Alain Lipietz

Alain Lipietz

Alain Lipietz attending Dominique Voynet's meeting during the French presidential election, 2007

Alain Lipietz (born September 19, 1947 in Charenton-le-Pont as Alain Guy Lipiec) is a French engineer, economist and politician, a Member of the European Parliament, and a member of the French Green Party.

Education

Alain Lipietz studied at the École polytechnique (entered in 1966) and the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (diploma in 1971). He then obtained a master's degree in economics (1972).

He became a researcher at the Institut de recherche des transports (transportation research institute, 1971–1973) and at the Centre d'études prospectives d'économie - Mathématiques appliquées à la planification (Center for prospective studies of economics - applied mathematics for planification, 1973–1999). He became a research director at CNRS in 1988. Since 1990, he is chief engineer at the Corps of Bridges and Roads (France).

Since the beginning of his career, he has devoted himself to the analysis of social-economic relationships within human communities. He is thought of as having contributed to the Regulation school of economic thought.

Political activities

Alain Lipietz is a former Maoist. He was a candidate of Les Verts for the legislative elections of 1986 in Seine-Saint-Denis, and became the national spokesperson of the French Green Party in 1997.

He has been an elected representative of the Green Party at the European Parliament since 1999.

Alain Lipietz also is an adviser to the Commission économique des Verts, a member of the Commission française du développement durable (since 2000) and a member of the Conseil d'établissement du Collège de France (since 2001).

On 21 June 2001, Alain Lipietz was elected candidate of the French Green Party for 2002 presidential elections. With 50% of the votes cast in the party's primaries, Lipietz narrowly beat rival candidate Noël Mamère.

However, a first controversy arose during summer 2001, when Alain Lipietz seemed to have appeared sympathetic to separatists jailed for planting bombs in Corsica. A second controversy was the issue of reopening the Mont Blanc Tunnel between France and Italy, which had been closed since 1999 after 39 people died in a fire. Meanwhile, the party dropped from seven to five percent support in opinion polls.

Finally, on 14 October 2001, Les Verts managed to survive a major internal crisis and changed candidate, dropping Alain Lipietz to choose Noël Mamère, who had made the irrevocable decision not to run a day sooner.

Court challenge to SNCF

In a precedent-setting case brought by Alain and his sister, SNCF, the national railway of France, was ordered on June 6, 2006, to pay almost $80,000 in reparations for transporting members of their family to the Drancy deportation camp during World War II. SNCF argued at trial that they were at the time under orders of the German military; the railroad further argued that the German military threatened to shoot any railroad official who disobeyed their orders. The court disagreed with SNCF concluding that there was no way that SNCF could have avoided knowledge of the prisoners' likely deportation to concentration camps and that SNCF made no effort to either protest the transportation or to transport them in a humane manner.

Main publications

He is the author of:

• Green Hopes. The Future of Political Ecology (1993)
  (Vert-espérance. Le futur de l'écologie politique)
• Berlin, Bagdad, Rio - XXIst Century Has begun (1992)
  (Bagdad, Rio: le XXIè siècle est commencé)

He also published books focusing on the French and Third World political economy:

• Mirages and Miracles. Fortune and Misportunes of Global Fordism (1985)
  (Mirages et miracles. Problèmes de l'industrialisation dans le Tiers-Monde)
• To Swim or to Sink. On Economic Policies of the Frend Left Governments (1984)
  (L'audace ou l'enlisement. Sur les politiques économiques de la gauche)

Other publications

• The Wealth of Regions. Towards a Socio-economical Geography. Editor with G.Benko (2000)
• What is Political Ecology ? The Great Transformation of XXIst century (1998)
• Hour-glass Society. Job Sharing vs Social Exclusion (1996)
• Phaedra : Identification of a Crime (1992)
• The Winning Regions (edited with G. Benko, 1992)
• Towards a New Economic Order. Post-Fordism, Ecology, Democracy (1989)
• The crisis (with Clerc & Satre-Buisson, 1983)
• The Enchanted World. Inflation, Credit and the Global Crises (1982)
• Crisis and Inflation : Why ? (1979)
• Capital and its Space (1977)
• The Urban Land Tribute (1974)

He has also worked on many of the EC directives regarding the financial sector. (1990–2010)

External links

• Personal Website
• Bio as a former student of Polytechnique
• Blog of Lipietz and friends
• Alain Lipietz on Political Ecology and the Future of Marxism
• Alain Lipietz - The post-Fordist world: labour relations, international hierarchy and global ecology
• Alain Lipietz - Working for world ecological sustainability
• Du jardin à la planète
• Ce soir, je n'ai pas envie...