In recent months, a fruitful debate has been taking place within the Degrowth movement that seeks to go beyond the arguments regarding the need for a (good) degrowth (which has already been amply demonstrated) and begin to consider how to translate it into political reality.
One of the most recent articles is by Anna Gregoletto Bettin and Mark H. Burton, which summarizes the positions in this debate into two strands: Ecosocialism (represented by authors such as Jason Hickel, Kohei Saito, and Jorge Riechmann) and the Pluriversal Perspective (as outlined in the article by Vincent Liegey, Anitra Nelson, and Terry Leahy). Gregoletto and Burton propose an Anadialectical Synthesis that aims to bring both positions together (D. Gasparro and D. Vico, and Vlad Bunea hold a similar stance). For his part, Ted Trainer, an advocate of The Simpler Way, criticizes these movements for failing to recognize the extent of the necessary reductions in consumption, in line with the views of Carlos de Castro and Manuel Casal.
In the table below, the most relevant ideas from these authors are summarized, while also including the main points of this article.
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Key authors
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Key ideas
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Ecosocialism (maximalist minimalism)
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J. Hickel, K. Saito, J. Riechmann
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The goal is an ecosocialist state that directs production toward sectors that “must grow” (essential sectors and care work that provide value of use) and discourages speculative or harmful sectors (advertising, arms, speculation). Proposed measures such as reduction of the workweek, guaranteed public employment, economic planning, democratization of the production process and of decisions regarding what to produce.
Some ecosocialists advocate frugal ways of living (Riechmann, Saito) which are closer to The Simpler Way approach, while others place little emphasis of this.
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Pluriversal Perspective
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V. Liegey, A. Nelson, T. Leahy, J. Steinberg
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Degrowth is a movement of movements with connections to others such as post-development, decolonialism, ecofeminism, ecovillage networks, climate action movements, labor unions and environmental groups. They prioritize direct democracy and transformation in everyday life. Degrowth is much more than simply minimizing the use of materials and energy: it is an invitation to explore new imaginaries and ways of life.
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The Simpler Way
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T. Trainer, M. Casal. C. Castro
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The degrowth movement runs the risk of becoming “a catch-all for all utopian dreams,” since there are countless movements that claim to be degrowth advocates even though they do not aim to reduce consumption nor are they aware of the enormous reductions that are necessary. The necessary reductions can only be achieved if most people lived in small, highly self-sufficient, self-governing, cooperative, and frugal communities. Societies should be fundamentally agrarian.
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Anadialectical Synthesis
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A. Gregoletto, M. Burton, D. Gasparro, D. Vico.
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An approach that seeks (dialectically) to synthesize and transcend the (first) two positions, while remaining open to the voices of those excluded from the debate. The core of Degrowth lies in the managed and just reduction of the material basis of the economy, especially in the imperial core. Even so, there are some associated elements that, while not central, are strongly linked: democracy, justice, decoloniality, liberation/emancipation, sufficiency, frugality, and a critique of economism (the conversion of everything into a commodity).
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Systemic Analysis
(The perspective of this article.)
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M. Mediavilla
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We must ask ourselves: what drives us to keep growing? and deactivate the dynamics that force us to do so. Until we do, the policies will be insufficient. Two of the dynamics driving us to grow are the profit motive and the pressure of unemployment. Some eco-socialist policies could help deactivate them, but truly controlling growth requires going further. The key to growth lies in competition at all levels, with the international level being the most important and difficult to address. The growth problem is a management of the commons dynamic that can only be resolved by creating the institution of the commons, and, at present, this is very difficult to do because most of the key commons are global in scope.
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All of these discussions are very enlightening, but I believe we need to go further. It has already been amply demonstrated that growth is not increasing our well-being; moreover, it is causing serious environmental problems, and in any case, it will have to slow down sooner or later due to a lack of resources. But all this knowledge is not making countries, people, and companies any less eager to grow. What drives us to keep growing? What drives us to always be willing to grow?
In this article I propose a Systemic Analysis of growth and use some System Dynamics diagrams to analyse the problem. I ask for a little patience from readers who are unfamiliar with this tool.
The arrows in these diagrams represent cause-and-effect relationships between variables. The “+” sign indicates a direct relationship: an increase in the first variable increases the second; the “-” sign indicates an inverse relationship: an increase in the first variable decreases the second. We speak of a feedback loop when a closed chain of cause-and-effect relationships appears. Loops are reinforcing when all the arrows in the loop are “+”: the loop becomes a mechanism that reinforces the behaviour more and more. Conversely, if a “-“ relationship exists, the structure tends to maintain equilibrium and becomes a stabilizing mechanism. Two “-“ relationships in a loop offset each other and result in a “+” relationship.
