Social Movements and the Commons: A Framework for Understanding Collective Action in Crisis-Ridden Southern Europe

Abstract

Both social movement research and the literature on the commons provide rich accounts of the anti-austerity mobilizations and uprisings in southern Europe. Movement studies offer important insights regarding the context of mobilization and collective claim making. The commons literature emphasizes bottom-up practices of shared ownership, self-management, and social co-production that move beyond institutional solutions. Although both literatures highlight similar phenomena, they remain relatively unconnected. Their distance precludes a full grasp of the implications regarding the dynamic and abundant to-and-fro movement between protest-based politics and everyday forms of collective action in this region, which is heavily affected by the crisis’ austerity management. Drawing on the South European context, this article rethinks key concepts addressed in both literatures (social movements-commons, activists-commoners, mobilization-commoning) and highlights how a conceptual synthesis can sharpen and (re)politicize the theorization of contemporary collective action in the everyday.

Radical democracy, the commons and everyday struggles during the Greek crisis

“…Such activities are thus informed by a political logic of being and doing in common, as they constitute discursive articulations whose objective is to overcome the hegemony of neoliberal logics (such as individualisation, commodification, and hierarchy in organising social relations and practices). Hence, we find ourselves closer to accounts that seek to understand these practices as initiatives and struggles to exercise democratic control of 'the commons' (Kioupkiolis and Karyotis, 2015;Roussos and Malamidis, 2021;Varvarousis et al, 2020).…”