Convergence and Divergence of Struggles

As the crisis deepened, a moment that defined grassroots politics in Greece was the occupation of the squares by the “indignants” from May 2011 onwards, at the same time as the Spanish 15M movement. A multitude of individuals with different origins and agendas — according to some statistics, one out of four Greeks — participated in the occupations and assemblies. This diversity was certainly an advantage, as it enabled osmosis between different groups and individuals and the emergence of innovative initiatives and practices. Nevertheless, the — minoritarian — presence of nationalist discourses and the absence of “class” as an analytical framework drove some radical activists away from the squares.

Despite any discrepancies and the admitted difficulty of the indignants to self-identify as a “movement,” the influence of the squares regarding spatial practices and the production of the urban commons has been crucial. In the wake of the squares, a multitude of local neighborhood assemblies emerged. Their priorities were no longer to influence developments on the central political stage, but to self-organize and defend against the impending attack on popular living standards — to promote self-sufficiency and the resilience for local communities, filling the gaps left behind by the retreating welfare state, and to combat poverty and unemployment through the promotion of solidarity endeavors.

In the context of urban commoning promoted by neighborhood assemblies, occupation practices acquired legitimacy and became widespread. It was no longer just youthful protesters who occupied public spaces to turn them into commons, but mixed collectives of young and old, men and women, families and individuals, immigrants and natives. These practices are exemplified by the occupation of urban land to turn into self-managed, community-run vegetable gardens. Such is the case, for example of PERKA (“Peri-urban Farming”) in Thessaloniki and the Self-Managed Urban Gardens of Elliniko in Athens, on the grounds of an abandoned military base and the former Athens airport respectively. According to the terms of the memorandum of understanding between the Greek government and the Troika of foreign lenders, both sites are earmarked to be privatized and developed into luxury housing and commercial infrastructure. In both cases, broad citizens’ movements demand their conversion into metropolitan parks with public facilities instead.

Local community self-defense initiatives multiplied when the government imposed a regressive land ownership tax — mockingly called haratsi, for its reminiscence of a despised Ottoman poll tax — arbitrarily charged through the electricity bill. Homeowners who failed to pay the tax were having their power cut off; that was quite common in a country where wages had been slashed and one third of the workforce was out of a job. This sadistic measure would have created a situation verging on humanitarian catastrophe, were it not for the self-organized “anti-haratsi” neighborhood committees, which would be on call to extra-legally reconnect the power for families that could not afford the tax.

Food provision was another important area of self-defense. In the previous decade, food distribution had been captured by oligopolistic, price-fixing middlemen, who made everyday staples unaffordable for the popular classes, while squeezing the profit margin of food producers. The movement to cut out the middlemen started with truckloads of potatoes arriving in central city squares to be sold directly to end consumers. The “potato movement” soon evolved into a decentralized “guerrilla farmers’ market” movement, which occupied urban land without permits, trying to bring together farmers and consumers despite the threat of eviction, arrests and confrontation with entrenched interests.

The creation of “urban commons” extended to healthcare, with the creation of an extended network of self-managed solidarity clinics; alternative currencies, notably TEM in Volos, Syntagma Time Bank in Athens, Koino in Thessaloniki and two dozen more; consumer cooperatives, such as Bios Coop in Thessaloniki, which unites more than 450 families in reclaiming their food autonomy; solidarity kitchens, which offer free or very low-cost food, encouraging punters to get involved in cooking and food distribution; and a multitude of egalitarian workers’ cooperatives, mainly concentrated in the services sector, such as those belonging to the Athens Network of Worker Cooperatives.

What Kind of “Right to the City”?

In a country as puritan and religious as Greece, the importance of “visibility” events like the Gay Pride March or the Naked Bike Ride in reclaiming public space for the full spectrum of identities and alternative practices cannot be overstated. Indeed, these events regularly become sites of confrontation with the Orthodox Church or the extreme right. These events, however, face an additional risk: to the extent that they promote an individualistic conception of the “right to the city” and fail to adopt an intersectional view of social oppression, they may involuntarily turn themselves into a “niche market” in the context of urban renewal, under which diversity is prized as long as the overriding social principle remains that of market exchange. Indeed, “diversity”, “creativity” and “innovation” are the core concepts of gentrification processes that are underway in most European cities. These exclusionary processes presuppose an individualized consumer of rights, rather than active collectives that affirm their right to self-determine everyday life in the city.

To address all these oppressions at once, Radical Pride, an “alternative” gay pride event that preserved its autonomy from public institutions and corporate sponsors, was organized in Thessaloniki this year. Radical Pride offered a rich framework to understand how gender, race, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age or ability intersect in the production of oppression and exclusion. It thus sought to affirm collective action and connect the struggle of the LGBTQ movement with other urban struggles.

