Socio-political developments in Greece and Spain in the wake of the grassroots anti-austerity campaign: towards national parliaments and local spaces

This article investigates the socio-political developments in Greece and Spain following the grassroots anti-austerity campaign from 2011 on, which unfolded towards national parliaments and local spaces. It does so by analysing the institutionalisation of the populist radical Left as compared with the local-oriented agency of social movements in these two countries. It argues that these alternative approaches to social change and emancipation illustrate contending paradigms of contemporary political thought reflecting upon collective movements, political action


INTRODUCTION: FROM THE SQUARES TO NATIONAL PARLIAMENTS AND LOCAL SPACES
The decline of the protest cycle in the grassroots campaign against austerity that broke out across the European periphery in the early 2010s (della Porta, 2017) was followed by two apparently complementary moves aspiring to social transformation, as the popular encampments in public squares were demobilised.The populist radical Left committed to elevating the new common sense and radical democratic politics cultivated in the encampments into the political arena, and so movement--parties2 closely associated with the anti-austerity protests achieved significant electoral results across Southern Europe over the past decade (Katsambekis;Kioupkiolis, 2019).At the same time, social movements turned towards local communities and neighbourhoods to translate the new subjectivities and democratic praxis from the movement of the squares into a local-grounded approach, developing a wide array of solidarity initiatives for collective resilience and radical democratic spaces for fostering people's control over the commons (Hadjimichalis, 2018;Nez, 2016).
Albeit striving for social transformation and emancipation, these two endeavours have followed divergent paths.The political trajectory of the populist radical Left towards national parliaments in Southern Europe pursues the hierarchical and representative dynamics of institutionalised state politics (Kioupkiolis, 2019a), whereas the collective agency of social movements unfolds horizontally within local arenas, autonomously from the state and market (Prentoulis;Thomassen, 2019).Arguably, these two projects illustrate contending paradigms of contemporary political thought reflecting upon collective agency, political action, and social change: the vertical politics of Antonio Gramsci's hegemony (1971) and the absolute democratic politics of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's multitude (2004;2009).
In what follows, this article investigates these two alternative projects: the institutionalisation of the populist radical Left vis-à-vis the local-oriented agency of social movements.It does so by analysing the socio-political developments unfolding over the vertical and horizontal dimensions in Spain and Greece in the years of austerity, which offer particularly constructive case studies for a critical analysis of the shortcomings and potentials of each approach.The interest in the Greek and Spanish cases is explained not only because of the magnitude of the Indignados and Aganaktismenoi movements -the most developed occupations in Europe (Gerbaudo, 2017) -but precisely because therein the vertical and horizontal dimensions of human agency and political action intersect in pursuit of social change.As these cases are the most illustrative of the reverberations of grassroots radical agency for social and political transformation, this strategic case selection allows to observe the theory at play (Ruffa, 2020).This theoretical prominence, therefore, will expand on building from a detailed analysis of complementary case studies, opposing the political trajectory of Podemos, in Spain, and SYRIZA, in Greece, to a selection of social solidarity initiatives and radical democratic spaces that emerged in these two countries constituting, altogether, the grassroots response to the multiple crises of the neoliberal hegemonic order.The very selection of the cases for analysis here coincides with these aggravating and intertwining crises of the hegemonic order, as this article will engage with different expressions of grassroots radical agency entangling multiple dimensions of human life in common (economic-productive relations, housing and co-habitation, daily needs and everyday-life management, and socio-spatial relations).This analysis will then lay the groundwork for putting forward theoretical possibilities for an alternative conceptualisation of grassroots agency and radical democratic praxis, seeking to reconcile the democratic politics of the multitude with the broad counter-hegemonic revolutionary project.
The first section introduces the theoretical debate opposing the horizontal politics of Hardt and Negri's multitude and Gramsci's vertical politics of hegemony, discussing the alternative ontologies, conceptual apparatuses and shortcomings of each theoretical paradigm.The second section discusses the trajectory of Podemos and SYRIZA from the squares to national politics, analysing their electoral efforts in the wake of the anti-austerity campaign, and their political achievements and unfulfilled promises since they entered national parliaments.The third section investigates a selection of social solidarity initiatives and radical democratic spaces that flourished across these countries in parallel, resorting to official data available on their websites and social networks, along with other secondary data sources, such as the established literature and newspaper articles.The complementarity of these cases and their reach over multiple dimensions of human life account for the emphasis on different manifestations of grassroots radical agency in Greece and Spain.The fourth section builds from the analysis developed in the previous sections to elaborate on the theoretical possibilities for bridging the horizontal model for being and acting of the multitude and the vertical politics of hegemony, accommodating key categories of each paradigm into an alternative conceptualisation of grassroots agency and radical democratic politics at present.The concluding section offers some final remarks on the limits and potential of the vertical and horizontal approaches to social and political transformation and reflects on the need to think anew to conceive concrete possibilities of social change and emancipation.

VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL PARADIGMS OF COLLECTIVE AGENCY, POLITICAL ACTION AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: HEGEMONY AND THE MULTITUDE
The Great Recession in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, along with the austerity policies imposed by the European Union (EU), produced an overwhelming toll on social livelihood across the European periphery, not to mention the democratic crisis that ensued it, eroding society's general trust on political institutions both at the national and European levels (della Porta, 2017).Nonetheless, grassroots social forces have responded to these successive crises through autonomous and radical collective action, and so the popular anti-austerity campaign that emerged afterwards brought renewed attention to the debate that has animated contemporary political thought for the past decades (Kioupkiolis;Katsambekis, 2014), expounding alternative approaches to social movements, political action, and emancipation.Intellectual attempts reflecting on grassroots agency and its theoretical and practical reverberations to social transformation, inspired firstly by the Global Justice Movement, have lately theorised about the new subjectivities and radical democratic politics of the movement of the squares.And the variegated interpretations have revolved around two (apparently) contending paradigms: the absolute horizontal politics of the multitude and the vertical politics of hegemony (Kioupkiolis;Katsambekis, 2014).
The vertical paradigm draws upon Gramsci's theory of hegemony, presupposing the elevation of a political agent that brings together and guides subordinate social forces in the struggle against the hegemonic order to enact political and social transformation.A counter-hegemonic revolutionary project must target institutional power and the occupation of the political realm, understood in terms of the Gramscian extended state (i.e., the entanglement of the political and civil societies), which is the terrain wherein antagonistic political subjects contend for hegemony (Gramsci, 1971).The need for taking political power to elevate social struggles into the building of a new social order necessarily entails the construction of a counter-hegemonic historic bloc, in which multiple subjects cohere under the centralised leadership of a political body capable of challenging the dominant forces of a given hegemonic formation (Cox, 1993;Gill, 1993).Consequently, collective mobilisation and action of the grassroots have a decisive role at the liminal stage of the revolutionary project: the development of constituent subaltern politics.
Gramsci assigned the development of "alternative, bottom-up and autonomous forms of life" (Fonseca, 2016, p. 7) to the working class and subaltern groups to give form to an embryonic workers' democracy.Within these loci of proletarian life, gestated through the association and organisation of the working class (precisely what Gramsci meant by constituent subaltern politics) an emancipatory consciousness is nurtured and the revolutionary praxis instigated among the subalterns (Fonseca, 2016;Gramsci, 1919a).Gramsci (1919a) insisted on the proletarian power and the institutions of the proletarian social life that bore the potentiality of the socialist state, arguing that a genuine workers' democracy could only emerge from the self-organised association and action of workers and peasants.Furthermore, in these autonomous and spontaneous arrangements of working-class social life (e.g., the occupied factories, socialist clubs, peasant communities in 1920s Italy), a counter-hegemonic common sense eventually embeds within everyday life.
The constituent subaltern politics of the working class allow for the formation of a national popular front, fostering the politicisation of the masses at large and overcoming ideological divisions, cohering a diverse social majority around the counter-hegemonic project.The "amalgamation of politicised masses (…) into a national popular movement" (Briziarelli, 2018, p. 98) provides sustained mobilisation for the revolutionary party (the Modern Prince of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, 1971), which embodies the national popular collective will and, endowed with intellectual and moral leadership, wages a war of position against hegemony.
Gramsci's notion of war of position foresees the "constant rearrangement of relations of forces" between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic social classes, through the "expansion of the struggle on multiple fronts such as political, economic, cultural, and social" (Briziarelli, 2018, p. 97-8).And just as several dimensions and social confrontations intersect each other in pursuit of hegemony, the war of position unfolds through the patient and laborious effort of putting together the moral and intellectual resources and institutions for building up a counter-hegemonic order -unlike in a war of movement, when the revolutionary party seizes power through a direct assault against the establishment (Gramsci, 1971;Cox, 1993).The task of the revolution is twofold therefore: it requires the implementation of progressive politics for transforming the established political structures and creating alternative institutions within the hegemonic order; and it relies upon the permeation of a shared consciousness throughout the social fabric, binding together oppressed groups under capitalism into a common subjectivity (Cox, 1993;Briziarelli, 2018).
