The political establishment and its media are in a panic over the number of children being born. Public figures and publications from all over the political spectrum seem to share in this anxiety. Elon Musk worries that “low birth rates will end civilization.” Vice President J.D. Vance claims that raising birth rates is a priority of the Trump administration and says he wants “more babies in America.” The Atlantic frets that “The Birth-Rate Crisis Isn’t as Bad as You’ve Heard—It’s Worse.” Even Jacobin, the flagship social-democratic publication, has called for “A Left Response to the Birth Rate Crisis.”
Historically, anxiety over birth rates was confined to racist, far-right “great replacement” conspiracy theories or orientalist reporting on Japan or South Korea. However today this concern has gone mainstream. It is not hard to understand why. Low birth rates, once confined to East Asia and a few European countries, have become commonplace among the majority of Global North countries.
According to the United Nations’ population numbers for 2023, the US birth rate was at 1.6, Europe on average around 1.4, and Japan was at 1.2. Perhaps the poster child for low birth rates, South Korea’s birth rate in 2023 was 0.7! The UN birth rate figure referenced here is the total fertility rate (TFR), which measures the number of births per woman. Demographers consider a TFR of about 2.1 to produce a stable population size for wealthy nations. Below that rate and without immigration, the population will eventually shrink.
As socialists we do not agree that low birth rates are a crisis, at least not for humanity. However, for the capitalist system it is a crisis.
High birth rates are now mostly confined to impoverished African nations. For example, in 2023 according to the UN, Chad had a birth rate of 6.1 and Nigeria’s was 4.5. Indeed, due to these African nations’ relatively high fertility and falling fertility elsewhere, their share of the global population is projected to rise from 19 percent to 26 percent by 2050.
As socialists we do not agree that low birth rates are a crisis, at least not for humanity. Compared to the risk of nuclear war, ecological collapse, or another global pandemic, the problems presented by a shrinking, aging population are quite minimal. However, for the capitalist system it is a crisis.
A brief history of capitalist population anxieties
Any discussion of population growth and birth rates under capitalism must begin with the 18th century English reverend, Thomas Malthus. Malthus came to prominence for his 1798 publication, An Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he argued that population growth inevitably caused hardship, famine, war, and disease. His ideas laid the intellectual basis for bourgeois attacks on the poor, labelling them the “surplus population.”
The basis of Malthus’s thought lay in the idea that resources are necessarily limited. In this view, more people means more strain on food supplies, housing, and other essential resources. The fundamental flaw of Malthusian thinking is not recognizing that human beings are not merely passive consumers, but also producers. If the average person were indeed a burden on society, it would be impossible for there to be an exploiting class of capitalists. There would be no billionaires with megayachts.
Until recently, Malthusianism has been the dominant perspective among the ruling class. It was not long ago that liberal publications would call the Earth overpopulated and identify population expansion as the reason for scarce housing and jobs, environmental destruction, or any other social problem.
If the average person were indeed a burden on society, it would be impossible for there to be an exploiting class of capitalists. There would be no billionaires with megayachts.
The publication of the 1968 book The Population Bomb by Stanford professor and environmentalist Paul Ehrlich heralded the era of neo-Malthusian thought. Writing in the aftermath of the post-World War II baby boom, Ehrlich predicted that widespread starvation, declining living standards, and calamity would befall humanity if it did not engage in population control. Even his book cover dramatically exclaims that “while you are reading these words, four people will have died of starvation, most of them children.” Suffice it to say that Ehrlich’s doom-and-gloom predictions did not materialize.
Ehrlich’s anxiety about population growth was in fact racist. The opening paragraph of The Population Bomb provides an example of who Ehrlich had in mind for the population controls he argued for: he describes a taxi ride he took with his family in India, calling the streets overcrowded and the locals filthy. Ehrlich’s barely-concealed racial animus spoke to the anxiety the ruling class had over the rising population of its potential rivals, such as India and China.
