As a response to the unprecedented attack on their social, economic and political rights triggered by the imposed austerity measures, Greek citizens organize prefigurative arrangements of political governance from below based on solidarity, direct democracy and defence of the commons, in reclaiming their health, water and livelihood.
When the
sale of Thessaloniki’s water
company was announced in 2011 as part of the
Troika’s conditions, citizens promoting direct democracy and cooperativism met
with the water workers’ trade union in the occupied squares of the Greek “indignados”. There, they
elaborated a
proposal for a
viable alternative to both corporate privatization and state administration of water services. They formed a new movement called Initiative 136, based on the
simple premise that
if 136 Euros is provided by each household in the
city, the
citizens can raise the
amount needed to buy the
water company, protect it from corporate
greed and manage it through local cooperatives in a non-profit manner, thus ensuring democratic participation, social justice and access to this vital good for everyone. After
securing funding from cooperative banks, Initiative 136 presented its bid in the
public
tender for the privatization of the
water company. Its bid was rejected by the
institution carrying out the privatization, with no sufficient justification, so Initiative 136 started a legal battle to overturn this decision, parallel to the process
of organizing the community and
applying political pressure against privatization.
Theodoros Karyotis
July 2014
It is evident today that
the Greek population is experiencing
an unprecedented attack on
its social, economic and political rights. Using the sovereign debt crisis as an excuse, a series
of neoliberal governments have followed the prescriptions of the troika to promote the dismantling of the
public health and education systems, to push down wages and pensions, to rob
the majority of the population of the little they had through debt and taxation, and most
importantly, to sell off everything that
constituted the public wealth of the
people to multinational corporations.
This is not the first case of a
structural adjustment that damages
the lives of millions· it is however the first violent adjustment that
takes place in
the European periphery.
The Greek parliamentary left has so far been unable
to
slow down this offensive, in part due to the
strategy of the powerful to divide and rule,
by
setting every social group against
each other through powerful propaganda, and in part because a new reality renders our
traditional means
of struggle obsolete: The reality that social consensus is not necessary
anymore for the exercise of power, since a permanent
state of exception makes every extreme measure justifiable and allows the state to systematically repress, criminalize, manipulate and lie. The victims of such repression are systematically presented as
perpetrators.
Reactions on the part of the population to this rapid disappearance of all that
was familiar and normative in our country range from reactionary, chauvinist and violent
postures, such as the rise of the
neo-nazi Golden Dawn, to resignation and individualist efforts to save oneself, whatever the cost. But fortunately, we also witness an
unprecedented
activity and creativity of the social movements. There is a
widespread realization that
the oppressed
social strata cannot
merely entrust their salvation to representational structures
or institutions such as trade unions and political parties anymore, but
that constant grassroots involvement and political participation is imperative.
Greece is probably a peculiar case within Europe in that the
state never had a
positive role of economic redistribution and the welfare mechanisms were rudimentary even when they existed in the
"good days" before the
crisis severely hit. This is probably why within
the social movements there are presently many voices that not
only are anti-austerity or anti-neoliberal, but envision a whole new path that
leads us away from state-sponsored capitalism.
What follows is the presentation of 3 movements, which revolve around the following core values: resistance, horizontality, participation, solidarity and defence of the commons,
through practices that
challenge the dominant discourse and promote popular education and
self-initiative.
When the
sale of Thessaloniki’s water
company was announced in 2011 as part of the
Troika’s conditions, citizens promoting direct democracy and cooperativism met
with the water workers’ trade union in the occupied squares of the Greek “indignados”. There, they
elaborated a
proposal for a
viable alternative to both corporate privatization and state administration of water services. They formed a new movement called Initiative 136, based on the
simple premise that
if 136 Euros is provided by each household in the
city, the
citizens can raise the
amount needed to buy the
water company, protect it from corporate
greed and manage it through local cooperatives in a non-profit manner, thus ensuring democratic participation, social justice and access to this vital good for everyone. After
securing funding from cooperative banks, Initiative 136 presented its bid in the
public
tender for the privatization of the
water company. Its bid was rejected by the
institution carrying out the privatization, with no sufficient justification, so Initiative 136 started a legal battle to overturn this decision, parallel to the process
of organizing the community and
applying political pressure against privatization.
In May 2014, Initiative 136 was one of the main promoters of a grassroots referendum where 98 per cent of the voters rejected water privatization. Massive popular opposition
and a Supreme Court decision
have since obliged the government to freeze the privatization
process. This, however, is only a
partial victory; Initiative 136 continues organizing to make social control of water a reality.
Another recent experiment is the
occupation, and subsequent operation under workers’
self-management, of the
construction materials factory of Vio.Me. in Thessaloniki. In February 2013, 2 years after the employers abandoned the factory, the 40 members of the
Vio.Me. workers’ union, organized through assemblary and horizontal decision
making, with the
support of a
wide solidarity movement, restarted production in the occupied
factory. At the
same time they switched production towards environmentally friendly
cleaning products that
are
distributed through solidarity channels, especially the
structures
of the blooming social and solidarity economy that is rapidly growing around Greece. The
workers of Vio.Me face the hostility of the Greek state, which refuses to create a
legal
framework that allows the normal operation of the
factory and conspires with the ex- owners against this new endeavour. But there is also resistance
from a large sector of the
communist Left, which accuses the
workers of aiming to become “small capitalists”.
