Post-growth, post-democracy, post-Memoranda: What can the ‘post-growth’ debate learn from Greece and vice versa?

Abstract

The crisis in Greece in the last decade has led to a wide economic transition, raising the question of whether Greece can be understood as a kind of a ‘post-growth’ society. The article has two aims. First, it examines how the Greek crisis has been discussed within the post-growth debate and focuses on three views: Greece as a post-growth anti-paradigm, Greece as an opportunity for democratic post-growth and austerity in Greece as a path for anti-Keynesian degrowth. Second, the article examines how ideas and projects with a post-growth orientation have influenced specific social initiatives born out of the crisis period in Greece. Some of these initiatives are reviewed (self-organized social and economic collectives, grassroots initiatives for solidarity, solidarity economy actions, etc.). As further discussed in the article, these initiatives were part of a broader ‘countermovement’ (Polanyi), and they faded together with other forms of labour and social protest, in accordance with events at the central political scene, and especially SYRIZA’s adoption of Memoranda politics. It is observed that in the post-Memoranda era in Greece, although past strategies of social reproduction are either unavailable (the pre-crisis finance-led growth model) or no longer equally effective (the familistic social model) and fiscal discipline remains, the search for other alternatives, including social initiatives with a post-growth orientation, did not actually extend as was expected, due to some new growth opportunities, e.g. in the field of tourism. It is finally concluded that, although they constituted an important part of the Greek countermovement, born as responses to the crisis, these social initiatives did not manage to consolidate more permanent structures of social action that could successfully challenge the neoliberal agenda.