Capitalism and the Environment

The fundamental argument of this document has been that so long as decisions about production and technology remained in the hands of corporations producing blindly for an unknown market, and driven by competition to cut costs and maximise immediate profits, the crisis will remain. Effective environmental protection requires overall social planning, including the ability to set limits to production of certain items, and to use social wealth to subsidise branches of industry that would necessarily operate at a loss for a considerable period given the costs of serious antipollution measures. The subordination of investment decisions to social needs rather than private profits will be essential if production and transport systems are to be restructured to create a sustainable society.

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When global society is freed from any economic compulsion to expand the productive forces, the question of profitability or of labour productivity (economy of labour time) will vanish as a criterion of wealth. Instead, the criterion of wealth will become people's free, rational, and creative use of leisure, directed towards their own development as rounded personalities in harmony with each other and the natural environment. Only socialism will make it possible to develop the enormous productive potential of modern science and technology for the satisfaction of rational needs in conditions that assure the blossoming of the creative abilities of all individuals and all peoples without destroying the global ecological system upon which all life depends. The alternative is a society in which the enormous productive potential of modern science and technology, subordinated to the irrational imperatives of the capitalist private-profit system, assume ever more destructive forms in relation to both society and nature. The alternatives facing humanity are, quite simply, socialism or extinction.

http://www.dsp.org.au/dsp/ECS/Chapter6.htm