A Degrowth Project was published in January. Since then we have participated in more than twenty public debates in Switzerland, Belgium and around France. In September we are organising new meetings around Paris and in a few places around France (Centre, South-West, Brittany), and again in Geneva and Brussels, etc.
Degrowth Project is gaining international recognition and will be published in Québec, Hungary and Spain. Other translations and foreign editions are in the pipeline in Europe and South America. The book has even started to circulate around Africa.
The questions Degrowth raises together with its radical and multidimensional critique resonate. A Degrowth Project generates interest and debates, as the interviews, serious articles and the discussions during public meetings attest.
We have identified some recurring questions, contradictions and requests for in depth explanations:
- Degrowth and non-violence: where are the limits of non-violence when we are faced with an ever more aggressive oligarchy?
- Changing society without taking power: if we access power, it can take hold of us … but if we don’t access power?
- Degrowth and private property: how can we re-appropriate usage right over property right?
- What is the difference between the Unconditional Autonomy Allowance and Basic Income?
- Degrowth or barbarisms: what are the answers when we are faced with barbarisms already existing and incoming disasters? What should we do in front of the emergency?
- Degrowth and institutions: what role for the nation state, the European Union in Degrowth societies? What roles in the transition?
Discussions are rich and intense, but always convivial. They open up on new networks. They are based upon transition initiatives, which are all these spaces where politics is reappropriated through concrete alternatives.
The initial objective of this collaborative book has been reached with regard to these issues: thinking together the exit from Growth society, imagining possibilities to address the impasse growth has landed us in, finally, opening constructive reflexions and discussions.
Respecting the diversity of approaches that characterises Degrowth and its associated groups is a way to sow the seeds of critiques, reflexions, debates, but also, and above all, experiments, re-appropriation of know-hows and spheres of freedom.
Transition is underway, will the seed germinate soon?
Vincent Liegey, Stéphane Madelaine, Christophe Ondet Anne-Isabelle Veillot.
A Degrowth Project – Manifesto for an Unconditional Autonomy Allowance, Utopia.
“ […] the prerequisite for the transfromation of the economy is “ a strong adhesion from all and a participation to this desire for change”. That is the least … But we have to start somewhere and this stimulating book contributes to it undoubtedly”. Hervé Kempf in Le Monde.
“ And the success of the book may suggest that “transition is well underway”. Emmanuel Daniel in Slate.fr.
And also:
- « A Degrowth Project » in Libération: Vincent Liegey : “We can no longer grow in a finite world”
- « A Degrowth Project » in « Le Monde »
- The transition is underway! – In Reporterre.net
- Vincent Liegey : “The freedom to consume is a costly illusion” – A Degrowth Project in Bastamag.
- A Maximum Acceptable Income: beyond the symbolic limits
- A springboard for a Degrowth Project: the citizens’ initiative for a basic income.
