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?
who the FUCK cares about birthrates except for citizens of bourgeois society
>Unironically, the only solution is socialism.wowww fucking genius
>>2454031>most capitalistthere arent "degrees of capitalism" today btw
>>2456867>The reason why birthrates are capitalisms most lethal contradiction is because the current pension scheme is predicated on the belief that labor will re-supply itself, that for every one retiree there would be three laborers creating value to support them. But since labor doesn't replenish the pension scheme gets worse and worse until retiring at all isn't economically feasible for the state. Of course immigration is the tool used to slow down this process, but a good chunk of this imported labor has no intention of retiring here, to the delight of the bourgeoiseIt could easily, but that's kind of another question. I don't believe in infinite growth and infinite productivity and utilization of resources. There is no point. We only need certain conditions and resources to maintain ourselves. We don't need to live in a future where everyone owns there own yacht with a crew of two dozen people, it's not possible and it doesn't make sense obviously. We just need shelter from the elements and nutrition and shit and then maybe like a community to have normal social life. This is achievable with stone age technology. We just keep raising the bar to ridiculous levels, the most ridiculous of which is none of these faggots can even prolong their life expectancy past whatever random poor fucker lived to a century +. You're all gonna die no matter what stupid faggot extravagant shit you had an army of people perform for your benefit in your life.
So yeah, even with a huge number of people never having children at all, homosexuals and etc. the breeders should easily be able to compensate provided we aren't all being squeezed to give the booj greater and greater extravagance that doesn't even provide any added enjoyment to them.
I think that the human population needs to reach an equilibrium, and the negative birth rates just indicate that the current system is above its carrying capacity, even if hypothetically we could support much more(but there is still an endpoint regardless of what crazy tech we can come up with.)
>So. Can porky survive this?>>2454031>Cuba and North Korea, the most capitalist nations on earthAssuming the under replacement rate countrys of the northern hemisphere will each need to take in 1% of their countrys population as replacement migration per year to avoid collapse, and that this will also eventually need to apply to india and china as well, then the northern hemisphere will eventually need to import around 40 million people per year
china will require 14 million people per year
india will require around the same so thats another 14 million
Europe needs 7.4 million
North america needs 3.8 million (mexicos TFR is also under replacement rate)
almost all of south america is also under replacement rate so they'll eventually need 4.3 million per year as well
so in total thats 43.5 million per year
Where will these migrants come from? probably not the middle east because they're all predicted to go under replacement TFR in the next 10 years as well, so they'll probably need migrants which will probably be around 5-10 million per year, so we're now at 47.5 - 53.5 million migrants needed per year to keep the northern hemisphere + south america afloat + the middle east
The obvious solution is to just drain Africa of people. China + Europe + India + the Americas can hypothetically import 50 million Africans per year, for the next 30-50 years before the continent is completely depopulated of people.
Scramble for Africa 2.0 is coming but it will be to take the continents people, not its resources.
>>2456839>>2456840>>2456841>You think "shotgun marriages" exist for the benefit of the father?It's for the benefit of the patriarch of the other family you retard. In patriarchal property relations, having a daughter who is pregnant, but without a guarantee of marriage, is disasterous. It means the cost of raising the child is entirely placed on the family clan, with the daughters value now viewed as diminished, leaving it difficult to aquire a new suitor. The lack of partner also means that the potential of being able to add said partners resources to the patriarchs own is now squandered.Traditional "Shotgun weddings", back even in the western feudal era, are effectively a way to cut losses. Yes, this man had a child with your daughter, denying her marrying someone possibility better off, but at the very best you can ensure there's somebody and you're not stuck with a unmarried daughter and a child.
>marriage has always or at least for centuries in the west, been an institution to primarily benefit women.Read Engels.
>>2457556>Read Engels.He's wrong.
>having a daughter who is pregnant, but without a guarantee of marriage, is disasterous. IIt's even more disastrous for the daughter.
>Unironically, the only solution is socialism.
>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.
This will quite literally never happen, Contemporary Left is too high on the antinatalism, environmentalism and childhate/misanthropy supply or they believe that people only have kids because they're brainwashed into being cis straight breeders when 90% of population is actually gay/childfree/antinatalist.
Instead you'll get One Child policies like those in PRC, Vietnam and Iran (yes Iran also had a population control policy at some point), only they won't be enforced as brutally as the ones mentioned above and with gayer terminology ("death to le cishet normiefag/chudcel breeding cults", "death to mombies", "kill all cishetmoids", "kill all crotch parasites under 16" et cetera).
>>2454056>>2456883>>2457844>>2457947Antinatalism is bourgeois and gay FYI.
>>2457895It's mostly genuinely getting their mind blown most people are still straight and want to have a family, but there are chunks of left that are practically r/childfree.
>>2458066I seem to be advocating more for a type of eugenics anyways. I know I couldn't stop people from breeding even if I wanted to. But like
>>2457947 has pointed out people generally don't want to breed that much anyways although I do kind of agree with>>2457860 that socialism would make having children easier and better. I don't particularly hate children or anything and I think a large chunk of childfree people are unfair towards them I also don't particularly feel good raising a child. Generally I just view life as unpleasant and that ultimately makes me view procreation as futile and not worth the effort.
>>2458258>2018imagine what it's like now
>Why be in an annoying relationship and force yourself to partner with someoneyeah hahaha imagine not being an alienated shell of a human being hahahaha
>>2458549Socialism won't help either.
Also it took me several rereads of that picture to realize it was gender flipped of "things men say that demean women".
