to formulate a theory of justice and fairness that combines theoretical, legal and empirical analysis. This deliverable focuses on the types of distributive claims, interests and capabilities of various groups of the population evoked in the political and economic debates at the EU and at the nation state level (D6.2). As the original project states, this goal was planned to be achieved through a study on the non-realization or limited realization of distributive justice claims experienced by the most vulnerable and marginalized groups in society. 
Based upon the challenges brought up by Castro Caldas (2017) and framed on D6.1, the core question that leaded this (D6.2) research was: how did the austerity discourses, translated into policies and laws in the context of the recent crises, affected EU and Turkey democracies and citizens’ rights? In order to understand the justice or injustice experienced by marginalized groups in society we opted to include grassroots movements and their non-institutionalized discourses. A central goal was to learn about their specific conditions and obstacles, but also to listen to their views about European policies and the European future in the context of redistributive justice.
The main challenge of this deliverable was to unveil the voices of the vulnerable groups included in the study. Research and policies meant to be “about” people and groups frequently fail to include them, i.e., citizens’ real claims and experiences expressed in their own voices and discourses are frequently erased from the public sphere. This report brings together different and sometimes contradictory discourses: a) official discourses translated into national and international policies and law (hard law and soft law); b) citizens’ discourses about the consequences of EU and national policies and law on their lives, theirs claims and alternative proposals.
The study covered research in five EU member states (Austria, Hungary, Netherlands, Portugal and UK) and in Turkey. It has a national comparative dimension, for which we opted to give special attention to a common vulnerable group (young women). Research also focused on a second specific group that varied for each country according to a preliminary analysis of national reality (persons with disabilities, Roma people, younger and older people, women, migrants - including non-Western migrants -, and third-country nationals ).
In a first moment, the work was based on desk research (bibliography review and legal, statistical and documental analysis). Following a broad picture of the European situation, in a second moment the research moved into an empirical approach with a smaller scale view (semi-structured interviews to key informants).
As the analysis show, European welfare and employment regimes, as well as the European Social Model are experiencing a convergence towards neoliberalism and that is jeopardizing citizens’ rights and democracy. The consequences include devastating effects in employment, increased insecurity with loss of jobs, precariousness and in-work poverty, threats to human dignity. Despite a general policy trend, the intensity and effects of austerity vary between countries and social groups. 
In addition to the obvious economic and financial aspects of the austerity model, the post-crisis reaction resulted in a social model of naturalization of inequalities of an “austerity society”. Legitimacy by fear, prompted by predictions of catastrophic scenarios, asserts itself as a mechanism for converting the narrative of austerity into a dominant political-social model, assuring the absolute priority of the moral values of economic and labour neoliberalism (Ferreira, 2011).
Although fear is many times paralyzing and leaves citizens vulnerable to populist discourses, the perception of injustice also led to public protests. A young and well-educated European generation that became adult to realize that the European promises of democracy, rights and opportunities were losing their meaning occupied the public space in order to get their voices heard.  European institutions and their leaders claimed that austerity was the only possible path, but protesters were discussing something different. They were not looking for solutions for the crisis inside of the current model, they wanted to discuss a new model of democracy that is open to the voices of citizens and takes seriously the values inscribed in European treaties and national constitutions.
The European project is, in its essence, a political project and not legal engineering, even though the legal institutions have played a crucial role in its development. Restoring the European project of citizenship, equality and solidarity cannot be achieved without the democratization of its political institutions. Europe’s problems are not temporary crises, nor are they ordinary issues. Rather, they are warning signs of a structural reality that, at this rate of degradation, can very well reach a peak in which the values of freedom, democracy, equality and rule of law -  that are the cornerstones for the Treaty of Lisbon or the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union -, lose their meaning, and Europe becomes a caricature of itself - discredited within its borders and abroad.
If there is something that resistance and protest movements have shown during the crisis or even the copying mechanisms of social groups to overcome hardship or test alternative solutions is that the possibilities for the future are broader than the idea that austerity is the only way.

Article based on paper presented as part of Panel 24: ‘Looting, Refusing, Negating, Embodying’ ‘Critical Refusals’ Fourth Biennal Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society, University of Pennsylvania, 27-29th October 2011

http://www.pdcnet.org/radphilrev/content/radphilrev_2013_0016_0001_0375_0385

http://web.asc.upenn.edu/news/Critical_Refusals_Conference.pdf

In Athens and Istanbul, two cities that have emerged as epicentres of protest within the broader conjuncture of contemporary political mobilization across the Mediterranean, the transformative potential of political street art has become particularly evident. Staging a dialogic encounter between the two cities, this chapter examines how in each case interventions into public space as well as their circulation in the digital realm create "hybrid space[s] of resistance" that sustain political performances both grounded in the real world and beyond. Attentive to the resonances as well as the differences between the two cities and their respective political configurations, I reflect on manifestations of political street art in the context of contemporary social movements.

