The Illusion of Ethical Consumerism and Why It Fails to Change Capitalism

If there were ever a day that epitomizes the excesses of capitalism, it would be Black Friday. Deals upon deals pepper stores, early morning crowds rampage through stores, and multiple TVs line carts as big box stores offload all their endless production into our lives. But for some, Black Friday represents a chance to push back. To consume ethically. The Patagonia's of the world urge us, "don't buy their jackets", and REI argues that we should #optoutside, while IKEA encourages shoppers to buy and sell their used furniture instead with the slogan

"Green Friday." The message in this marketing is that you, the consumer, can make a change at the checkout counter. You can make informed choices. By buying brands that actually care, you in turn can create environmental and social transformation and show that you can in the process. But it's not so easy. Indeed the ethical purity Patagonia, REI, and IKEA pursue by eschewing Black Friday might be just sleight of hand. An illusion that hides the deeper workings of exploitation and inherent destruction of capitalism. Today, we dive into the murky waters of ethical consumerism. We'll wade

through the myths of B-corp certifications, the importance of commodity fetishism, as well as unpack whether there is truly "no ethical consumption under capitalism." Ethical Consumption: Amazon packages pile up on front doorsteps. Storage units fill to the brim. Sales, commercials, and influencers shovel even more useless stuff down our throats. Consumption pervades every facet of our lives. In the process, we consume far more than we need. Food waste is higher than ever, primary energy consumption has skyrocketed since 1950, and global waste continues to rise unabated. Not to mention,

emissions rates push upward year over year at a time when they need to be doing the exact opposite. But this is not simply the end result of human nature. It's not the conclusion of our greed or moral depravity. No, consumption is the enabler of capitalism, and we're forced to live with its waste. Capitalism demands overconsumption because consumption is the motor oil of capitalist production and accumulation. As I explained in this video, capitalists must constantly expand their productive capacities through new technologies, decreasing labor costs,

and scaling up to create the most commodities for the lowest prices. If they fail to do so, capitalists get eaten alive by other, more capable owners who've managed to create more products at cheaper prices and, ultimately, more profit. This process of constant accumulation and expansion creates increased overproduction. Production that generates piles of commodities, which must be sold to the masses to continue the cycle of capital accumulation. Exchanging products for even more money is essential to complete the last leg of the money invested into commodities

and sold for even more money also known as M-C-M'. In a sense, consumption is a release valve or lubricant of production, it expands and contracts and enables, but never creates, the flow of goods. Enter ethical consumerism. A movement of buyers who assume that the problem is the quality and quantity of the commodities we buy. We only need to choose better and buy less and capitalism's environmental and social toll shrinks. At its core, ethical consumerism asks us to wield everyday shopping to drive social change. It seeks to guide the tide of overproduction

towards the moral good by embracing so-called ethical brands [flicker of ads] In short, voting with your dollar. And companies have leaned into this mindset. With everything from all-natural hemp-fiber Patagonia pants claiming to save the Earth, to 100% recycled Coke bottles, companies coat their products in nods towards saving the planet or ending exploitative practices to get you to buy their stuff. From the consumer's point of view under capitalism, and especially under neoliberalism, wielding our purchasing power for political purposes makes

sense. For so long we've been inundated with the narrative that consumers have control. That our choice at the checkout counter matters. If we can all just put our money where our mouth is and buy the right stuff, the market will respond quickly and corporations will be forced to transform their production into morally sound and environmentally ethical entities because no one will shop at their stores if they refuse to change. This is the neoliberal theory of consumer sovereignty. An idea that has now been championed by liberals interested in working within the system for change like Ralph Nader. This strain

of politics transforms the act of consumption into a political activity with catchphrases like "vote with your dollar." But the reality is far from the utopic and simplistic vision of consumer sovereignty. Ethical consumerism, while meaning well, has done little to move the needle. The Myth of Ethical Consumerism: The proliferation of stores like Whole Foods, REI, Everlane, and corporate social responsibility makes it seem like ethical consumerism is working. There is no doubt that these companies are taking some important actions. Whole Foods has committed

to reducing its food waste and making its stores more energy efficient, while tech behemoth Salesforce committed $1.5 million to help end homelessness in the Bay Area. But are these just illusions? Are these just small actions that help cover up more substantial exploitation and maintenance of the status quo? The short answer is yes. Whole Foods is owned and operated by Amazon, a company long known for pushing both its workers and the environment to the brink. Not to mention that as Whole Foods has grown, it's been plagued with revelations of its exploitative supply chain.