Marx basically admits this very early in Capital Volume 1 OP:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrLlc_hAViY8:00-10:29 are relevant:
<The owner of labour-power is mortal. If then his appearance in the market is to be continuous, and the continuous conversion of money into capital assumes this, the seller of labour-power must perpetuate himself, “in the way that every living individual perpetuates himself, by procreation.”8 The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear and death, must be continually replaced by, at the very least, an equal amount of fresh labour-power. Hence the sum of the means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary for the labourer’s substitutes, i.e., his children, in order that this race of peculiar commodity-owners may perpetuate its appearance in the market.If making above subsistence wage makes you "a petty bourgeois treatlerite" because it allows you to "accumulate savings after monthly expenses" which are "reserves that can be potentially converted into capital" then by that same logic any couple who has fewer than 2 children or any single person who has fewer than 1 child is "petty bourgeois" because the subsistence wage is the wage required, according to Marx, not just to keep yourself alive, but also your children, since capitalism requires the labor force to reproduce itself.
If a nation's population fails to reproduce itself Capital has to seek out labor from other nations by outsourcing or using immigrant labor. Something we see in the imperial core. If you're single and aren't bearing the expense of raising at least 1 adopted child, or if you're a couple, and you aren't bearing the expense of raising at least 2 children, then you aren't reproducing the labor force for capital, which means that even with a subsistence wage (which by definition, according to Marx himself, includes the cost of raising children to adulthood), you will have left over savings that can go towards "treats" (luxury commodities that aren't essential for survival like vidya games) or be used as money capital (i.e. invested as self-expanding value in an interest yielding savings account or 401k or some other petty bourgeois asset).
By this logic, many of the most puritanical Marxists on here (like Iron Felix) who rail against "treatlerites" and such are usually single men without children (the usual imageboard demographic) who, even if we believe them, and they are "immiserated wage workers earning a subsistence wage and unable to accumulate savings" they aren't actually reproducing themselves, which is one of the things Marx originally stated about the working class. This is because Marx himself had 7 children, half of whom died before adulthood, and he was writing during a time when contraception and birth control and sex education were basically nonexistent. This is why Marx railed against the Malthusian doctrine and basically stated that it was impossible for the working class to practice abstinence collectively. I think one of the most important things that has changed since Marx's time is the availability of sex education, contraception, birth control, and a more skeptical attitude towards marriage and starting a family, as well as the rise of anti-reproductive ideologies like antinatalism. It is harder for capital in the imperial core countries to get the desired oversupply of labor power, which is why the resort to outsourcing and immigration. Only a handful of "developing" countries still have fertility rates higher than 4 children per woman, and most of the imperial core countries have trouble getting each woman to have 2 children. So the labor force is not reproducing itself.
Birth strike under capitalism does increase wages actually by lowering the supply of labor and thereby increasing its demand. The inverse is also the case, which is what Marx was trying to point out with the idea of the reserve army of labor, or as Eugene Debs once called it, the reserve army of scabs. The same is true in pre-capitalism. In feudalism for example the only people who were wage workers were artisans in the towns, in the guilds. But when the black plague happened in the 1300s a lot of them died and their wages effectively doubled. This enraged King Edward III in England, at the time, so much, that he tried to freeze wages, but it as basically unenforceable. That was the result of a pandemic instead of a birth strike but we see similar patterns whenever the working population does not reproduce itself: The bourgeoisie has to pay more wages.
So maybe instead of being puritanical about who's "really proletarian" based on the ability to accumulate savings or not (without even considering whether it's set aside for emergency or used as money capital or both), we should look at how vastly different the imperial core is as an environment itself than during Marx's time. The proletariat is able to do things like accumulate savings even when making a subsistence wage by staying single and refusing to reproduce. Now if you want to redefine "subsistence" away from Marx's definition to not include reproduction, fine, but keep in mind that workers failing to reproduce themselves is not sustainable for Capital as a multi-generational system based on self expanding value and high profit rates, which is why Marx was focused on it as a system that needs to survive for more than 1 generation of working class life, which is why he included the cost of reproduction in subsistence.
>>2459025>If making above subsistence wage makes you "a petty bourgeois treatlerite" petit bourgeois blah blahretard who thinks theres a defined numerical cutoff in what determines a proletarian and middle classer
you scholastic morons get hung up way too much on isolated sentences to think about what makes the proletariat and what makes the middle class
the fact is: you do not get away from the messiness that offends your theoretical conscience in the conceptions usually put forward here with these kinds of formal considerations. the fuzziness of the middle class is a specific characteristic of it
im sure everyone can see the difference between a person with scanty earnings that can suddenly afford a bit more due to fighting with class brothers, and a wealthy person that moves into one of the richest and most expensive places on earth for example
>>2458536it's not
just the availability of contraception but the emphasis on career, the lack of free time to spend with your family, etc.
>>2459181First I don't really have any friends. Yeah big surprise I know. Second if I go by my coworkers most of them have kids or are having kids. Almost every year I've worked here somebody was having kids. Right now there's about two people expecting that I see. But the bulk seem to stop at two although several have 4 or maybe more I've really seen 4 as max. I'm actually an odd one out , what surprise right, since I have no kids and I'm actually middle age at this point. Most of the other Non parents are in their 20s or even teens . Point is I came about with my line of thinking despite what I see although I will concede it might be due to me just being not particularly normal or maybe maladjusted . I'm this guy
>>2458100 by the way
>>2459258Lol what is this asshurt
Are you personally offended by someone bringing up points on this subject
>>2459574Machines must be maintained and rebuild
Too bad, it does matter
Unique IPs: 43