Notwithstanding the logical influence of the vertical approach among contemporary Marxist circles reflecting on emancipatory struggles against capital, the politics of hegemony also resonates among post-Marxist thinkers, inspired by E. Laclau's (2005) populist-discursive interpretation of Gramsci's works.Understanding hegemony as rhetorically constructed, post-Marxist scholars reinterpret key categories of this conceptualisation to propose a transversalist vision for aggregating different social subjects into a common construct through empty signifiers that establish "a potential chain of equivalence between different social groups, circumstances, identities, and interests" (Agustín;Briziarelli, 2018, p. 15).This populist-discursive approach insists on the transversality of the aggregative discourse for creating an inclusive popular front, bypassing classic concepts of Marxism (e.g., class struggle, the Left x Right dichotomy) and dovetailing with the encounter of multiple subjectivities during the anti-austerity campaign (Kioupkiolis;2019b).Aggregated under empty signifiers, this social majority challenges the politico-economic establishment, contending for hegemony once elevated into the political arena alongside the revolutionary party.Accordingly, political concentration and cohesion, hierarchy and leadership, and antagonism are key categories of the vertical paradigm, irrespective of whether taking a cue from Gramsci's theory of hegemony or Laclau's populist-discursive approach to it (Kioupkiolis;Katsambekis, 2014).
On the other hand, the horizontal paradigm rejects these categories, centring upon the process of becoming of autonomous subjectivities into a new constituent social subject and the absolute democratic politics it brings into play in a post-hegemonic order.As Hardt and Negri (2004;2009) theorise, this emerging constituent subject -the multitude -is loosely and horizontally articulated in a rhizomatic network and thence engages in the collaborative production of social reality.The plurality and freedom of the multiple singularities collaborating through this network are nevertheless preserved in this process of collective subjectivation.And from its irreducible plurality stems the constituent potential of the multitude for producing new expansive forms of life: "the full expression of autonomy and difference of each here coincides with the powerful articulation of all" (Hardt;Negri, 2004, p. 87).This autonomous and horizontal articulation of multiple social subjectivities and their cooperative and inventive agency are constituent of the production of social reality, rather than means for taking political power and challenging the hegemonic order, as Gramsci envisaged.These categories of absolute democratic politics are actually an end in themselves, i.e., the very ontology of the alternative social realities that the multitude enacts (Hardt;Negri, 2009).Following this horizontal conceptualisation, radical democratic politics, spontaneous human agency, and horizontal modes for collaborating and acting are, in effect, the sine qua non of an emerging post-hegemonic order (Hardt;Negri, 2012).Therefore, the multitude can only rise as the constituent collective social subject of our times as long as it organically incorporates these fundamental principles in its subjectivation process.
Moreover, it is upon these foundations that the multitude acts: horizontally collaborating within a rhizomatic networked model of association and therein producing social realities (Hardt;Negri, 2009).These horizontal modes of association not only allow for the multitude to come into being but also offer the organisational apparatus for this new collective social subject to act in the production of the common in the context of biopolitical reality (Hardt;Negri, 2009).Precisely because of the biopolitical context of producing the common nowadays -"all spheres of life," both the natural world and the constitutive elements of human society (Hardt;Negri, 2009, p. 171) -the multitude is "formed through articulations on the plane of immanence without hegemony" (Hardt;Negri, 2009, p. 169).As such, it discards hierarchical and representative politics, for the multitude is itself "capable of making decisions and of taking action without being directed by a hegemonic force" (Kioupkiolis;Katsambekis, 2014, p. 9).
The main objections to Gramsci's hegemonic politics, according to the horizontal paradigm, refer to two complementary notions: the emergence of a hierarchical power over disparate social subjects and the need for coherence and cohesion around the programmatic unity under this emerging political body.As Hardt and Negri (2009) have pointed out, this vertical conception of political constitution through unified and hierarchical organisation, for providing the oppressed social forces with discipline and education -as Gramsci (1971) attributed this role to the Modern Prince -can only disrupt the constituent potential of the subordinated social subjects coming together in a post-hegemonic order.Accordingly, the emergence of a counter-hegemonic party will eventually arouse vertical and centralising tendencies, reproducing capitalist relations of power and subordination.Moreover, coherence and cohesion essentially contradict the radical heterogeneity of the social field, hence undermining the autonomy and the creative potential of the multiple social subjectivities interacting and cooperating in the production of social reality (Hardt;Negri, 2004;2009).Bearing the alternative ontologies and conceptual apparatuses of the vertical and horizontal paradigms in mind, the next sections analyse the socio-political developments in Greece and Spain towards national parliaments with the populist radical Left and local communities and neighbourhoods with social movements, respectively.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE POPULIST RADICAL LEFT IN GREECE AND SPAIN
The rise of Podemos and SYRIZA illustrates the breakthrough of the populist radical Left in Europe since the early 2010s (Katsambekis;Kioupkiolis, 2019).Notwithstanding, their fall is instructive about the perils of yet another attempt to contain grassroots agency into the vertical institutions of liberal democracy (Kioupkiolis, 2019b).The electoral success of movement-parties closely associated with the grassroots campaign against austerity indicated the emergence of a new political cycle founded upon radical democratic politics and a new common sense (Agustín;Briziarelli, 2018).Tellingly, the victory of SYRIZA in the 2015 Greek national elections and the expressive popularity of Podemos since its foundation (eventually securing a place in the coalitional government in Spain as of 2020) can be credited to a bold strategy instrumentalising the Gramscian notion of war of position into their political agenda.
The first pillar of these movement-parties' electoral project is the incorporation of the radical democratic practices developed within the encampments, which became laboratories of grassroots politics (della Porta, 2013).Therein protesters experimented with deliberative and participatory decision-making within assemblies and working groups, and enacted open, horizontal, and egalitarian processes for the collective management of the daily life within the occupations (Kioupkiolis, 2019b).These democratic mechanisms were transposed into the political dynamics of Podemos and SYRIZA.The former established an innovative multi-layered apparatus of direct practices for engaging its constituency through local circles, fully open primaries, and the collective construction of its program (Rendueles;Sola, 2018), insisting on the 'technopolitical' dimension of grassroots democracy through online platforms, such as Plaza Podemos, Agora Voting, and social networks (Kioupkiolis, 2019a).In its turn, SYRIZA insisted upon the Greek people's sovereignty, extending direct democracy through the popular referendum on a new bailout agreement with the country's lenders (Katsambekis, 2019).
Arguably, these movement-parties endeavoured to transpose the radical democratic praxis from the anti-austerity movement into national politics.Their goal was to incubate oppositional institutions for building a new political order within the shell of the old post-democratic order that had long been rooted in Spanish and Greek politics (Kioupkiolis, 2019a).
Meanwhile, on the strategic plane, is the instrumentalisation of the Laclauian populist-discursive approach to hegemony for creating an inclusive popular front (Briziarelli, 2018).Podemos and SYRIZA articulated the multifaceted identities coming together during the anti-austerity campaign into equivalential chains, using empty signifiers (e.g., 'the people,' 'the masses,' 'democracy') for cohering the grassroots around their electoral projects (Kioupkiolis, 2019a).This aggregated social majority overcame ideological and identity idiosyncrasies for opposing the politico-economic establishment: domestic elites (politicians, banks, corporations, the media) and international actors (the 'troika', i.e., the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund).
This populist-discursive frame was exhaustively explored during their electoral campaigns.Podemos boldly explored the popularity of political talk shows in Spain at that time for devising a "counter-hegemonic television project" (Rendueles;Sola, 2018, p. 34), successfully resonating its aggregative rhetoric with society at large and pervading the everyday language of Spanish politics (Franzé, 2018).Likewise, the coalitional nature of SYRIZA oriented the party's electoral strategy.A "mass connective party" (Katsambekis, 2019, p. 27), SYRIZA emphasised the development of cross-class alliances with social movements, bringing together diverse struggles (environmental, labour, migrants, and so on) countrywide into the broad anti-neoliberal camp.
The employment of this populist-discursive strategy proved decisive in laying the foundation for the 'national popular project' of the populist radical Left in Greece and Spain (Briziarelli, 2018), raising a new social majority behind these movement-parties as elections drew closer.Most importantly, it allowed for the new common sense that emerged from the occupations to eventually expand beyond the encampments, pervading the social fabric of Greek and Spanish civil societies and prefiguring "popular power as a real political alternative" (Agustín;Briziarelli, 2018, p. 5).
Notwithstanding the overreliance on the politics of hegemony as the orienting theoretical-strategic framework for their emancipatory political projects, it is rather contradictory that these movement-parties have failed to acknowledge the risks of ending up entrapped in a passive revolution.Gramsci (1971) understood it as the dialectical relation between revolution and restoration, or progressive objectives hindered by regressive methods.A passive revolution, thus, produces a stalemate opposing the revolutionary and dominant forces, as the former's progressive potential is not yet sturdy enough to dislodge the conservative foundations of the hegemonic order (Cox;1993).In that sense, Gramsci saw the dominant forces introducing limited changes that rather than arousing from popular forces are instead interventions 'from above,' incorporating revolutionary subaltern groups into the politics of hegemony (Cox, 1993).Comprehensive and systemic change is consequently forestalled, as the counter-hegemonic forces are channelled into the existing political structures of the hegemonic order.
Against the backdrop of an organic crisis of representative democracy at the national and European realms -a critical juncture wherein political institutions lost legitimacy alongside the capability of producing consent (Briziarelli, 2018) -the political trajectory of Podemos and SYRIZA was hindered both within national parliaments and at the supranational level.As they became entangled in national politics, they gradually abandoned the grassroots, becoming more vertical and centralised and adapting their agenda to the institutional logic of parliaments, favouring hierarchical and representative relations (Kioupkiolis, 2019a).These movement-parties also found themselves powerless against the top-down EU intervention on austerity policies (della Porta, 2017) as well as the structural constraints of international economic governance with bailout programmes (Katsambekis, 2019).