As far as urban mobilization goes, however, it has to be stressed that not all bottom-up processes are inclusionary in nature. Notoriously, the foremost task of so-called “residents’ committees” is to increase land value, as members have a personal interest in the appreciation of their properties. More often than not, this includes efforts to keep “undesirables” out of the neighborhood. It is not a surprise, then, that residents’ committees are frequently taken over by fascist elements. In fact, exclusion and fascism are the ugly underbelly of shiny urban renewal projects and the construction of “model cities.”

Indeed, in the recent conflict around refugees, xenophobic “residents’ committees” have played a dubious role by protesting their inclusion in social life. Likewise, the state treats the plight of refugees as an issue of public order and tries to keep them isolated in deplorable conditions in camps, away from urban centers. As a response, solidarity movements have patiently set up solidarity structures to include refugees in the social life of the city. The pinnacle of these efforts are the self-managed occupied refugee shelters that have been created in Athens, Thessaloniki and other cities — several of which were evicted by the police last year.

What About Systemic Change?

By 2013, the construction of Syriza’s hegemonic project was advancing at full steam. Hardly any movement remained unaffected by the party’s desire to pose as the political expression of anti-austerity struggles and monopolize the concept of solidarity. Today we are experiencing the end-result of this process: policies of dispossession are intensified under a nominally left-wing government, while resistances have been neutralized, and “social peace” — much desired by international and local elites — has been secured. This defeat, however, is not the work of Syriza alone but also demonstrates the internal limitations of the movement. While in Spain, for instance, the desire of people for institutional change was largely channeled to the local level and towards coalitions hegemonized by the movements themselves, in Greece, the dual influence of, on the one hand, the anarchist movement, which is hostile to any kind of involvement with the institutions, and, on the other hand, a rigid parliamentary and extra-parliamentary left, which in its statist mindset fails to perceive the importance of local participatory forms of government, prevented the emergence of independent municipalist initiatives.

In 2014, municipalist observatory dimotopia.gr (now defunct) identified 17 independent municipalist formations that had direct democracy as a central element of their program. A couple of years later, few had managed to gain representation. Many secured the support of Syriza; this gave them an electoral push, at the expense of gradually being taken over by professional politicians and losing their grassroots character. One such case is the formation “Resistance with the Citizens” in the Athenian municipality of Chalandri. After spending a long time as a minority opposition party, it conquered the mayorship in 2015. Two years later, many of its long-time members resigned, denouncing the new mayor for transgressing the foundational principles of the formation and aligning himself with the government’s austerity policies.

It is very early to say whether the municipalist movement in Spain has had any significant influence on institutional politics — strong debate and criticism has been generated on this question within the movement itself. We can, however, argue that in Greece, the deficit of grassroots political coordination — electoral or otherwise —facilitated the continuation of austerity policies. While the suspicion of great parts of the movements towards electoral politics is understandable, in no case should this be translated into reluctance to organize, cooperate, compromise, scale up, reach out to society, participate energetically in the public dialogue. There is no merit in partiality, marginality or ideological purity.

The first few years of the crisis brought a profound delegitimation of the political system and its satellites — political parties, trade unions, the mass media — as well as the dissolution of identities formed around social status, work or consumption. This produced not only depression and resignation, but also an explosion in grassroots mobilization that affected the lives of many and created structures, collectives and practices to reclaim the city for a diversity of subjects. At the peak of these mobilizations, there was widespread optimism that the mere accumulation of urban commons would be enough to radically change the urban landscape and create a social counterpower sufficient to effectively challenge the processes of dispossession.

In the following phase, grassroots movements were faced with the inevitable question of political coordination and institutional change, and were called to position themselves with respect to the hegemonic project developed by Syriza. Some identified with the project and were assimilated by it; others adopted a cautious but pragmatic position, trying to negotiate political benefits without compromising their identity; others still denounced Syriza’s project and distanced themselves from it, but without producing an alternative form of political coordination. This was a time of intense conflict and debate.

In the present phase, hopes of institutional change have been dashed, grassroots movements have lost their mass character, and remaining collectives have entered a process of reflection and redefinition of strategy. One key point to highlight in such reflections is the importance of grassroots urban struggles during the crisis, taking into account not only the external threats they face — repression and co-optation — but also their internal limitations: their contradictory nature, their ideological divergences, their difficulty in finding a common vocabulary, in coordinating and in forming a coherent political subject. These shortcomings, however, should not be perceived as a failure, as the cycle of dissent and subordination is never a zero-sum game. There is an “overflow” that persists and forms the substrate of the following cycle of mobilization. This overflow includes ideas, practices, values and possibilities of action that did not exist just a decade ago, in addition to a new voice in the public discourse, which prioritizes social cooperation and self-determination.