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.”