One of the central elements of Podemos' innovative organisational model, the popular circles were soon emptied by a top-down logic that appropriated the party's leadership (Kioupkiolis, 2019a), just like the digital platforms soon lost influence and autonomy (Prentoulis;Thomassen, 2019).As these participatory practices eroded, "Podemos' democratic centralism" (Mazzolini;Borriello, 2018, p. 242) manifested in the empowerment of the then secretary-general Pablo Iglesias and his nucleus, who systematically strengthened control over the party at the expense of greater plurality, horizontal participation of the rank and file, and dissonant voices from within.
Unsurprisingly, the party has undergone internal splits and recorded a steady decline in election performance recently.Even more concerning, Podemos has been relegated as a marginal member of the coalitional government led by the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, PSOE.Critics have pointed out that rather than advancing progressive policies as those championed by the anti-austerity movement, Podemos has instead taken on a more traditional Left position (Errejón, 2021).Thus, the party contradictorily legitimises the ruling of PSOE, the centre-Left party that for decades concurred with a neoliberal agenda, which threw the country into the double (economic and democratic) crisis that brought the Indignados to the streets in 2011.
SYRIZA's adventure in Greek national politics is also disappointing, as the party found itself powerless against structural constraints of international economic governance, while developing a vertical and centralist orientation.It became "a much more homogeneous party" (Mudde, 2017, p. 31) dominated by the then Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, what became evident in his unexpected -and unilateral -decision to accept yet another bailout agreement with the country's lenders a week after the Greek people have voted against it.Ignoring the Greeks' manifest will (61% of the voters rejected the new agreement), SYRIZA bent to the 'troika,' failing to uphold its promise to restore popular sovereignty over this matter (Katsambekis, 2019).The capitulation to the third memorandum and the ensuing internal rebellion against Tsipras eroded SYRIZA's governmentability and, all in all, the party navigated the years in government with old-fashioned politics of fiery rhetoric and pragmatic -and rather controversial -policies, or by 'talking left and walking right' (Sheehan, 2017).
Even though Tsipras had managed to secure another win at the snap election that followed the acceptance on the third bailout programme and the subsequent party defections, SYRIZA has recorded poorly in European, local, and general elections since then, not securing a second mandate in the 2019 national elections, hence paving the way for the reinstallation of the conservative New Democracy, ND, in government (Mylonas, 2020).Critically, just as SYRIZA's contradictions discredited the radical Left, the party witnesses the resurgence of far-Right ultranationalist forces across the country, which have systematically targeted with xenophobia, racism, and violence, the very same people which the Aganaktismenoi stood for -refugees, migrants, and ethnic minorities (Smith, 2021).
This analysis of the journey of Podemos and SYRIZA from the squares to national parliaments (and therein towards a passive revolution) -as well as the position they currently hold, whether in power or opposition -makes a case against the preponderance of the vertical approach to hegemony as the orienting framework for political action and social transformation.The very few social demands attained during their years in government should arguably be understood as marginal concessions from the establishment that, nevertheless, serve to the reproduction of hegemonic structures of neoliberal capitalism.Furthermore, at the time of writing, rather than advancing progressive politics enabling a real democratic praxis -as those gestated within the popular occupations against austerity -both movement-parties are much more on the defensive, currently engaged in containing the advances of the far-right, which appropriates the political agenda and shapes the public conversation (Errejón, 2021).Alternatively, this article now turns towards local-level autonomous and horizontal social reproduction, as did the social movements engaged in the anti-austerity campaign after the encampments' demobilisation.

LOCAL-LEVEL COLLECTIVE AGENCY OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN THE YEARS OF AUSTERITY
Local-level capacity building has traditionally been a strong feature of social movements' repertoire of action (Voss;Williams, 2012).Understanding the protest cycle as a specific time frame within the broader fight for social change, in periods of less visible mobilisation -but of latent activity nevertheless -social movements invest in "strengthening […] autonomous spaces for collective decision-making and social transformation" (Flesher Fominaya, 2015, p. 149).This local-oriented approach is by no means an exclusive feature of the (Greek and Spanish) anti-austerity movement since it has manifested in different historical and geographical contexts of grassroots collective agency.Notwithstanding, within this framework, the radical agency of social movements reaches an impressive scale both in terms of extension and diversity, constituting the grassroots response to the multiple crises of neoliberal capitalism.
