Half a century has passed since the publication of the Limits to growth report, in which a team of researchers came to the sobering conclusion that there would be an uncontrolled decline in the world’s population and production capacities if existing economic growth trends were to continue. However, instead of pushing for sustainable ecological and economic stability, the guardians of the neoliberal regime continue to devise strategies for green, inclusive and sustainable growth. The latest in a series of such strategies is the European Green Deal, which ignored all warnings from environmental NGOs and intergovernmental forums that empirical data and evidence do not support the mantra of decoupling economic growth from the growth in greenhouse gas emissions and resource use. In search for an answer to why the political establishment continues to embrace growth as the ultimate goal of economic policies, and why modern society‘s obsession with material growth is so deeply entrenched, the paper critically questions the basic premises of neoclassical economic theory. Furthermore, the authors employ historical analysis in an attempt to understand the historical circumstances that enabled the emergence of capitalism, which can only be sustained through the growth of capital and which, as a class system based on the exploitation of human labor and the appropriation of the environment on an unimaginable scale, can only be reproduced by the concealment of the sources of growth. In its final part, the paper uses the feminist concept „absent from history” in order to detect if there was anything missing in the critical period of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the late Middle Ages which could have altered the flow of Western history towards the formation of a more just society and mode of production.
