I thought it would be a nice idea to try and explain this phrase, and by extension explain from where profit is extracted, since both seem like easy concepts which can be understood more easily if simple examples are provided. I do not have a degree on Marxism so I may miss something, but I hope I’m doing my best to help you understand them in a more interesting way.
This phrase, which you will probably heard being spouted by the left faction within the liberals, either on the internet or in the form it has taken as the national bourgeoisie in your country, or also by anarchists and other forms of idealists, makes sense only if analyzed through the lenses of Marxism.
So, then, why do we say ethical production, and by antonomasia, consumption, is impossible within a capitalist society? Are these cruelty free products that you are buying worthless? Well, it all comes down to profit.
To understand how capital accumulation happens, and how wage theft is carried out, we need to understand from where profit is extracted. I will try to provide an easy example, taken out of all the abstraction and complexities of our society so that it will be easier for comprehension.
Let’s say you have a carpenter, they are the owner of their hammer and their saw, with these tools they are charged by some small company in their village to build tables, simple, block shaped tables. They need to buy 1$ worth of nails for every table they produce, and they charge 9$ per hour for the production of such table. The final price they will sell this table, to this merchant person who is owner of this small company, is that of 10$. He will then resell the aforementioned table at a value of 15$ at his company. This 5$ that seem to have appeared out of nowhere is what we Marxist call “Surplus Value”.
Remember this example is astonishingly simplistic, but this is the core reality of what factory workers go through when producing goods, only there are at least a thousand other factors and different levels of exploitation in the process of creating the final product.
This is reason behind ethical consumption is impossible, because the core principles upon which production is based in a capitalist society are those of exploitation, there’s no conceivable labour where wage theft does not occur. It’s not that trying to be vegan, or not hurting animals in the process, or using renewable sources for their materials is pointless. But rather these are all forms that the capitalist superstructure synthesizes into so that it can amass a bigger profit, a grosser capital. These practices should be praised, and are needed, but under a different system, practices such as these will never bring a meaningful change, only Marxist thought and the political and scientific implementation of it in the material world can do so.
Well, when we talk about the exploitation of the workers, that’s what we mean, which is synonymous with wage theft, of course this is not the only way it happens, we also have poor working conditions, prolonged working hours, and so on, and so forth, but I can’t think of another “bad thing” about surplus value, it’s just how capitalists make their capital grow.
Regarding taxes, which is something libertarians tend to hate a lot because that’s how they think the government is “stealing from them” and who basically want zero control over how resources are managed, it’s not that they are necessarily bad. Taxes can be used, in a socialist economy transitioning to communism, as a tool to help fix a varied range of issues regarding income inequality and so on, but using taxes alone you can achieve significant change, just taxing the rich isn’t going to solve capitalism, or create some kind of “ethical capitalism”.
Now when it comes to using taxes as a tool to rob working people and help corporations to accumulate more wealth, I would refer to Ross Scot’s video about Deus Ex, specifically this part which talks about the very beginning of the game where you detain a terrorist, it will do way better than I do and in a fun way, you can watch from where I time stamped up until minute 28:08, although watching until the end is recommended, too.
Taxation is a tough one bc Tax isn’t bullshit but sometimes the way it’s administered absolutely is. In my region, a larger city put forth a tax on “sugary drinks” which eventually came to include bottled water. So homeless people had to pay an extra like 30-50 cents every time they wanted something that SHOULD be free.