As the Indignados and Aganaktismenoi movements turned towards local communities, the protesters were not leaving but expanding, as they would meet back in the neighbourhoods (Nez;2016).In the years of austerity, a rich constellation of loci of grassroots radical agency surfaced in Greek and Spanish civil societies autonomously from the state and market (Kousis et al., 2018) and, grounded in the foundational principles of the occupations -equality, freedom, plurality, and social justice -it represents an important legacy of the movement of the squares (Flesher Fominaya, 2017).
Very much important in Spain are the several existing neighbourhood associations that, since Franco's dictatorship, became symbolic spaces of collective mobilisation (Flesher Fominaya, 2015).As the Indignados main encampments were dispersed, neighbourhood associations continued decentralising general assemblies, implementing grassroots agency within local communities and suburbs.Despite some loose coordination among these local assemblies, they enjoy a relatively high degree of autonomy and flexibility for formulating concrete propositions concerning each neighbourhood (Prentoulis;Thomassen, 2013).Notwithstanding, given the recurrence of critical issues across different areas, the social policies implemented by collective movements transpose and interact beyond geographical limits, especially in regard to labour, immigration, and housing issues (Nez, 2016).Most recently, responding to the COVID-19 health crisis, neighbourhood associations in urban centres that were hit harder by the pandemic (as the Community of Madrid) joined the fight against the precarization of public healthcare services, securing the continuing operation of public health centres and the jobs of many temporary health workers (Asamblea Popular de Carabanchel, 2021).
Constructive relations were soon developed between these neighbourhood associations and other autonomous citizens' organisations, enabling direct grassroots action to address pressing individual and communitarian daily life issues.For instance, the grassroots association Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Platform of Those Affected by Mortgages), PAH, that since 2009 has fought home foreclosure and eviction, campaigned for housing rights, and actively participated in the Indignados (Mir Garcia, 2019) has expanded its reach of action across the country while engaging with many neighbourhood assemblies, forming a network of more than 200 territorial nodes (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, n.d.).PAH has impacted everyday life in Spain, stopping thousands of evictions and rehousing hundreds of families in occupied buildings (Mir Garcia, 2019).It has also reshaped the debate over public housing policies towards a grassroots campaign for the right to housing in Spain, promoting a "social and shared governance" (Quintanar, 2021, p. 83) around the issue.
Several self-organised social centres also operate across Spain, intervening in the everyday social organisation of neighbourhoods.These social centres navigate different spatial dimensions, legal statuses, temporalities, and funding mechanisms (Saltzman, 2019).The squatted social centre Can Batlló, in Barcelona, is a remarkable socio-spatial experiment, for instance.An abandoned factory converted into a multifunctional socio-cultural facility, Can Batlló has since 2011 been collectively and horizontally self-managed by the local community, becoming a genuine expression of the self-conceived transformation of the neighbourhood's socio-spatial fabric through grassroots agency (Can Batlló, n.d.).It provides the community where the squatted centre is located with several projects that thrive on associationism and cooperation, e.g., solidary economy activities, a publishing house, a communitarian children's school, a library about libertarian thought, a housing cooperative, a restaurant, and multiple workshops (Can Batlló, n.d.).Consequently, the Can Batlló became not only a transformative communitarian socio-cultural space but also an inspiration for local urban networks in several squatting actions and other bottom-up projects across the city (De Balanzó;Rodríguez-Planas, 2018).
In Greece likewise, solidarity networks traditionally associated with grassroots activism entangled with the trajectory of the Aganaktismenoi, notably from 2012 onwards, coinciding with the weakening of protests (Malamidis, 2020).Greek solidarity providers have built resilience among most vulnerable individuals, alleviating the toll of austerity on society, and also engaged with social economy experiments, self-organised spaces, and environment-related initiatives. 3 The collective self-management of occupied factories represents an important democratic experiment in terms of the emancipatory struggle for combating the economic crisis and expanding social control over production and the workspace (Kioupkiolis;Katsambekis, 2014).Under the slogan 'Occupy, Resist, Produce', the workers of the Vio.Me/Bio.Me cooperative, in Thessaloniki, progressed "from a hierarchical company to a horizontal node of resistance" (Malamidis, 2018, p. 25).In 2013, workers occupied and took control of the productive and managerial processes of the factory (that originally produced chemical products and was about to shut down) and, instrumentalising many of the Aganaktismenoiinspired principles, such as horizontalism, participatory and collective decision-making, and assembly-based practices, managed to resume the operation of the factory, shifting the production to environmental-friendly cleaning products (Malamidis, 2018).The cooperative distributes its products exclusively through grassroots channels, participating in local networks of sales and distribution (Vio.Me/Bio.Me, n.d.).As Vio.Me/Bio.Me actively takes part in the markets-without-middlemen movement, it extends the reach of its products and the values of self-management, establishing a direct and social relationship with its consumers (Malamidis, 2018).Moreover, by insisting upon the right to work, dignity at the workplace, and self-determination of the workforce, the cooperative employs a holistic approach to production, its consumers, and the workers themselves (Vio.Me/Bio.Me, n.d.), enacting the self-actualisation of the workers' emancipatory power.