Like selling cheese made with prison labor, or more recently when migrant children in the United States were found throughout Whole Foods supply chain- helping to "debone chicken sold at Whole Foods." Meanwhile, Salesforce says they [make profits while doing good] one day, and then use that 1.5 million, which is a minuscule amount of their revenue, for unhoused people to make an app. And the very next day the company fires 1,000 of its employees without warning. In this light, corporations' ethical deeds should be seen not as progress

towards a more ethical form of capitalism, but instead as a flimsy protective shield that masks corporations' true ecological and human exploitation. These "ethical" deeds are just maintenance of the status quo. This is a new version of marketing, a new manifestation of what Marxist scholar Hebert Marcuse calls the manufacturing of "false needs." To offload all of their products onto the masses, capitalists need to make us believe that we actually need the latest iPhone or those hemp fiber pants, rather than just want it. For some companies, that means building an ecological or ethical aura through labels and

one-off actions. This signals to consumers with political and moral compasses that they need to buy their specific product to save the planet or fight worker exploitation. [picture examples] This increasingly seems to be the case with the B-Corp label. An ethical label that's been watered down and co-opted as a means to clean up the image of exploitative companies. Initially, the B-Corp label was born out of a desire to certify the transparency, accountability, and social and environmental measures companies took. The label often certified smaller,

more niche brands. Unfortunately, its process relies heavily on good faith. Every three years, a B-corp company must submit for certification, but that process, especially the impact report, is entirely self-reported. A fact which, as professor of policy at Teesside University, Mathew Cotton, in an interview with BBC notes, "makes it relatively easy to manipulate internal reporting procedures or misrepresent findings." And we're seeing the fallout of that process in 2024. The label now seems to be just another tool for laundering the dirty practices of capitalism. Nespresso, a coffee subsidiary of

Nestle, notorious for their exploitation of water resources, recently was awarded the B-Corp label, despite their dark history of child labor and worker exploitation, not to mention the fact that they sell these single-use plastic Keurig-like machines. Meanwhile, the bottled water brand Aqua, which is a subsidiary of Danone, holds a B-Corp certification despite recently topping an audit of Indonesia's biggest plastic polluters. To make matters even worse, B-Lab has launched the B Movement Builders initiative in 2020, which further waters

down the B-corp label by recognizing multinational companies for environmental or social practices. Yes, some of these green initiatives or fair trade labels may actually be real. There's no question that hemp fiber pants are better for the environment than fossil fuel-based polyester jeans reliant on the hyper-exploitation of the imperial periphery. Indeed, some businesses are genuinely trying to do better within a broken system, but as we will soon see, in the meat grinder that is the capitalist mode of production, environmental destruction,

and worker exploitation are inevitable because they are necessary to capitalism itself. But even if these corporations are somehow environmental and moral saints, ethical consumers don't seem to be walking the walk. One 2005 study found that despite 30% of UK consumers reporting that they have intentions to buy ethical products, only 3% of consumers actually followed their morals at the check-out counter. Meanwhile, in 2011, an extensive book on the subject titled The Myth of Ethical Consumerism revealed a similar intentions-action mismatch. The authors conducted

numerous studies, including one that "showed that we could manipulate an individual's preference for "fair trade" products simply by prompting them and removing their privacy. With such actions, 70% purchased the fair trade alternative (which was the same price). Without such actions, less than 1% purchased the fair trade product." In short, at the checkout counter, ethics rarely come into play. This is possibly because, at the end of the day, for many who live paycheck to paycheck, price is the ultimate factor when it comes to purchasing decisions.

This gap, however, shrouds the larger picture. Ethical consumption distracts us from the foundational rot of capitalism. Our desire for and praise of corporations' minimal reform, as well as our hyperfocus on which is the best product distracts us from what's really happening under the hood. As one paper argues, "ethical consumption inadvertently works to thwart the destruction of capitalism by reinforcing conventional (capitalist) consumption." Essentially, shopping ethically, instead of changing the system, actually doubles down on it. Voting with your dollars concretizes the

idea of consumer sovereignty when the reality of who controls production and generates desires for those products are capitalists and corporations themselves. We can only buy what is produced, and as a result, the producers-the owners of the means of production- have significantly more control of the commodities that enter the market. What these owners, the board members, the investors, the factory owners, care about at the end of the day, is not the well-being of the planet or the health of the worker, but instead profit and the continuation of the corporation.

