If you're trying to blame "stupid consumers" or "evil companies" you're not thinking about things systemically. Of course, under our current economic system, companies are going to end up exploiting, because there's lots of pressure to maximise profits, and minimal pressure to avoid decisions that make money but harm society. And consumers are going to make bad decisions, because they live in a society where they are constantly bombarded by advertising and social values that encourage spending and don't punish buying unnecessary shit.

The naïve (or self-serving) status quo view is "but consumers should know what they can afford, and not waste money. And customers should take their business elsewhere if a company does bad things". If that's really what you want to happen, then create a system that incentivizes that - have strict rules on credit and loans, so that people can't buy takeaway food on credit, enforce strict anti-monopoly measures so that there lots of genuine alternatives for consumers to turn to, have requirements for news media to inform the public about all the actions that companies take that are harmful to the environment, their workers, or the general population (and make clear who are their competitors, and only those alternatives that aren't owned by the same conglomerate), and so on...

If someone promotes a system that relies on "personal responsibility" but doesn't promote tools that facilitiate that responsibility, then they are being disingenuous.

"are corporations whose sole purpose is to extract as much money from the masses as possible with no thoughts to anything else up to and including destroying the house it occupies in order to maximize profits to blame for the world around us? Or is it those dirty fucking people with all their bad gross nasty purchasing of the things the corporation shoves down their throats?"

I'm sorry but did a CEO write this?

IMO, consumers aren't necessarily stupid as much as corporations have very expertly learned to weaponize FOMO through advertising; allowing companies like apple to inflate their profit margin from something reasonable to "whatever the consumer is willing to pay."

Is that "capitalism"? Yes...technically. But to me, it goes against the spirit of capitalism, which at its heart sums up as "Farmer has a cow that produces milk. Farmer sells the chicken farmer down the road his extra milk and charges enough to be reasonable but doesn't get greedy because he needs eggs."

Corporations don't need our eggs. They don't believe they need anything from us and so don't care about being reasonable about profit.

Its "capitalism", but in my opinion, a perverse, stilted form that should have been kicked to the curb the moment Reaganomics started making it popular.

Think systemically like the other guy said. Under capitalism consumption is purpose. I can't blame people for wanting purpose. If you dislike consumerism, you need to create a system that gives people purpose in something else.

I also think that theoretically there's not anything wrong with consumerism as long as the profits are distributed amongst the workers fairly, like with a cooperative with worker-owner-shareholders who democratically decide their own working conditions and hours and output.

With a large enough amount of stakeholders in that business (workers) who all have democratic decision-making power over the business, I doubt they would collectively decide to shit up the planet with waste or poison consumers since none of them would be shielded by extreme wealth from the effects of all that.

Sometimes people just want the shiny thing, thats okay. I think it would actually shine a bit better if it wasn't made by slave or sweatshop labour in the global south and the profits didn't all go evaporate in some private equity ponzi scheme.