Ireland had long been put forward as a model of sensible governance to be emulated by other countries suffering during the economic crisis. The government assiduously applied the Troika’s economic dictates and the Irish population reputedly, stoically accepted the ravaging of public services, wage cuts, huge unemployment and a return to mass emigration. However, after Ireland exited the Troika memorandum in 2013, instead of society rejoicing in the fruits of its responsible behaviour, it began to take to the streets. This culminated in the largest protest campaign - against the imposition of water charges - the country has arguably every witnessed. This chapter will analyse the reasons behind the inconsistency of protest in the early stages of austerity before addressing the explosion of dissent in 2014. It argues that Ireland’s specific protest patterns can be attributed to its prevailing consensual and relatively conservative political culture, as well as the institutional setting and practises of Social Partnership which undergirded it. The chapter traces protest in three waves from 2008 to 2015 and finally considers the extent of Ireland’s macro-economic economy and how that has impacted on social movement actors.

Essay published in the Avery Review, Critical Essays on Architecture, Issue 54, October 2021. In Issue 54, Elisavet Hasa traces the “archive of resistance” assembled by solidarity heath care initiatives in Athens. This essay draws on the spaces of solidarity clinics and pharmacies in Greece and investigates the infrastructure of care provision that was developed during the years of financial crisis in Athens.

Anti-austerity politics are often theorised with an implicit intentionality of aiding the subaltern struggle against an oppressive government. Yet such perspectives tend to undermine the role of the people in seeking to validate their struggles, expressed in such a manner that the philosopher can expound upon to justify their own interventions into politics. Utilising new social research by Konings (2015a), I seek to undermine this logic of the populace being exploited by the cold rational hand of austerity. Instead, we should understand how it is that social relations themselves structure and perpetuate these moral bonds which ensure the functioning of a social order. On such a reading, we can more fruitfully understand the successes and failures of various contemporary revolutionary movements, such as Occupy. While avoiding a top-down dismissal of populist politics, we can nonetheless articulate how far from breaking free of their social bonds, populism is a key mechanism for the perpetuation of oppressive social structues. Instead, a politics of redemption, of the kind articulated in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History should be embraced, once which transcends these very social bonds through its Messianic potential. In looking at the trials of Syriza in their efforts to undermine austerity within Greece, I argue utilising original photography that it is impossible to redeem a reality which itself is plagued with austerity and its moral logic. I thus conclude that such redemptive politics are not only a feature of anti-austerity politics which should be accentuated, but that indeed they may offer the only manner of successful socialist politics.

In this working paper, I trace the mutations in political subjectivation in Greece through three important moments in the latest cycle of mobilisation: the December 2008 revolt, the square occupations of 2011, and the referendum of 2015. In all these events, political time was condensed, bringing forth different, overlapping but divergent, contentious imaginaries. First, in December 2008, a complete absence of demands and the dissolution of all insurgent identities into a collective and peculiar “we” signified a break not only with the political establishment, but also with the accepted forms of political struggle and dissidence. I examine this event in reference to John Holloway’s non-identitarian political philosophy. Second, like in many other countries at that time, the Greek squares in 2011 were constituted as a network of porous, open-ended and self-organised processes, as an ongoing negotiation to give content and meaning to the occupied urban space. I approach this event as an example of the politics of inclusion and multiplicity propounded by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Lastly, the collapse of the traditional two-party system under the weight of austerity politics gave rise to a new hegemonic party, Syriza, which created an antagonistic frontier between the people and the elites, and attempted to represent the diverse aspirations and demands of the former, condensed in the empty signifier of hope. Here I mobilise Ernesto Laclau’s discourse theory, approaching the crisis as a large-scale dislocation which allowed a new hegemonic power to emerge out of a chain of equivalences, all those who suffer under austerity. In all three cases, the focus is on the processes of subjectivation. By juxtaposing Holloway’s self-negating proletariat, Hardt and Negri’s diverse multitude and Laclau’s hegemonic people, I propose a tentative framework for understanding the development of social struggles in Greece from the viewpoint of the collective subject, with the aim of linking this discussion back to the debates within the social movements.

