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Athens where they plan to pass it off to a Senegalese man who, in turn, will take it to a
buyer. One of my anarchist contacts is updating his website with a new subsection
entitled “The Failures of Capitalism” and with links to articles about Greece’s economic
problems in British and American newspapers. Two of my high school student contacts
are at an internet cafe in Halandri and a university student contact is attending a lecture
downtown and then planning to head to a nearby hotspot to meet some friends. However,
it would be folly to suggest that these groups have disengaged from the public sphere. As
the previous three chapters demonstrated, migrants and the Roma have an ongoing
influence over small commodity prices, are changing the affective quality of local spaces,
and are inspiring a popular sense of risk-cosmopolitanization (Beck 2006), to name a few
influences. Likewise, anarchists and other anarchist-style far-left groups are producing,
channeling, and making available anti-establishment discourses which the youth
population consumes and circulates internally, essentially feeding the proto-civil styling
of parées and maintaining a broad action-potentiality. The influence of unconventional
citizens on the socio-political subjectivities of the greater population of Athens, and
indeed Greece, occurs from within their communities and at the various points of social,
economic, and political contact they share among and amongst themselves and the
mainstream population149. Let us consider this influence more closely.
As I have argued above, Greeks have moved into a new period of critical
reflexivity influenced less by nationalist rhetoric and more by local-level experiences. To
be sure, modem civic identity, the nation, and even the meaning of democratic
engagement are coming to be framed in relation to the actions and influences
149 Of note, immigrants from various origins are beginning to influence the Greek cultural scene including
theatre, fine art, and music.