An Economy Oriented to Human Needs
An economy designed to meet human needs could be regarded as the ideal one for Degrowth defenders. The local communities proposed by The Simpler Way, for example, are economies of this type. Figure 1 represents the basic behaviour of these economies: needs are compared with the production of goods, and, if there is a shortfall, growth will occur to increase production. When production exceeds what is needed, it will decrease until it aligns with demand.
We can see that this structure creates a closed loop of causal relationships with two positive signs and one negative; this means that the resulting loop is stabilizing. Production tends to adjust to human needs, which are determined by population size.
Figure 1: Dynamic pattern of an economy oriented to human needs. Economic activity grows enough to meet needs, and once those needs are met, it stops growing. A closed chain of cause-and-effect relationships is created, with a negative sign in the loop. The behaviour is stable. Click on the image to enlarge.
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Traditional agrarian economies were, to a great extent, economies of this type. In those societies, production relies primarily on human labour, which means that growing beyond basic needs comes at a cost that people are rarely willing to bear. As a result, their behaviour essentially follows the pattern shown in Figure 1: these are stable economies and, as such, capable of being sustainable and adapting to the carrying capacity of their ecosystem without overexploiting it.
Inflating Needs: Profits
The production in capitalist economies does not align with needs but rather tends to grow forever. In my view, the mechanism that most clearly drives this is the one depicted in Figure 2, and it is based on the well-known pursuit of profit.
In Figure 2, needs are not constant but are artificially inflated. This is due, mainly, to corporate profits: companies have an interest in increasing production because their profits are proportional to the quantity of product sold, and this encourages them to artificially inflate consumer needs through all kinds of advertising.
This behaviour is self-perpetuating, because it creates a reinforcing loop where all the signs are positive: the more production, the more needs; and the more needs, the more production. All of this leads to a kind of social automatism that binds us to endless growth.
Some eco-socialists, such as Saito and Hickel, advocate implementing measures that curb speculation and advertising and prioritize essential sectors. These measures are designed to prevent the artificial inflation of necessities, and, in principle, would be appropriate because they aim to steer the economy toward a model like the one of Figure 1. Another measure they propose is to favour sectors with lower environmental impact (for example, by directing investment, as Hickel suggests), which, in principle, would also be an interesting measure because it would weaken the link between production and pressure on the biosphere.
However, in light of the diagram in Figure 2, all these measures fail in one essential respect: they do not break the feedback loop. As long as corporate profits remain proportional to the production of goods, there will be actors interested in increasing production more and more, no matter how much one tries to direct them toward certain sectors. As long as there are actors who benefit from increased sales, it will also be very difficult to ban advertising without resorting to authoritarian measures. Until the feedback loop that incentivizes production is broken, it will be difficult to limit growth.
The growth dynamics shown in Figure 2 will, of course, cease to have an effect when significant constraints on energy, materials, or labour arise that severely limit production (black arrow in Figure 2). However, these constraints would have to be extremely severe to be effective: as soon as there is any room for growth, the reinforcing cycle would kick in again and some social classes, regions or sectors will grow at the expense of the destruction of others
Figure 2: Artificial inflation of needs: profits. Demand increases endlessly because profits are proportional to production, and companies have an interest in artificially inflating needs. The overall behaviour is unstable (reinforcing) because all the arrows have positive signs, which causes production to increase endlessly and, with it, the pressure on the biosphere. Click on the image to enlarge.
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To break free from this automatic feedback loop, we must change the cause-and-effect relationships that create it. One way to do this is to “cut” the link between production and profits (marked with scissors in Figure 2): finding ways to exchange goods and services in which profits are not proportional to production.
Could we imagine a company that is paid simply for being available to provide a good or service but does not receive compensation for producing more? This is the standard operating model for fire departments, the police, or healthcare services, which do not earn more when there are more emergencies or diseases. Consumer cooperatives also operate according to this logic.
Could we apply a similar concept to other sectors of the economy? What adverse effects might this measure have? We cannot ignore the fact that a company whose profits are not tied to sales may very easily tend to compromise quality unless it has effective mechanisms for public oversight. Can we use other economic policies, such as taxes or labour costs, to break the cycle shown in Figure 2?
Inflated needs: Employment
There is another mechanism that creates a pattern of inflated needs: the pressure of unemployment. As shown in Figure 3, since wages are proportional to production, the working class also ends up supporting the increase of the production and the inflation of needs. Furthermore, the fact that automation reduces the number of jobs per unit of production makes matters worse.
This relationship between production and jobs explains the common conflict between environmental and labour movements: on the one hand, the left supports environmental demands, but on the other, it defends the preservation of jobs in companies whose activities are clearly unsustainable.
This link exists because there is a working class deprived of the means of production that needs paid employment, and because unemployment is a constant threat; otherwise, it would have no effect. Some policies proposed by advocates of degrowth, such as guaranteed public employment and job sharing, eliminate the pressure of unemployment and break this feedback loop. The economic self-sufficiency achieved in land-based communities that control their means of production also breaks it.
