Grassroots meanings of informality: Resistance, subsistence and survival in the Greek crisis context
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3069
Informality poses multiple facets and functions in the modern economic world. In this article I employ a bottom up approach in order to understand what informality is and does according to my informants, understandings and explanations within the greater context of the Greek, economic crisis. 
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Stamatis Amarianakis
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Grassroots meanings of informality: Resistance, subsistence and survival in the Greek crisis context
Text.Serial.Journal
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2017-12-31
2017-11-24
2017-12-31
2017-12-31
51-55
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Stamatis Amarianakis
2017/12/31
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3069
51
Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
2239-625X
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55
Grassroots meanings of informality: Resistance, subsistence and survival in the Greek crisis context
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                                               2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 51-55




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Brindisi to the Brindisians, graffiti in Brindisi, Italy. Photo by A. M. Pusceddu.


In/formalization
Edited by
Alan SMART, Josephine SMART, Filippo M. ZERILLI

Contributions of
Stamatis AMARIANAKIS, Lenka BRUNCLÍKOVÁ, Dolores KOENIG, B. Lynne MILGRAM, Sarah
MUIR, Antonio Maria PUSCEDDU, Alan SMART, Mechthild VON VACANO, Filippo M.
ZERILLI & Julie TRAPPE.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © STAMATIS AMARIANAKIS
Grassroots meanings of informality: Resistance, subsistence and survival in the Greek crisis context
2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 51-55.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3069
IN/FORMALIZATION                                                                       51




Grassroots meanings of informality
Resistance, subsistence and survival in the Greek crisis context

Stamatis AMARIANAKIS
Universitat de Barcelona




ABSTRACT: Informality poses multiple facets and functions in the modern economic world. In
this article I employ a bottom up approach in order to understand what informality is and
does according to my informants, understandings and explanations within the greater
context of the Greek, economic crisis.




   In this article I employ a bottom up approach to understand informality
and informal economic activities. I argue that informality provides weapons
for the weak (Scott 1985, 1976) to subsist, survive and resist powerful
structures and institutions. Specially, I focus on my informants’ under-
standings and explanations of their informal activities, namely the informal
production and consumption of goods and services which I analyze within
the wider context of the Greek economic crisis. I draw on selected ethno-
graphic observations from Chalkida, Greece, a mid-sized provincial city at
the periphery of Athens, where I conducted fieldwork from May 2015 to
December 20161.
   People in Chalkida, as well as in other provincial cities, have direct access
to nature and to food production. Almost every household is a petty olive oil
producer or has access to olive oil through kinship or social networks. In
times of crisis, olive oil production is highly valued, while many, in their
effort to supply their income seek to sell their surplus informally. Another
resource, to which many in Chalkida have unmediated, market-less access is
seafood. Many own amateur fishing licenses and small boats to practice
fishing as a hobby. Nowadays, many amateur fishermen manage to make a
substantial income out of fishing.

1. Research developed within the ERC Grassroots Economics Project (GRECO).

                                           2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 51-55
52                                         ALAN SMART, JOSEPHINE SMART, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


