Radical Democracy and Grassroots Agency at Local Universes: the Cases of Can Batlló and Vio.Me/Bio.Me.

Democracy in Southern Europe is at a crossroads. The grassroots anti-austerity campaign of the early 2010s, besides awakening the indignant citizens across the region and prefiguring an alternative democratic praxis at public squares, has also led to a breakthrough of the populist radical Left. Movement-parties closely associated with the anti-austerity protests achieved significant electoral results over the past decade, and Podemos and SYRIZA are the most successful cases of this reinvigorated populist radical Left. Nonetheless, their political trajectory from the squares to national politics, pursuing hierarchical and representative dynamics of institutionalized politics once they entered national parliaments, corroborates the limits of liberal democracy in the pursuit of social change and emancipation. Rather than putting forward a real democratic praxis enabling social and political transformation, both movement-parties are currently on the defensive (whether in power or opposition), engaged in containing an energized far-Right that appropriates the political agenda and public conversation. Alternatively, this research project builds on the understanding of democracy as furthering people’s control over the commons and enacting autonomous modes of collective action for managing life in common through grassroots agency, beyond (and often in opposition to) liberal democracy. It investigates two socio-spatial entanglements produced by radical grassroot agency at local arenas: the squatted social centre Can Batlló, in Barcelona - Spain, and the workers’ cooperative Vio.Me/Bio.Me, in Thessaloniki - Greece. This study aims to understand how horizontal and autonomous forms of collective action and organization possibly interact with vertical politics of (counter-)hegemony against the neoliberal order and towards the gestation of emancipated forms of life; and how these independent loci of grassroots radical agency at local universes can eventually interact towards wider scales (national, regional, global), hence building up an alternative social order. It employs a scholar-activist research approach, combining both participatory action and systematic and structured methods (in-depth interviews and observation) to gather and analyse data in an iterative process, aiming to produce experiential knowledge on radical democratic politics and grassroots agency against the background of these two cases. The radical democratic politics gestated at Can Batlló and Vio.Me/Bio.Me, unfolding over different dimensions of human life (such as socio-cultural neighbourhood initiatives, housing and co-habitation, and productive and economic activities), are illustrative of the constituent potential of grassroots agency within and beyond these local-level socio-spatial entanglements, as they offer a glimpse of emancipated, egalitarian, and self-determining communitarian social life.