This article examines Irish and Portuguese protesters' perceptions of the EU in the decade since the European debt crisis. Building on EU politics, social movement and protest literatures, we ask how domestic protesters in both countries perceive the EU during its age of crisis protest timescape. We find that critical Europeanism, which rejects technocratic and neoliberal Europe and works towards an alternative, social Europe, has travelled beyond austerity/bailout protests into women's rights and housing protests in both countries, although to varying degrees. We suggest that the expansion of critical European perceptions in these traditionally Europhile member states forms part of the social and political legacy of the European debt crisis, but also contributes to the continued Europeanization of the European social movement space. It could have positive impacts on the EU's legitimacy deficit if EU institutions engaged meaningfully with critical European voices.
The purpose of this article is to reflect on how we can conceptualise the multiple types of struggles over water. Through a historical materialist engagement with social reproduction theorists, post-colonial interventions and eco-socialism, we argue that capitalist reproduction not only depends on the exploitation of wage labour but also the expropriation of nature and people along different forms of oppression. By focusing on historical processes and the intertwined dynamics necessary for capitalist reproduction, we reveal the internal relations of these struggles to each other and to global capitalism. Moreover, by putting forward a conceptual and methodological guide for how to approach water struggles relationally, we can point to the anti-systemic potential of these struggles. We argue that the diversity of protesters apparent in struggles against water grabbing captures internally related and mediated forms of class struggle, where the terrain of class struggle is inclusive of the whole social factory.
KEYWORDS: Class struggle; exploitation; expropriation; primitive accumulation; water grabbing; incorporated comparison
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