Reflections on grassroots healthcare provisioning in Greece in times of crisis

This chapter explores the discourses and repertoires of social movements and grassroots struggles that emerged as particular forms of response to the recent economic crisis in Greece. Our specific goal is to offer a snapshot of the novel practices of solidarity and democratic experimentation that constitute these responses, but also to highlight the broader transformative potential these practices carry. Going beyond their immediate character as ways of tackling the effects of the crisis, we argue that they should also be assessed as other ways forward, as Gibson-Graham put it, in terms of the ethical reimagining of social relations that they enable, as well as the partial bringing into life of these relations. We explore the actual enactment and embodiment of new rules and modes of social interaction seen to carving out a space for forms of social, political, and economic organization that are distinct from both the market and the state. We are doing this by taking as a case study the Metropolitan Community Health Clinic at Helliniko, a social solidarity clinic that was set up at the peak of the economic crisis in Athens. Experiments like the Metropolitan Community Health Clinic at Helliniko and other Social and Solidarity Clinics and Pharmacies that emerged within the crisis context, we argue, are attempts to expand democratic imagination and conceptions of social justice values in an area of key importance that was hit hard by the crisis, namely primary healthcare provision.