TO answer the question, it depends what you mean by “growth” — what kind of growth, who controls and benefits from it and what its longer term consequences might be for our Earth. Capitalism is clearly in crisis; stagnating and destroying the environment as it does so — but what about the broader prospects for the wellbeing of our planet and its peoples?

Fifty years ago the “Club of Rome,” an “invisible college” of “notable scientists, economists, business executives, high level civil servants and former heads of state from around the (mainly capitalist) world, declared that “growth” (of all types) was unsustainable — and funded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to produce a computer model to “prove” it.

The Limits to Growth published in 1972 concluded that “if the present trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next hundred years ... the most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”

Two million copies of the book were sold worldwide, and it received wide media attention. For many people the computer printouts provided “scientific” confirmation of the worst environmentalist prophesies of imminent ecocatastrophe.

Reactions from the right and left were mixed, varying from cocky optimism (that capitalism — or socialism — would “automatically” solve the problems) to despair.

A team at Sussex University’s Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) under its director, the Marxist economist Chris Freeman, analysed the models in depth. Making the point that all computer output depends essentially on the quality of the input on the data and assumptions on which the computer model is based — they declared that “computer models cannot replace theory.”

The team concluded that “the growth versus no growth debate has become a rather sterile one of the Tweedledum/Tweedledee variety because it tends to ignore the really important issues of the composition of growth in output and of the distribution of the fruits of growth.

“Some types of growth are consistent not merely with the conservation of the environment but with its enhancement. The problem in our view is a socio-political one of stimulating this type of growth, and of more equitable distribution, both within countries and between them.”

Others at SPRU drew a connection between the Limits of Growth study (funded by a consortium of second-rank multinationals) and the crises of capitalism, in particular the end of the post-1945 “long boom.”

Since then, computers have become infinitely more powerful and computer modelling more complex. “World models” have continued, adding little to the conclusions of the 1972 study and subject to the same constraints and criticisms.

At the same time environmental concerns have shifted. Human demography is increasingly recognised to be much more than a question of numbers; as an earlier article in this series emphasised, family size is intimately related to economics, politics and history.

Starvation and malnutrition are caused by the inability of the poor to purchase what is produced; there has never yet been a year when global per capita food production has fallen below subsistence levels. The depletion of mineral resources has been successively met by technical fixes (although how long this can continue is debatable).

Increasingly, attention has shifted in particular to biogeochemical cycles and the ability of the planet to adsorb pollution, most specifically in relation to climate change (the depletion of fossil fuels is recognised as a secondary issue to their impact on the carbon cycle).

And most recently a succession of reports from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have analysed the physical science basis for climate change; its consequences (including implications for agriculture, ecosystems and human wellbeing) and the potential for mitigation.

All show that “business as usual” is a recipe for disaster.

All this calls into question the issue of “growth” (as is usually presented by capital and its spokespeople) as a solution for world problems of inequality, poverty, malnutrition and disease.

There is a danger in overemphasising “natural” limits at the expense of a focus on the internal contradictions in capitalism that force “growth” of the most environmentally destructive but profitable kind.

And it’s no accident that as big business has itself appropriated much environmental rhetoric as a greenwash to hide its continuing destruction of our Earth, it has become fashionable in the global North to focus on individual lifestyle changes as a solution to the environmental crisis.

As David Harvey declares, “The capitalist class, it goes without saying, is always delighted, on this point at least, to have its role displaced and masked by an environmental rhetoric that lets them off the hook as the progenitors of the problem.”

Especially after the defeats of the labour and socialist movements of the 1970s, capitalism’s environmental contradictions became more prominent and for some appeared to present a stronger basis for building anti-capitalist alliances than labour struggles.

The alliances that can be built around environmental issues are critical. However it remains the case that environmental destruction is driven by the fundamental contradiction in capitalism — between the forces and relations of production and its relentless drive for profit.

What is now clear is that just as capitalism, as an economic system, depends on exploiting workers, so too does it depend on exploiting the resources — living and non-living — of our world. Capitalism depends on continued growth, without which it would collapse.

Non-exploitative capitalism is a contradiction in terms. There is not a single “human ecology” — every social system has its own ecological dynamic, and capitalism’s is a particularly destructive one.

That was something recognised by Marx himself with his concept of the “metabolic rift” between humans and nature. Marx focused on agriculture, the depletion of soil nutrients and the pollution of waterways by run-off and human sewage.

He was an early advocate of recycling. Today we recognise that the wider impacts of capitalism threaten the whole planet.

As Barry Commoner, a Marxist ecologist and one of the founders of the modern environmental movement, wrote (at the same time of the MIT studies) a half-century ago: “The world is being carried to the brink of ecological disaster, not by a singular fault, which some clever scheme can correct, but by the phalanx of powerful economic, political and social forces that constitute the march of history.

“Anyone who proposes to cure the environmental crisis undertakes thereby to change the course of history.”

Our Earth’s resources, geological and biological (in particular the equilibrating capacity of biogeochemical cycles) and even physical space are insufficient for everyone to “enjoy” private luxury on the scale of Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg.

Our planet will not support everyone living the wasteful luxury lifestyle of the “1 per cent” whose wealth is in any case extracted from the labour of the “99 per cent.” Nor — as the current energy crisis demonstrates — will it support continued capital accumulation by large corporations and their financial backers without plunging millions into destitution and misery.

But there is ample evidence that — within a sane economic system, with “growth” focused on quality, not quantity, with demographic stabilisation (which depends crucially on progressive policies including health care, education and women’s rights) and if — a big if — climate change (with its disastrous consequences for food production) can be contained — our Earth could provide everyone with private sufficiency (water, food, energy, clothes, decent housing) and allow everyone to share and enjoy public luxury — good education, health and social care; public libraries, museums, art galleries, sports centres, and swimming baths, playgrounds and community centres, a good transport and communications infrastructure, local green space and public parks.

That’s a socialist vision; a tall order but it’s a realistic and achievable one. Its realisation depends on us.

The Marx Memorial Library’s series of lectures on economics continues with Alfredo Saad-Filho speaking on “Three Crises in Neoliberal Capitalism” on Thursday October 6 followed by a seminar, “Defining capitalism in the contemporary context” on Monday October 10pm (both at 7pm) and its eight-week online course “Introduction to Marxist Economics” starts on Tuesday October 11. Details of these and much more on the Library’s website www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk.