It’s not always convenient, but you can’t just take all the benefits of a capitalist system without having any of the responsibilities.
There is literally no product you can buy in a capitalist system that did not feature suffering somewhere along the manufacturing pipeline.
The absolute best situation you can hope for is that every single person in the chain from acquisition of raw materials to manufacturing a finished product is that the only suffering they experience is “I am forced to do this labor so I don’t starve”
I should point out that this is an extrme rarity in supply chains and manufacturing goods. Typically it’s much worse.
The reason things are like this is that it’s very easy for humans to compartmentalize things and ignore the suffering of others if it makes their own situation just a little more bearable.
As much as I wish Nestle would shrivel and die, there are far too many people out there that will buy the baby formula or the chocolate bar without even considering the misery that went into making it. And even if they know about it, it’s easier to just buy it and feel a small pang of guilt than go without.
That line of thinking only benefits the large corporations in the end. There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, so whatever, let’s keep consuming from the corporations around and let’s not try to reduce their power? It’s like criticizing veganism because plants are also living beings, and we can’t eat anything without causing some form of suffering.
There is literally no product you can buy in a capitalist system that did not feature suffering somewhere along the manufacturing pipeline.
The absolute best situation you can hope for is that every single person in the chain from acquisition of raw materials to manufacturing a finished product is that the only suffering they experience is “I am forced to do this labor so I don’t starve”
I should point out that this is an extrme rarity in supply chains and manufacturing goods. Typically it’s much worse.
The reason things are like this is that it’s very easy for humans to compartmentalize things and ignore the suffering of others if it makes their own situation just a little more bearable.
As much as I wish Nestle would shrivel and die, there are far too many people out there that will buy the baby formula or the chocolate bar without even considering the misery that went into making it. And even if they know about it, it’s easier to just buy it and feel a small pang of guilt than go without.
That line of thinking only benefits the large corporations in the end. There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, so whatever, let’s keep consuming from the corporations around and let’s not try to reduce their power? It’s like criticizing veganism because plants are also living beings, and we can’t eat anything without causing some form of suffering.
True, but my point is that this is a systemic problem. You cannot buy different things to solve it.
You would do much better by reducing your consumption rather than buying different brands