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This article discusses social resistance to the austerity packages imposed on Greece from 2010 onwards, in the light of Polanyi’s concept of the ‘double movement’. Two further aspects, noted by Polanyi, are typical of the Greek case: the role of the speed with which specific policies were implemented and the way these policies were justified. Although official data show that Greece has achieved the highest speed of ‘structural reforms’ worldwide, domestic and international elites that promote austerity policies attribute the programme’s downturns to delays in its implementation and to all those who resist the measures (trade unions, citizen groups etc.), who are considered as ‘obstacles’ to the reform. This way of appealing to such ‘obstacles’ to explain failures of specific policies is in direct analogy with early liberal views about self-regulating markets, as already described by Polanyi. Finally, it is argued that the heterogeneous and often fragmented forms of resistance that appeared in the course of the Greek crisis constitute instances of what Polanyi characterised as the “realistic self-protection of society” against liberalisation and marketisation.
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