   The agricultural and fishing sector, not only can provide food, but also in-
formal jobs to the unemployed masses. Informal employers claim that they
provide employment while, on the contrary, the formal sector fails to do so.
Illegal fishing activities have been intensified, while coast guard officials who
are responsible to guard and regulate fishing and diving activities are eager
to be bribed, especially after the vast reduction of their salaries. Informally
produced seafood is not only channeled to households and individuals. Many
taverns of Chalkida are supplied with seafood by amateur fishermen and
through that way informal goods could be formalized. The same stands true
for the agricultural production, such as olive oil, raw vegetables, cheese, wine
and meat, while in many cases the tavern owner might be himself or his kin a
producer of the above products.
   When I asked people who are either producers or consumers of informal
goods and services, they mostly used similar patterns of reasoning to justify
their informal actions. They mentioned that such practices are necessary to
survive, subsist and resist the imposed impoverishment of the masses
provoked by the prolonged austerity. Informally produced goods enable
people to maintain and reinforce social relationships, in other words to
socialize. Goods, such as fish, meat and wine provide an occasion for people
to gather and as they said, to be able to have fun. In addition, many have said
that cultivating the land or going fishing relieves their stress and makes them
feel productive by balancing feelings of self contempt.
   In contrast to the big urban centres, such as Athens and Thessaloniki,
smaller cities seems to maintain strong relationships with the country side
and therefore high levels of, let’s say, traditional “informality”. During the
first years of crisis, the movement without “intermediaries” 2, which set up
informal food markets all over Greece, had gained lots of popularity in big
cities such as Athens and Thessaloniki, a method which we could define as
urban and contemporary informality. Rakopoulos (2014, 2015) who studied
the movement without intermediaries in Thessaloniki, has shown the
challenges and the struggles of this social movement to construct and
sustain a solidarity network in order to provide a fair price for both the
consumer and the producer . This informal social movement required high
organizational level since it had to mobilize and coordinate consumers,

2. Their aim was to replace intermediaries who bought cheap agricultural products and then
sold dear to the end customer making big profits. By bypassing that chain, they ensured a
better and fairer price both for the producer and the consumer, while this practice was en -
dowed with a strong sense of solidarity and resistance against the imposed impoverishment
(see Rakopoulos 2015).


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 51-55
IN/FORMALIZATION                                                                   53


volunteers and producers from all over Greece. However, that movement has
had little success in smaller cities such as Chalkida, mainly because most of
Chalkida’s inhabitants had already had access to food production through a
less organized network based on kinship and social relationships. That is why
hunger has not been a big issue in Chalkida or in any other provincial city in
Greece.
   Interestingly, when people use the word “survival”, they usually refer to
social and economic survival rather than to biological survival. Surviving the
crisis in my informants’ conceptualization, has not had the mere positivistic
determination of covering one’s basic needs. In small provincial cities, where
almost everyone knows everyone, survival, per se, has a symbolic meaning.
When people speak about survival, they mean to be able to sustain their life’s
achievements, be it a house, a business or their social status. It seems that
these material assets that people struggle to save have a life of their own.
   Yet, the most popular practice of informality, inherent to the formal
commercial market, is tax evasion, usually through the sale of goods and
services without receipts. Entrepreneurs and consumers justify this practice
by making arguments about mutual help, support and personal interest and
develop a polemical attitude towards dominant structures and institutions as
well as large multinational firms. The ones that buy products or services
without receipts usually pay less while those who sell informally are able to
hide income and avoid taxation on two levels. Firstly, they avoid attributing
the consumption tax which part of it they use to access the market and
sustain their businesses, and secondly, they hide income and present lower
annual budget so they have less overall taxation.
   Here, lies a strong sense of solidarity towards local ventures and people
versus faceless, large multinational firms which have been taking advantage
of the deregulated market to extract more profits. Preferring to consume in
local businesses has multiple benefits for the local society since it enables
the local economies to reproduce. Supporting the survival of small local
businesses by tolerating and encouraging their tax evading methods is an act
of social solidarity, and as an informant has put it, petty informal economic
activities maintain the social cohesion. In his view, the worst effect crisis has
had in the Greece is that the Greek society had lost its social cohesion.
   In many instances, the formal sector is governed by austerity, complexity,
irrationality, injustice and corruption makes many to go informal. People
speak about the poor services and provisioning the State offers and they
complain about the constantly reducing pensions, salaries and benefits and
the forever increasing taxation. Money they have paid to the State does not