The 2015 refugees crisis also catalysed social solidarity throughout the country, as the maxim 'nobody is alone in the crisis' (an anti-austerity slogan that soon became part of the new common sense in Greece) reached thousands of refugees arriving in Greek shores (Hadjimichalis, 2018).Greek civil society mobilised resources and networks to extend social support structures for addressing refugees' urgent needs, and offered a constructive response to the governmental migration policy of camps and detention centres that remained in force during SYRIZA's 4-year mandate (Agustín;Jørgensen, 2019).In a wave of squatting vacant buildings for housing refugees across the country, the City Plaza Hotel, in Athens, ran as an autonomous self-organised space for co-habitation from 2016 till 2019, becoming an alternative socio-spatial entanglement produced by grassroots radical agency.Besides inaugurating a space for communal living and addressing the immediate needs of more than 2,500 refugees, the solidarity movement engaged in the occupation and daily management of the building insisted on the autonomy and empowerment of refugees' own agency, constituting collective action together with them (Antonopoulou, 2022).The co-habitants of the City Plaza developed new alternatives and imaginaries through the shared coexistence and the self-organising processes of everyday life within the squat (Agustín;Jørgensen, 2019).Albeit closed in 2019, the City Plaza proved the potential of grassroots radical agency towards transformation and emancipation, enacting autonomy and horizontality for producing alternative modes of organising society at the local level and outside the institutional realm of the state.
By conceiving the social movements engaged in these socio-spatial entanglements at local arenas as collaborating nodes in a rhizomatic network of horizontal, associational, and autonomous loci of grassroots radical agency, one realises the process of becoming of a constituent collective social subject (Saltzman, 2019), as Hardt and Negri theorised.Taking the form of the multitude, this emerging collective social subject raises autonomously, out of the very associative power of the grassroots, and is capable of producing alternative social realities and imaginaries (Agustín;Jørgensen, 2019), which are gestated within these socio-spatial entanglements in communities and neighbourhoods.In these local spaces, multiple autonomous subjectivities (social movements, citizens organisations, activists, vulnerable individuals and groups) come together horizontally and, bound by the constituent principles of absolute democratic politicssolidarity, equality, freedom, openness, and collective self-determination (Hardt;Negri, 2012) -therein engage in the production of the common.And just as this emerging collective social subject embodies and expands grassroots radical agency through this network, it transforms every aspect of life within these local entanglements: social relations, spatial arrangements, political acting, and productive activities.
A detailed analysis of the scope and reach of these selected social solidarity networks and radical democratic spaces (alongside other socio--spatial entanglements interacting in this network of grassroots radical agency), as well as the impact they have produced on human life (both at the collective and individual levels), indicate, therefore, the potential of the multitude's horizontal politics for social transformation.Although leadership, homogeneity, and hierarchy don't stand in these local socio--spatial entanglements, key features and dynamics of the vertical politics of hegemony might still be accommodated nonetheless, leading to a fruitful and more accurate conceptualisation of grassroots radical agency in pursuit of social transformation.The next section advances these theoretical possibilities.

THEORETICAL POSSIBILITIES FOR ENGAGING THE MULTITUDE IN COUNTER-HEGEMONIC POLITICS
While embodying the ontological realisation and conceptual apparatus of the horizontal paradigm, social movements have provided a twofold contribution to neighbourhoods and communities in Greece and Spain in the years of austerity: they shape the terrain of struggle, enacting collective resistance, and implement a revolutionary praxis, democratising local arenas and empowering civil society.In fact, by doing so, this emerging collective social subject embeds and actively takes part in the politics of hegemony.In this regard, this section proposes some theoretical reflections for an alternative conceptualisation of grassroots radical agency, indicating a productive common ground for bridging the horizontal and vertical paradigms.
Within these local socio-spatial entanglements transformed and generated by social movements, the constituent subaltern politics that Gramsci attributed to the working class are, in effect, produced.Prefiguring the multiple "centres of proletarian life" (Gramsci, 1919a, p. 80) of his time, in these autonomous and horizontal arrangements of grassroots social life, a counter-hegemonic common sense develops and pervades everyday life.On that account, both the communist consciousness and mass constructive action that Gramsci (1919a) insisted upon are put at the service of emancipation and bottom-up social transformation, which is "generated by the associative experience" (Gramsci, 1919b, p. 87) of the multiple subjectivities oppressed under neoliberal capitalism.By producing constituent subaltern politics at the local level through the collective power of the grassroots, this constellation of egalitarian and emancipated socio-spatial entanglements actually embodies a dawning system of socialist living, corresponding to what Gramsci envisaged as an embryonic proletarian democracy, hence building up the cornerstone of the counter-hegemonic revolutionary project.
