The crisis seen from below, within, and against: from solidarity economy to food distribution cooperatives in Greece

Abstract

Anthropological literature on crises and social and solidarity economies can benefit from integrated approaches that assess grassroots cooperatives formed during critical periods of capitalist recession. This article debates on why it is problematic to conceptualize the Greek crisis as exceptional and then examines the relationship between the solidarity economy and cooperatives and argues that the latter is a development of the former in the future plans of people struggling against the crisis being witnessed in Greece. It moreover makes a case for there being a need to pay more attention to the distribution sector. Its main aim is to point out how participants engaged in initiatives related to the solidarity economy tend to imagine that their activities are inspired by larger aims and claims than the immediate significance of their material actions. This is done by ethnographically analyzing organized social responses against crises through the rise of popular solidarity economies associated with distribution of food without middlemen.

Solidarity: the egalitarian tensions of a bridge-concept

“…In particular, the idea of crisis as a rupture in the normative order in Greece permeates the public sphere and also holds some currency among serious anthropological interpretations (see Knight : 3). However, Greece's crisis is not an ‘exceptional’ condition (see Rakopoulos : 191–4); it is in fact organic to capitalist processes of debt ‘management’ (Bear ). Similarly, solidarity itself, the ‘other side of crisis’ (Cabot, this issue), while novel in many ways, is not radically new.…”

“…It is in that respect that I understand solidarity as interpretable as one of the crisis's ambivalent fluctuations and not simply as a factor outside or against them – nurturing ambivalence in dissent towards the crisis (Rakopoulos ; Theodossopoulos ; Cabot, this issue). Solidarity is continuously taking shape in relation to the austerity‐ridden lifeworlds of Greece's residents today – and as a remedy to the deleterious effects of individualisation that austerity brings forward as a TINA life‐narrative.…”

Introduction—Uncertain Visions: Crisis, Ambiguity, and Visual Culture in Greece

“…Athanasiou ). Some describe the present through notions of exception and emergency, ideas that have been critiqued in the crisis literature for reproducing Eurocentric notions of normalcy that ironically inform Greece's classification outside of the Western canon (Rakopoulos :193). Various authors retain a sanguine approach to the new political formations such as the subjects emerging in the 2011 lower Syntagma Square protests (Panourgiá ) and those subalterns realizing themselves as members of a collectivity through texting each other or playing football (Alexandrakis :86, 95).…”

Which community for cooperatives?

“…These factions are understood as groups recognized in divisions of labor in cooperatives, the outcome of processes of internal specialization and even bureaucratization (Rakopoulos 2013(Rakopoulos , 2014a(Rakopoulos , 2014b.…”