Cooperative Media and the Politics of Class: Exploring Post-capitalist Logics in the Cooperative Media of Ef.Syn and AlterThess

This chapter critically evaluates practices and politics of cooperative media in Greece, drawing on document research and qualitative interviews with members of two worker-owned media cooperatives, Efimerida ton Syntakton and AltherThess. The chapter devises political discourse theory in naming and explaining implicit and explicit norms and values embodied in their cooperative practices. The authors show how cooperative media can offer an alternative form in the organization of media labor based on collective decision-making and principles of horizontality, equality, and collective responsibility. Considering that media ownership in Greece is controlled by few business oligarchs, the chapter also reflects on how cooperative media can play an instrumental role in covering issues that would not play in mainstream platforms, by drawing equivalences among marginalized and excluded identities and demands. In doing so, the chapter attempts to expand conceptions of a politics of class able to incorporate the experience of political cooperativism and offer an understanding of how worker-owned media practices can contribute towards a post-capitalist strategy.