Paper short abstract:

The economic crisis in Greece demands emergency measures and sacrifices as a necessary condition of the social. Within a context of political and economic dispossession, solidarities emerge that carry the possibility of actualizing the future through, and out of, a framed reality.

Paper long abstract:

The Economic Crisis in Greece demands fast responses pre-emptively decided, emergency measures, and sacrifices under the rubric of national unity and as a necessary condition of the social. Dispossession has become the bell-wether of the social.

Within this context emerge forces capable of actualizing the future through and out of a framed reality. Social centres, consumer and production cooperatives, ecovillages, social and solidarity economy experiments, gratuitous bazaars, domain assemblies, strategies of commoning, and worker's self-management are among the many emergent autonomous solidarities. Such is the case of Vio.me., an abandoned by its bankrupt owner factory in Thessaloniki, Greece, that, after long struggles and intense mobilization has been occupied and reopened by its workers under democratic worker's control. The self-managed experience of Vio.me has achieved a stable although limited income for the workers through the production of ecological detergents, and has transformed a novel experiment into a viable alternative.

What has been initiated as a survival mechanism and a creative response to unemployment has developed in the process new, potentially empowering, collective subjectivities and alignments.

This paper aims to explore the ways the project of Vio.me is created by, and creates on its way, voluntary collaborations between its members and supportive relations with the wider community in the context of the Greek Economic Crisis.