Figure 3: Artificial inflation of needs: employment. In addition to the loop shown in Figure 2, there is another reinforcing loop (orange) based on the fact that wages are tied to production, which leads the working classes to also support an increase in [perceived] needs. Click on the image to enlarge.
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The Dynamics of Competition
The policy measures discussed in the previous section are desirable, but, in my view, they are also insufficient because there is another dynamic that forces us to grow and is more difficult to counteract: competition.
The influence diagram in Figure 4 illustrates this dynamic. Let’s imagine we have two actors, whom we’ll call A and B; they could be companies in the same market, employees in the same company or competing countries. When a comparison of power tells actor A that B is superior, A reacts by trying to grow in order to balance its power. The same happens for B with respect to A. This dynamic gives rise to specific stabilizing loops (shown in blue).
However, when viewed as a whole, this dynamic is destabilizing because it creates another loop (in pink) in which the two negative signs cancel each other out. This gives rise to an insidious reinforcing loop that drives the growth of A, which in turn drives the growth of B, which, in turn, stimulates the growth of A, and so on. The mutual rivalry between competing actors creates continuous growth.
Figure 4: The dynamics of competition between two actors, A and B, who are constantly comparing themselves. The figure above shows the two stable loops, while the one below shows the overall behaviour, which is destabilizing. Click on the image to enlarge.
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This dynamic of competition is, in my view, the most important driver of growth. Competition is deeply rooted in the capitalist economy and is its defining characteristic, but competition is not limited to capitalism. War between nations, for example, is the most extreme consequence of competition and is as old as the state itself. Competition is, in essence, what drives GDP growth, because a company’s market share or a country’s GDP is not merely a measure of economic activity: it is also a measure of its power compared to others.
Neoliberal globalization, in a sense, replaced conventional warfare with corporate competition in a kind of global economic war. The current wave of protectionism may offer an opportunity to return to economies with less global competition, though it could also reignite military competition (which is by no means good news, because no sector is more harmful—both environmentally and socially—than the military).
Since competition is one of the major obstacles to sustainability, all initiatives of Pluriversal degrowth that seek more caring and less patriarchal, authoritarian, and colonial societies—even if they are not aimed at reducing consumption—represent a step in the right direction (though not a sufficient one).
It is also a good idea to build more self-sufficient nations that rely less on global resources such as oil or strategic minerals. I don’t know if the only viable form of society in the future will be small, frugal, agrarian communities, as Trainer and Casal argue, but during the transition, it is clear that nation-states will continue to be important players. Those countries capable of providing well-being to their inhabitants with fewer resources and less energy will have less need to wage wars over resources.
As Manuel Casal Lodeiro said, Si vis pacem, para descensum, if you want peace, get ready for descent. This motto is particularly apt for European states, which face an international landscape where they will be highly vulnerable due to the scarcity of resources in their territory and their high per capita consumption.
The Creation of the Global Commons
Competition in a finite world end ups becoming the well known problem of managing the commons. Throughout history, numerous human societies have successfully resolved this problem by creating communal institutions. This idea of reclaiming the commons is not new to degrowth thinking: it is particularly emphasized by Kohei Saito, the anarchist movement, and those who advocate learning from indigenous cultures.
However, it is rarely taken into account that building communal institutions today is more difficult than it was in the past. Today’s commons are not limited to local resources (forests, water, land, electricity generation, etc.) that could be managed with varying degrees of success by local communities or states. At present, the oceans, the atmosphere and climate stability are common goods of all humanity that are in danger; fossil fuels and strategic minerals are also globally contested resources.
The task of building communal institutions around global commons is immense, and regulatory efforts, such as the COPs or the Kyoto Protocol, have not been very encouraging in past decades. This does not diminish the importance of global problems. Although building resilient local communities may be one of the most important steps toward the future, we should not forget to continue working on the global commons.
Let’s Draw Alternative Futures
I hope this text has shed some light on the Degrowth debate, and I also hope that its diagrams and the feedbacks they describe have helped the readers. We all know that our addiction to growth must stop because it is destroying the very foundations of our lives, but knowing that we must stop an addiction is one thing, and being able to do so is a different one. Capitalist growth is a complex and insidious dynamic that should be analysed through the lens of systems analysis and feedback in order to be addressed.
Our Western education tends to be overly focused on analytical, static, and linear reasoning, which is ill-suited to grappling with the reality, that is complex and full of dynamics and feedback loops. My personal experience has shown me that drawing diagrams—especially System Dynamics feedback diagrams—is one of the best ways to expand our thinking and adopt a more systemic perspective, something vital for facing the challenges we see on the horizon.
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