Central to much of the critical political economy (CPE) literature is a declared focus on emancipation. Yet, rather than highlight sources and instances of activity that might result in emancipatory outcomes, much of the CPE literature focuses on relations of domination and the way in which these are sustained and (re)produced. In contrast, and drawing on 'minoritarian' strands of CPE, we argue that an emancipation-oriented approach needs to focus upon the ways in which processes of domination are contested, disrupted, and as a result remain incomplete. In doing so, we present an analysis of the European political and economic crisis that contrasts starkly with prevailing accounts. Whilst many observers have considered the European crisis in terms that signal the death knell of labour's prolonged post-1970s defeat, the paper instead renders visible the ongoing disruptive effects of the European populace's obstinate, subversive and creative capacity to escape those attempts to achieve domination and subjugation which existing accounts tend to identify.

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The anti-austerity movement that emerged in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis and 2010 Eurozone crisis, and which forms part of the 'age of austerity' that came after those crises, was and remains in many ways contradictory. Many of the goals of the movement are grounded in concrete material concerns related to inequality, precarity, poverty, welfare conditionality and retrenchment, and the failure, inability or unwillingness of the labour market or the welfare state to provide for the well-being of substantial sections of society within the advanced industrial democracies. This inability of the state or market to meet the requirements of the public is, moreover, compounded by the strikingly similar failure, inability or unwillingness of most formal institutions of representation (especially political parties and trade unions) to react in such a way that they would prompt a reversal of austerity. In this sense, the anti-austerity movement was borne of a pragmatic desperation to achieve material well being through any feasible alternative available. The values that informed much of the antiausterity movement, however, are oftentimes radical and idealistic; influenced by notions of horizontalism, prefigurativism, anarchism, a critique of representation, and the search for a radically democratic society. It is in the context of the so-called 'age of austerity', therefore,