Moreover, as social movements enact new forms of politics within the everyday life of communities and neighbourhoods, they actively politicise the multiple social subjects coming together within these local universes (Garcés, 2019).A national popular front eventually emerges, expanding beyond each socio-spatial entanglement as these multiple nodes converge and intertwine into a dynamic network of grassroots radical agency.Social movements also develop alternative institutions and practices within these local arenas, on the margins of the state and market, wherein the grassroots engage in the production and management of the common through this self-determining model of collective association and organisation (Voss;Williams, 2012).Furthermore, as an emancipatory consciousness flourishes therein and the revolutionary praxis guides the oppressed social subjects converging into these local arenas, social movements actively perform a counter-hegemonic role.This emerging collective social subject, in effect, wages a Gramscian war of position, which thence takes place outside (and often in opposition to) the institutionalised politics of the state.Tellingly, it takes place in everyday life, itself the prime field of emancipatory struggle (Hadjimichalis, 2018).
Social transformation is, therefore, sparked by the very belief in an alternative social formation that emancipates one from the hegemonic structures underpinning the existing order, which alienate and restrict human life.The multitude raises as a constituent collective social subject that is organically committed to emancipation by opposing and challenging the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism over human life and hence is capable of producing new social realities.This antagonistic relation to the hegemonic order, albeit naively discarded by Hardt and Negri (2009) due to the immanent nature of the multitude's subjectivation, is actually paramount for this new collective social subject to act politically against the neoliberal capitalist order.In this conceptualisation, the multitude, emerging from these local socio-spatial entanglements is bound by this commitment against neoliberal capitalism, precisely so it can resist and challenge its hegemony.As discussed above, the alternative realities enacted by social movements transform the very social, political, and economic structures oppressing the multiplicity of social subjects entangled within these local arenas, offering a glimpse of egalitarian and emancipated forms of life.
Arguably, Greek and Spanish civil societies became a vibrant theatre wherein counter-hegemonic struggles intertwine with new forms of politics from below and are diffused through the daily life within local communities and neighbourhoods (Kanellopoulos, et al., 2021).These egalitarian and emancipated socio-spatial entanglements, therefore, indicate the potential of alternative social formations wherein the failures of neoliberal capitalism are tackled in collective, self-determining, and solidary means, even though the harsh impacts of the years of austerity and struggle in these countries -and these are not to be forgotten -will long burden upon collective livelihood in these societies.Most importantly, as the horizontal and vertical dimensions of grassroots agency and radical democratic politics intersect within these local domains, the new constituent social subject of our times eventually emerges to produce social transformation bottom-upwards.

CONCLUSION
This article has indicated the shortcomings of the vertical paradigm as the orienting strategic framework for political action, as the analysis of the political trajectory of Podemos and SYRIZA from the squares to national politics (and therein into a passive revolution) produced in the second section corroborates it.Alternatively, the third section has analysed a selection of strategic case studies embodying multiple expressions of local-oriented grassroots radical agency in Greece and Spain, to illustrate the potentials of the multitude's horizontal politics for producing social change at the local level.Most importantly, these analyses laid the groundwork for putting forward theoretical possibilities for reconciling key categories of the horizontal and vertical paradigms, exploring productive common grounds towards an alternative understanding of the subjectivation process of the emerging collective social subject of our times and the radical democratic practices it brings into play.Grounding these theoretical reflections on concrete cases of generative collective action that flourished across Greece and Spain in the years of austerity, the fourth section attempted to bridge Gramsci's counter-hegemonic politics and the networked model for being and acting of Hardt and Negri's multitude.By situating local-level horizontal and autonomous grassroots radical agency within the broad revolutionary project, it expects to unravel the practical possibilities for the multitude to reconstruct socio-spatial arrangements from below, eventually succeeding in producing alternative orders to neoliberal capitalism.
In view of the aggravating crises of the hegemonic order, which recently unfolded over health, migration, and international security issues, to think anew and seek new conceptual approaches to grassroots agency and democratic politics is all the more essential.Moreover, one must transcend the theoretical plane and imbue these alternative understandings into concrete possibilities of social change and emancipation.By opposing traditional conceptions of political action inherent to the vertical dynamics of state politics and horizontal and autonomous grassroots radical agency, this article hopes to make a move in this direction.
3. Under the scope of the 'Living withHard Times' (LIVEWHAT) research project, KOUSIS, et al. (2018) mapped a comprehensive database of solidarity initiatives promoting alternative forms of resilience across Greece since the early 2010s.