                                       2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 51-55
54                                         ALAN SMART, JOSEPHINE SMART, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


return to them as taxation has seized to be an egalitarian, redistributive
model. Paying fees and taxes is seen as a mode of dispossession, so people
resist, however, they have not collectively articulated and expressed a
political discourse about the covert and overt acts of their resistance. Unlike
more organized informal activities, such as the movement without inter-
mediaries in which people have produced collectively their political
discourse about their practices, often is endowed with solidarity and
resistance (Rakopoulos 2015).
   Very often austerity and dictated authoritative models are considered as
death politics, a biopolitical governance (Foucault 1997) at the EU scale
which is exercised through economic power and indebtedness. Popular
discourses around crisis include words and terminology such as economic
colonialization. Many express the view of an ongoing war: «What the
Germans did not succeed to get with arms, they do it now through the
economic crisis. They are buying us out!» is a very common statement with
which the majority of Greeks would agree. We see that resistance takes also
the form of a national, an imagined collective resistance; however it is not
collectively organized as such. This is a grassroots, non-organized, national
and therefore imagined resistance. In that grassroots logic, the Nation has
been separated from the State. The State and the government are regarded as
puppet mechanisms of foreign capital interests which make structures act on
their behalf (Bourdieu 2005). Consequently, resistance takes the form of a
political consumerism and an economic nationalism (Lekakis 2015),
informality is empowered by the dominant, formal regime which
incorporates large scale economic demands of big capital interests and fails
to serve the needs of ordinary people, the body of the nation. Combined with
the continuous revelations of corruption scandals and upper scale informal
practices, petty informal economic activities and petty capital accumulation
through informal means are justified further.
   Last but not least, informally produced goods provide the means for
various food gatherings and festivities which oppose and provide relief to the
widespread economic (and social) depression crisis has brought. In that light
this is another form of resistance, to have fun and enjoy even in harsh times,
while at the same time informality acts as a disalienative force both on the
social and the economic sphere. Actually, I have witnessed a counter stereotype
being expressed in response to the one that highlights the laziness and un-
thoughtfulness of the “Southerners” in general, and Greeks in particular, to
handle their economics. In several instances, people told me that austerity
consists of a cultural trait of the North, hence through my informants’ views,


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IN/FORMALIZATION                                                                            55


austerity is not simply an economic project, it is the cultural assimilation of
Southern Europe to the strict German standards which opens up a field of
cultural resistance as well3.
   To conclude with, informality has always been a constitutive part of the
Greek society (and economy). A deep socioeconomic structure upon which a
certain economic habitus has been constructed. The case of Greece enables
to study informality as a widespread social attitude which almost everyone
practices it in one way or another. Finally, when ordinary people speak about
informality they use the word “black money” or “black market” and non-
taxed income or to use a Greek idiom sti zoula that means to do in secret. It
seems that in the definition of the concept of informality the voices of
people, those who engage in informal activities have been ignored and are
absent in the formation of the term.


REFERENCES
Bourdieu, Pierre, 2005, Principles of an Economic Anthropology, in The Handbook of
      Economic Sociology, Neil Smelser, Richard Swedberg, eds, New York, Princeton
      Univesity Press: 75-89.
Foucault, Michel, 1997, The Birth of Biopolitics, in Ethics: Subjectivity, and Truth,
      Paul Rabinow, ed, New York, New Press: 73-79.
Lekakis, Eleftheria, 2015, Economic nationalism and the cultural politics of con-
      sumption under austerity: The rise of ethnocentric consumption in Greece,
      Journal of Consumer Culture, 17, 2: 286-302.
Rakopoulos, Theodoros, 2014, Resonance of solidarity: Anti-middleman food distri-
      bution in anti-austerity Greece, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 32, 2: 95-119.
Rakopoulos, Theodoros, 2015, Solidarity’s tensions: Informality and sociality in the
      Greek crisis, Social Analysis, 59(3): 85-104.
Scott, James, 1976, The moral economy of the peasant: Rebellion and subsistence in
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Scott, James, 1985, Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance, New
      Haven, Yale University Press.




3. Austerity is a greek word that derives from the adjective αυστηρός (afstiros) which means
strict. In Greek, austerity is translated as λιτότητα (litotita) which comes from the adjective
λιτός (litos) that means plain, simple, self-abnegating, puritanical etc.


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