/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

This post is just a quick informal thing to kick off discussion, I won't claim to be as informed as I should be and some of my points may be wrong.

>declining birthrates lead to shrinking economic growth and tax revenue+larger proportion of dependents, all due to a shrinking labor force
>birthrate decline (not yet population decline) is happening in most countries outside of Africa, regardless of socioeconomic development, cost of living or culture (incl. religion or "feminism")
>the most likely primary common cause is the simple availability of choice: not needing children as extra labor, more access to birth control/abortion, etc.
>>secondarily, often it is not the case that people don't want children but that they want to have them later in life and want to give their children optimal lives, e.g. being unwilling to raise children until one has a high-paying stable job; this also leads to people having less children overall
>>the chain reaction here is that the higher the standard of living gets, the bigger the opportunity cost of having children when one actually gets to DECIDE whether to have them, as well as a more demanding standard for WHEN one should have them
>the proposed liberal capitalist solutions fail to tackle the problem:
>>paying people to have children needs to cover the opportunity cost of not having them, which is already massive and will continue to increase the more an economy grows, which will eventually become unsustainable for governments
>>roundabout solutions like providing parents with tax cuts, exceptional welfare or a lower retirement age suffer from the same problem
>>even increased immigration will only stop the bleeding temporarily as the global population fails to keep up
>>automation might "cover" the decrease in labor force but at the same societal cost that massive automation will always bring

With all of the above in mind, it seems that capitalism combined with reproductive choice contains the seed of its own decline. Stagnation threatens the system, but growth leads in its own roundabout way back to stagnation.
The capitalists thus only have the option of restricting or steering choice, from banning abortion and contraceptives to the more extreme scenario of forcing women to be broodmares; or alternatively, by an ideology of pro-natalism for the "greater good", requiring many people to act against "rational self-interest".
In practice, however, those options are just forms of reaction, and even when reaction is successful (and it rarely is) all it can ultimately lead to is a repeat of the past, susceptible to the same conditions and contradictions that caused it to crumble once before.
This is a classic problem that manifests in many ways: capitalism needs laborers to be spenders, but progress inevitably requires a decrease in their ability to do so; in this case, by directly cutting the supply of labor.

Unironically, the only solution is socialism.
The only way to change this equation around without making things worse for everyone is by challenging the assumptions of growth and opportunity cost. This can happen in many ways.
If making a living isn't tied to the success of companies which need constant growth to stay competitive, the dependence on constantly increasing birthrates is reduced.
On the other hand, if society can directly contribute to making child rearing easier and less expensive instead of subsidizing the artificial difficulties and costs created by the market, the opportunity cost of having children is also reduced.
And this ties into many other factors. More safety, more education, more stability, they all ease the burden on parents.
But as you can see, it requires real socialism. Can't half-ass it and call it socialism anyway or you'll pay the price. You need real socialist outcomes.

So. Can porky survive this?