This article explores the social composition of participants in anti-austerity protests taking place in Belgium, Italy, Spain and the UK between 2010 and 2012, based on over 3000 questionnaires distributed to protest participants according to a standardized method. Employing a distinction between three types of mobilizations, we compare protests anchored in the traditional ‘old’ labour movements, protests by smaller radical leftist unions and parties, and the ostensibly newer kinds of mobilizations in the form of Indignados and Occupy protests. Although easily forgotten, we argue that the two former types of anti-austerity protests deserve equal attention from researchers. We conclude that there are significant differences between the protest categories in terms of socio-demographic characteristics of their participants, but the participants nevertheless appear to maintain surprisingly similar political values across demonstration types. Class identification also differed. The participants in the Indignados/Occupy protests had a markedly lower degree of identification with the working class – regardless of the ‘objective’ labour market position and controlling for country differences. These aspects relate to the classic distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ social movements, but we argue that it risks obscuring a more complex pattern of similarities and differences between different anti-austerity mobilizations

The main purpose of this article is to examine and discuss political strategies of three different political organizations -SYRIZA in Greece, 15M Movement/Indignados in Spain, and M5S/Five Stars Movement in Italy- which gained prominence during the debt crisis management processes in Southern Europe in the late 2000s and early 2010s. It particularly focuses upon alternative strategies framed or implied by them regarding the way out of the debt and legitimacy crises. It is argued that their emergence as important political actors have been indicative of the growing popular discontent against and search for alternatives to the framework drawn by the austerity agenda. Although a similar context has paved the ground for their rise, these three political actors have represented different political paths that can respectively be regarded as ‘radical reformism’, ‘positive/creative negation’ and ‘anti-politics’. The article also explains these strategies on the basis of how they have politicised the three broad sources of popular discontent: austerity policies (policy contents), parliamentary/ representative democracy (policy-making processes) and the representatives (policy-makers).

In this article we approach SYRIZA's electoral success between 2012 and 2015 as a movement effect. We focus on SYRIZA's features, strategy and message that have been developed on the grounds of its movement activity, as well as the external political conditions which SYRIZA seems to take advantage of. We argue that the anti-austerity campaign created the necessary preconditions for the electoral and political rise of SYRIZA, namely the emergence of a new political boundary between pro- and anti-Memorandum forces and a subsequent majoritarian socio-political category that could be transformed into a privileged electoral pool for SYRIZA.

The essay analyzes the 2017 anticorruption protests in Romania by implementing and complementing the scholarship on political opportunity structures and civil mobilization. It argues that corruption allegations and corruption investigations are inherently open to politicization and shrouded in uncertainty, which substantially raises the cost of understanding the corruption milieu. This uncertainty arises because (1) it is hard to establish whether the corruption act has occurred; (2) there is no agreement how to ensure the independence of the prosecutor; (3) there is lack of clarity concerning who can strip alleged officials of immunity, and (4) it is unclear how information collected by the secret service should be utilized. Three elements of the political opportunity structure shaped the cost-benefit calculus of potential protesters in Romania in 2017 and served as "virtual markers" of certainty. The dual executive standoff between the president and the government raised the benefits of protesting, while the communist cleavage and the outspoken personalities of Presidents Basescu and Iohannis served as virtual markers of certainty that decreased the cost of figuring out the complex corruption narrative and spurred the protests.

The article is an analysis of the five most distinctive public mobilisations in the Czech Republic in the past 20 years. The analysis builds on two key debates regarding post-communist civil society (civil vs. uncivil society and transactional vs. participatory activism) and also on an analysis of Czech nationalism by the anthropologist Ladislav Holý. In the empirical part, it looks at the image of the nation and civil society in the cases of the movement against the opposition agreement (Thank You, Now Go, and Czech Television – A Public Affair), the movement against the American radar base, the anti-austerity protest movement, the anti-Roma protests and the islamophobic movement. The self-conception of the movements is complemented by an analysis of the images of them that were held by their opponents. The article points to the vague and indefinite nature of Czech national identity, and the fact that in the past two decades, it has been markedly connected with the image of the West and a relatively low significance of class. It also shows that " NGO-ised " transactional activism has become the subject of hostile rhetoric which may rely on the legitimacy deficit that this type of activism has. However, it concludes that to a certain extent, it shares this type of deficit with another type of civic activism; in the case of participatory activism, it identifies a dilemma between the polarisation of society and political ineffectiveness.