The book After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case For People by the economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso serves to herald a new era of natalism, much like The Population Bomb did for the former era of Malthusian thought. After the Spike was funded in part by the Musk Foundation, presumably to popularize Musk’s own natalist position. To be sure, this book is terrible. It is infected with the diseases that commonly afflict bourgeois intellectuals: idealism, an irrational faith in human (i.e., capitalist) progress, and normalization of capitalist social relations. However, as such it is a useful lens into the ruling class’s thinking on the matter.
Spears and Geruso’s thesis is that the world is on track for sub-replacement birth rates, and the eventual result is global exponential population decline. They project low birth rates far into the future and claim that the population will begin to precipitously decline sometime after 2080. The authors’ attempt to justify this claim by declaring that there is no countervailing force that will automatically restore higher birth rates. This is a dubious premise.
A higher dependency ratio puts more strain on the working population. A higher portion of the working population must drop their paid work in order to perform care work. It is usually women who find themselves in this position.
The next section of the book combats Malthusianism by arguing that a larger population of people is generally better for humanity as a whole. In the chapter “More Good is Better,” the authors lay out their philosophical case for increasing birth rates to stabilize the population. Spears and Geruso argue that human life is generally good, so more of it is better.
From a Marxist perspective, this shift towards natalism is a result of the ruling class’s fear of a lack of workers and soldiers in the future. If all value is ultimately produced by human labor, it follows that global economic growth depends on population growth. If the human population begins to fall precipitously, so too will the global economy.
There are deeper economic reasons for shifts in the population policy of capitalists. Apart from concerns over raw GDP, another statistic called the dependency ratio worries bourgeois economists. This number measures the ratio of people working to those who cannot, such as children, the elderly, or the disabled. A higher dependency ratio puts more strain on the working population. A higher portion of the working population must drop their paid work in order to perform care work. It is usually women who find themselves in this position.
In the middle of the 20th century, a major source of growth in the labor market across the world was from the entrance of women into the labor market. This shift into paid work could only become possible if the dependency ratio was low enough to allow most women to enter paid work freely. It would be politically difficult for the ruling class to engage in a serious reduction of the elderly or disabled populations. So the easier lever for the ruling class to control the dependency ratio was to reduce the child population by reducing the number of children born in the first place.
The dependency ratio was the main motivation behind China’s One-Child Policy, for example. Reducing the number of children born allowed the Chinese ruling class to benefit from what bourgeois economists call a “demographic dividend,” or in simpler terms a large working-age population. However, as many demographers point out, while birth rates have declined significantly in China, the One-Child Policy likely had a negligible contribution to this trend. Peer nations, like South Korea or Japan, had similar birth-rate trajectories without any such formal restriction on births.
Now the dependency ratio and low birth rates spur the ruling classes towards natalism. If birth rates remain low, eventually the proportion of elderly retirees will rise in relation to the working population. In absolute terms, there will be fewer workers to exploit and the percentage of workers available for exploitation will decline.
From a Marxist perspective, this shift towards natalism is a result of the ruling class’s fear of a lack of workers and soldiers in the future.
The dependency ratio explains why Spears and Geruso do not take their own philosophical arguments to their natural conclusion, i.e. towards unbounded population growth. Instead, Spears and Geruso confine their conclusion to population stabilization. They liken having too many babies to eating too much pie, deploying the ‘too much of a good thing’ cliché. This is what passes for rigorous philosophical arguments among bourgeois intellectuals these days. The real reason the authors confine themselves to population stabilization is because unbounded population growth would dampen economic growth.
Capitalists prefer a stable or slowly-growing population. If the population grows too quickly, it takes too many people out of paid work to care for children and becomes a drag on economic growth. On the other hand, if the population declines in size, there will be less labor to exploit and fewer soldiers to fight in the wars that eventually result from economic and national decline. This preference explains the shift in ruling-class thought through history from Malthusianism to natalism.
Why are birth rates declining?
Even if we do not consider low birth rates a crisis, we must understand this trend and its social consequences — how capitalists are likely to react and whether their interventions will have the desired effect.