According to the traditional Left’s mode of thinking, whatever is not state-owned is private:
Society cannot have any self-determined
and independent existence outside the
dominant institutions of the state and the
market.
Despite such a hostile environment, Vio.Me has had significant success in sustaining the worker’s families, in has created a big international solidarity movement. In April 2014, after overcoming several legal and bureaucratic hurdles, the workers formed a cooperative, based on the very principles that had been guiding their endeavor since the beginning: collective decision-making through the workers’ assembly, collective ownership of the means of production, and non-profit operation, as any surpluses will return to the wider community.
Despite such a hostile environment, Vio.Me has had significant success in sustaining the worker’s families, in has created a big international solidarity movement. In April 2014, after overcoming several legal and bureaucratic hurdles, the workers formed a cooperative, based on the very principles that had been guiding their endeavor since the beginning: collective decision-making through the workers’ assembly, collective ownership of the means of production, and non-profit operation, as any surpluses will return to the wider community.
The third movement I would like to mention here is Thessaloniki's social solidarity clinic. It is one of the oldest and biggest in a network of clinics around Greece that
are
run by volunteer health professionals. They are providing free healthcare services to a target
population of approximately 3 million Greeks and immigrants that have no social security coverage at the moment.
They operate remarkably efficiently by horizontal decision making, they finance
their activity only on donations of individuals, barring companies and governmental institutions, and they try to engage
the community and the patients themselves in their processes
of self-management. At the
same time they are part of a
wider movement in Greece that
demands universal healthcare by engaging in direct action, applying political pressure and trying to create public awareness. At great personal risk, solidarity clinic volunteers who work as physicians
and nurses in the
public health system,
honour their oath by “smuggling” into the
public hospitals uninsured patients that need
treatment or examinations that the
solidarity clinic cannot
provide.
This article starts by denouncing that the
political, economic
and social rights of the
Greek population are under attack, however what is presented here is not big crowds protesting
and demanding that their rights are respected. Rather, present
examples are offered where groups of people organize from below and just try to take back what has been robbed of
them: Water, healthcare, livelihood. They have fallen out of trust with political and
governmental institutions. They envision
a different world and at the
same time they create
the instruments to move towards it. New instruments that
are
autonomous from existing
structures of power, that
work outside of the
spaces of representational democracy, which are
so consistently co-opted, undermined or appeased by the
traditional holders of power.
These movements seek not only to create new spaces of political participation and
debate, but
to
operate on a
different set of principles: Solidarity, cooperation, self-
management, participation, community involvement and defence of the common
goods. In short: They organize prefigurative arrangements of political governance
from below rather
than wait for social or economic rights to be
granted by an
omnipotent instance of power.
This is not to say that social movements and organizations should stop demanding the enforcement
of negotiated rights. Rather, we
have to be
aware of the
limits of the
rights discourse and the individualisation it
produces in front of instances of power, and be ready to overcome it when it helps perpetuate asymmetrical power relations, by legitimating the
domination of those who “grant” them over those who “claim”
the rights. We have already seen how Thessaloniki's social solidarity clinic is a
defender of universal healthcare as a right, but
also a promoter
of community healthcare as a
commons. Self-managed initiatives don't reject the
idea of rights altogether, but
they renegotiate those rights within
the context
of the community and they challenge the
role of the
state as enforcer and guarantor of those rights, promoting instead the
collective empowerment of the
rights holders themselves.
Capitalism is going through a structural crisis. It
has reached its energetic, environmental and
social limits. Can the
practices of commoning, of solidarity, gift and sharing economy, through their questioning
of capitalism's core values –private property, methodological
individualism, political representation– offer us a sneak
peek of a new economic and political configuration? Or do we
run
the chance of offering capitalism a way out of its problems,
by helping alleviate the social reproduction crisis that
neoliberal policies have
created?
To get out of
its dead-end, capitalism is trying to get what Massimo
DeAngelis calls “a
commons fix”: It tries to utilize commons-based alternatives, especially solidarity structures
and cooperatives, as a
cheap and easy way to provide welfare support, healthcare, income,
protection from unemployment, etc.
Through a discursive shift from the
Thatcherite "there is no thing such as a
society" to the
official U.K. state policy of “the big society”, the people are
left to fend for themselves while the state pulls the welfare rug from under their feet.
This is why the
creation of “tame” and co-optable versions of commons practices (disguised as
“social entrepreneurship”, NGOs, solidarity networks, etc) is now an
institutionally
sanctioned practice in a hyper-neoliberal European Union in crisis:
They are providing
cheap alternatives to the rapidly privatized and dismantled public welfare system for the
reproduction of the workforce and preservation of social peace.
In this light, merely building commons alternatives is hardly enough from the point of view of social emancipation: What is needed is an articulation of radical and dynamic commons endeavours that seek
not to complement state and capital, but to foreshadow their
substitution with a
new set of social practices and institutions that can
guarantee a future for the next generations. While capitalism will
keep
on trying to disrupt, coopt and utilize
the flow of social cooperation, commons
initiatives have to be articulated in a
diverse and militant constitutive process
that will extend commons practices and institutions in ever more areas of social life, thus leaving gradually less and less of people’s lives in the
hands of the state and the market.
The existing experiments in social appropriation and self-management of workplaces, public utilities and services around Europe can light the
way in this direction.