Here is a brief abstract of an important article by Alexandros Kioupkiolis and Theodoros Karyotis:

“In this text we set out to explore a number of contemporary instances of self-management as pursued in various fields of production in present-day Greece. Situated in a poorly industrialised country which is embedded in the information age of global capital, we construe production in the widest sense of the term, which extends from Fordist industrial production to the production of knowledge, information, social relations, subjectivities and culture. We then enquire into the paths that actual endeavours seek to chart in the provision of collective goods, moving in the gaps and the cracks of state control and capitalist rule.

The chapter begins with a brief historical survey of agricultural and industrial cooperative endeavours in modern Greece, which exposes the absence of a strong tradition in self-management and the miserable failure of an early statist approach to it. We then go on to describe how the political and economic crises of the early 21st century, in tandem with a chain of empowering experiences, such as the popular uprising of 2008 and the squares movement in 2011, have given rise to new political spaces and new collective subjects that are committed in principle to direct democracy, solidarity and self-organisation. It is within this context that we probe emerging experiments in self-management, such as a cooperatively-run restaurant in Athens and an emblematic social centre in Thessaloniki that has been promoting solidarity, cooperation and self-management over the last few years. Special attention is given to Vio.Me., the first venture in workers’ self-management of an occupied factory in this country, which has sparked the development of a wide solidarity movement.

We make the case that workplace self-direction today should not be envisaged in isolation from a wider paradigm of collective autonomy in the production of social relations, subjectivities and the commons. This investigation draws on the critical discussion around the ‘commons’ but does not evince any nostalgia for a pre-capitalist past, paying enhanced attention to the new internationalism, social networks, pluralism, creativity, incompletion and the agonistic attitudes which inform contemporary endeavours in collective self-rule.”