Conservatives blame the gains made by women’s struggles for low birth rates, and argue for a return to rigid gender norms. The liberal response can be split into two camps: those who argue that low birth rates are a non-issue, and those who argue that it is an issue of the rising cost of children. Those who say it’s a non-issue often call for increased immigration and automation to keep the economy growing. Whereas in regard to the rising cost of children, the other camp calls for measures like free childcare and cash payments to parents.
To its credit, After the Spike does a decent job addressing and rejecting these common arguments. Spears and Geruso address the cost argument at length since it is the most popular and straightforward argument. They point out that birth rates remain low in countries like Sweden and Finland that provide free childcare, cash for parents, strong paternity leave, and so on. Monetary costs are not the primary deterrent, at least not exactly. However, they accept a slightly different version of the cost argument: the idea of “opportunity cost.”
Mainstream discussions of opportunity cost with regards to children usually go something like this: while having children is expensive, as any parent will tell you, the biggest cost is the opportunities that are lost by having them —the opportunities to travel on a whim, to live in a different city, or to engage in leisure activities. Generally it is portrayed as an individual choice, made in a world where childbearing is increasingly unattractive in comparison to the other options available for one’s lifestyle.
Opportunity cost is the best explanation for low birth rates only if we change our point of view from that of the individual worker to that of the capitalist class. To understand this process by analogy, look to deindustrialization as a historical trend that has already occurred in the US.
The decline of manufacturing and the rise of the rentier economy
In the 1970s, the US ruling class faced declining profitability in its manufacturing sectors. The ruling class began to move a large portion of its manufacturing offshore, especially lower-skilled and rote forms of manufacturing. As a result, the US went from being the world’s undisputed champion of manufacturing to its more modest role today. But even today the US remains a global manufacturing powerhouse, second only to China. Despite comprising 4.2 percent of the world’s population, the US produces 13 percent of all manufactured goods globally
The left often speaks of deindustrialization as a way to crush domestic unions and lower wage costs. While certainly true, there is more to it than that. Within any capitalist nation, certain resources are fundamentally limited. There is only so much water, land, minerals, oil, forests, and so on. The capitalist class is obligated to make the most profitable use of these limited resources, lest it falls behind in international competition. While these resources are not used to their fullest, profits can grow by increasing their utilization. However, once resources are fully utilized, the only way to increase profits is for more profitable activities to displace the less profitable ones.
Displacement of less profitable activities was one main reason for deindustrialization. As the US capitalist class’s wealth grew, it needed more profitable avenues for investment. Many lower tiers of manufacturing were no longer profitable in the US. Moving the lower tiers of manufacturing to countries like China or Mexico made space for more profitable businesses domestically.
Having children increasingly appears to be a luxury which fewer and fewer people can afford.
A similar process is playing out now with babies instead of manufacturing parts. Human reproduction itself has been crowded out by the need for profitable investments.
As mentioned above, the lack of profitable investment opportunities has had to be filled by investments into what Marx termed fictitious capital, in reference to the speculative or financial part of the economy. Stocks, bonds, cryptocurrencies, and real estate are examples of fictitious capital. A defining characteristic of fictitious capital is that it is not valuable itself; instead, it represents a claim on existing value elsewhere in the economy. The value of fictitious capital is speculative, or fictitious, until it is realized — i.e. sold and converted into money.
How does fictitious capital increase profits? Instead of investments to produce something, these investments tend to be some form of rent extraction — the type of rent extraction that monopolizes the necessities of life to make them more expensive, and thus, more profitable.
For example, childcare costs have soared as private equity has consolidated its hold on the industry. The costs of medical treatments and health insurance have ballooned. Home prices have sharply risen by 50 percent since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. These are part of the trend towards rent extraction over productive investment. Thus, having children increasingly appears to be a luxury which fewer and fewer people can afford.
Rising parenting intensity
At the same time that support for parents has collapsed and the expectations for parenting have risen, the amount of time parents spend with their children has soared. In the US, the “gentle parenting” approach (treating one’s child like the undeveloped human being they are) has become more popular than the authoritarian style that was dominant in the past. This change in parenting style is good: no one should advocate a return to the authoritarian style whose violent motto was “spare the rod, spoil the child.”
