Public spheres, counter public spheres ... and proletarian public spheres: the case of Facebook group of the Hellenic Halyvourgia S.A. strikers in Greece 2011-2012

Abstract

The 9-month strike in Hellenic Halyvourgia S.A. marked the first period of social struggles against austerity policies in Greece and was embraced by a huge solidarity movement both at national and international level. During that time the only digital voice of the strikers was a Facebook group that, even created more than a year before, became a vivid gathering of the strikers, their relatives and people in solidarity, even some counter strikers. The paper examines the visual and text data of the Facebook group during the nine months of the strike and focuses both to the subjects, the members of the group and to the discourse pronounced by them. The question that rises from that and similar researches is whether cyberspace, and SNS in particular, could serve for the formation of a community of struggle and, furthermore, to what German scholars Negt and Kluge once called a ‘proletarian public sphere’.