Challenging Political Hegemony, Unseen Community Assets, Poverty and Its Regulation Under Duress. Social Asset Building Innovations for Greece.

Assembling sociality by means of social economy enterprise empowerment and regulation, has been a key policy issue for EU member states  and the EU administration.  Reference is being made to recent agenda setting as Horizon 2020 among others.  Assembling sociality issues  have been instrumental in developing community employment capacity by addressing the problematic of inclusion for youth, women, people with disabilities and immigrants. The social economy has been established as key to employment development as it addresses the community cooperative capacity which has been key to eroding private informal “capital” engaging in usurious money lending, and engaging as private “mediators” who control markets from the “communal” producers themselves.

Social economy expresses the social capital formation relationship and as a concept may refer to its density within a community (it is a collective property ), and/or its weak ties with institutionalized actors, local political and civic agencies.  Such weak ties engaging “rent-seeking” political actors may also be defined by general conditions setting  legal parameter enforcement  expressing  the general interest.   Sociality is the general interest expressing itself by means of basic anti-poverty, social cohesion policies. Population security issues (health, work, secure food production, child and elderly care) may form the basis for the facilities of general interest thus constituting the essence of communal sociality.

 Ongoing EU-Greece institutional  interaction shows many deficiencies that impede sociality and mainstreaming that address the combinatory of social economy building and their application for  poverty eradication. Greece lacks an Anti-Poverty Agency.  Two cases will be presented testing this relationship.  One regards the establishment of the guaranteed basic income mechanism and the other the fate of a proposal to deal with the problem of absolute poverty by means of food delivery by the state using existing stocks stored in agricultural coops.  Social Innovation in times of crisis demands attention.