And it's here that we finally arrive at the root. Capitalism, at its core, relies on the exploitation of labor through the lever of fossil fuels. I'll say that again in another way. For the owners of production to make a profit, they must exploit workers. This specifically means that during an eight-hour work-day, for example, if a laborer is paid $80, a small chunk of a worker's time is spent making $80 worth of product, the rest is unpaid or surplus labor. That is where the capitalist makes their profit. This is the core engine of capitalism, and as Andreas Malm asserts

in Fossil Capital, this engine is facilitated by the temporal and spatial consistency of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels allow capitalists to bring factories and the workplace to cities where the cheapest labor resides, as well as keep the lights on in warehouses and the workplace with exacting consistency, both of which are crucial for consistent growth and competition. In short, worker exploitation and environmental destruction are inherent to the capitalist mode of production. This is the real reason why we can't have ethical consumption under capitalism. Profits,

and necessarily the exploitation of workers and combustion of fossil fuels, will always come before morality and ethics in a capitalist system. Not because a company is evil, but because that is how the system works. To stay competitive and provide profits for stakeholders it must steal the surplus labor from workers and wield fossil fuels for maximum output and consistency. But this process of exploitation and destruction is obscured from the consumer, in what Marx calls "the hidden abode of production." What we see on a store's shelf is thoroughly divorced from

the laborers and the long chain of manufacturers and materials it took to create those products. We only see the end result of production. A seemingly magical object imbued with value. This is what Marx calls "commodity fetishism," which as the Youtube collective Marxism Today describes, "So, when Marx talks about Commodity Fetishism, he's similarly referring to our illusory perception as consumers that commodities contain inherent value in and of themselves, appearing in a kind of vacuum that's devoid of the larger social context

of the production of these commodities by real people engaged in exploitative labor relations." Ethical consumerism works precisely because of this divorce. Because that toy on the shelf seems to have inherent value, because we can't see the exploitation and the vast chain of production, materials and labor that is needed to bring it into existence, we are convinced that commodity holds virtue or value in and of itself, that our purchasing of that pair of hemp pants or even that Ben & Jerry's ice cream cone, can indeed be ethical. This shrouding of production and the mystification of the product with morals

shifts our politics. Instead of addressing the root problems of worker and environmental exploitation directly through strikes and pressure on the endless cycle of production, now we focus on the product. We are led to believe that buying more ethical stuff is a political act. In reality, many ethical brands are just subsidiaries of larger hyper-exploitative multinationals. Like this organic cat and dog food brand that is owned by Nestle or Innocent Smoothies which touts its human rights and environmental work yet is owned by Coca-Cola. Many ethical brands,

sadly, are wolves in sheep's clothing, and they can often be aided and abetted by watered-down ethical labeling and certifications. Ultimately, however, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism not because everyone is evil and everything is owned by multinational corporations, but because the nature of capitalism itself demands environmental destruction and worker exploitation. So if this is the case, then should we just give up and buy whatever we want? Living Under Capitalism, If there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, then we should just give up right? We should never even strive

to purchase necessities from places that are at least giving lip service to more sustainable and less exploitative goods. No. Individual choices certainly matter, but they are like a mosquito trying to drain an elephant of blood single-handedly. Power comes in the collective form. So, yes when you're looking to buy something strive for the "ethical" choice, but just know it will ultimately not create the system change we need to end worker exploitation and mitigate climate chaos. Unfortunately, right now, we are left with bad choices- it's not to say that it's useless to try to purchase a more ethical good so you might as well just go with

the cheapest worst thing, but rather our efforts shouldn't be focused on our individual consumer choices if we are trying to fundamentally change capitalism, which is what the climate crisis calls for. If we look back through history, systems change comes not from people buying better, but collective movements fighting for political change. Whether that's the socialist revolution in Russia, suffragettes or civil rights movements, or anti-apartheid. Sure there were certainly selective boycotts and divestments of corporations, but these were tools in a much

broader toolkit of change. Shopping has never been and will never be a tool for social change. So how do we directly address the exploitation and ecological destruction at the root? Striving for Better We can do much more than buy better. Indeed the ecological world of the future challenges us to do so. A truly ethical world is one where production is socialized. Where the workplace, the factories, and the landscape is controlled, owned, and planned by the people. A truly democratic and socialist economic system. A world where goods produced are made not based on how much profit they can

make but instead on their use and necessity. This would undoubtedly be a radically different world, where the ethical and environmental desires of everyday people actually matter, because they would be integral in the planning and production processes. But that world isn't built on buying better products. We can't buy our way out of capitalism. That world is built, instead, on deep organizing, on trust, on tight relationships, and collective action. With the recent re-election of Trump, alongside the broader global rise of fascism, that organizing and community building feels more important than ever.

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