ABSTRACT

This final chapter focuses on resistance, possibly one of the after-effects of the post2008 crisis that has received the most public and scholarly attention. Indeed, when thinking of the economic crisis and the concomitant austerity policies, it is almost impossible to avoid addressing the huge mobilisations and public outcry against austerity and the cuts – the Indignados or 15-M movement in Spain, Aganaktismenoi in Greece, Occupy St. Pauls in the UK, Indignati in Italy, Movimento 12 de Março in Portugal and the big anti-austerity protests in Ireland to name a few. It was, therefore, a deliberate choice to leave resistance to the end. This is not only because the intention of this book is to move away from the spectacular effects and aesthetics of crisis in order to unpack the daily untold stories of people on the ground. But also, and most importantly, because the spectacle of resistance can be easily captured in a headline in the moment of rupture, in the myriad images of people clashing with the police, but its social legacy is much more difficult to grasp. This is precisely the focus of this chapter, to challenge the orthodox representations of resistance and to engage with the notions of social change, creativity and subversion that outline the social legacy of resistant acts to the European crisis. Crisis and resistance have a long and charged history. For example, from a Marxist perspective, a crisis of capitalism is seen as an opportunity for struggle and revolution. According to this logic, a big and irreversible crisis of the capitalist system of production would inevitably lead to an intensification of class struggle that would give way to new forms of resistance and revolutionary organisation. The economic crisis can be transformed into a social and political crisis as well, in which the possibility for collective struggle and the insurgent seizure of power is evident. The problem with this approach is that it views crisis as the force of accumulation of revolutionary possibilities, and thus as the turning point from which the agent of change will emerge in the form of a saviour.1 This rather deterministic and fatalistic reading of the relationship between crisis and resistance dismisses the possibility that the crisis of capitalism can be the turning point for its restructuring – a restructuring that does not necessarily mean the end of capitalist production and relations but, as Hardt and Negri (2000) famously stated, might signify a process of a creative destruction that ultimately breathes new life into the capitalist system and imposes harsher measures of discipline and control of the workers.