As capitalism decays, this rise in parenting intensity reflects the increased competition for a decent life. In the past, employers might have overlooked mediocre grades in high school. A college degree of any kind was the ticket to a good job. Now low grades may hold a person back from an important scholarship and lock them into even more debt, or out of college entirely. At the same time, college degrees often translate into meager-paying and unstable jobs, if they translate into a job at all. Working and middle-class parents must work harder to shepherd their children into the remaining slots for a decent life.
Beyond these considerations, there is the issue of time. Long gone are the days when a worker could get a decently paid manufacturing or construction job out of high school. These days most working class people must obtain a four-year degree and work for around a decade before they are stable enough in their career and finances to consider having children. This is why the age at which one’s first child is born has risen to 30 years old or more across the developed world.
The tradeoff between childbearing and career progression is obvious for workers, especially for women. However, it is a tradeoff for capitalists as well. Capitalists need skilled labor and must work to maximize the number of available skilled laborers. It takes years on the job to acquire the types of skills that are valuable to capitalists and expand their wealth. Time and energy spent towards acquiring and cultivating these skills is time and energy not spent caring for children.
Productivity growth and productive investment
Productivity growth is essential to the long-term growth of profits in any developed capitalist society. While profits may be increased by raising the intensity of work or lengthening the working day, these strategies reach their natural limits quickly. Inevitably, capitalists must increase the productivity of labor through machinery and automation to raise their profits. Thus, capitalists can increase exploitation without giving the appearance of anything being lost by the worker since working-class living standards remain intact. As Karl Marx wrote in Capital, Volume I:
The value of commodities is in inverse ratio to the productiveness of labour. And so, too, is the value of labour-power, because it depends on the values of commodities. … Hence there is immanent in capital an inclination and constant tendency, to heighten the productiveness of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and by such cheapening to cheapen the labourer himself.
The problem for capital across the developed world is that productivity growth has declined significantly, and in some cases reversed. As Marxist economist Michael Roberts points out, it is partly due to the decline of investment into the productive sectors of the economy as a result of a declining rate of profit. Instead, the avenues for profitable investment are increasingly found in unproductive rentier investments. These rentier investments are in effect direct assaults on the living standards of workers, which also lowers birth rates.
Even if productivity growth could be restored, there is reason to believe it would not do much to increase the birth rate. While factory and office workers can often be automated, care work mostly cannot. In spite of the many technological advancements of the past century, roles like teaching, nursing, and parenting remain as labor intensive today as a century ago, if not more so.
We must conclude that capitalism’s own development causes birth rates to decline. As capitalists continue to seek new investment opportunities for their expanding piles of wealth, these opportunities come at the expense of their society’s own future. Birth rates are low in Global North nations because of their accumulated wealth, not despite it. Conversely, birth rates are higher (though still falling) in Global South nations because of their lack of accumulated wealth, not in spite of it.
There is no fix under capitalism
As bourgeois intellectuals realize this trend, they seek to make reforms to increase the birth rate. While none of the interventions by capitalists will succeed, we should understand the goal of the capitalists in more detail.
Capitalists prefer a growing or stable population over a shrinking one insofar as it provides them with profitably exploitable labor. To achieve this capitalists have relied on the heterosexual, patriarchal, nuclear family to produce and raise children. The essential quality of this model for capitalists is the privatization of the many costs of raising the next generation of workers, which allows capitalists to receive fresh labor on the cheap. While important strides have been made towards gender equality, women continue to perform the bulk of childrearing labor.
In practice, although dominant, the nuclear family has not been the sole provider of labor, nor has its privatization of costs been total. Depending on the historical epoch, capitalists supplemented this model with both immigration and slave labor. They were also forced to give important concessions to the working class to socialize some costs and supplement its reproduction; namely education, national health services, housing subsidies, and welfare.
Capitalist attempts to increase the birth rate should be understood as a political project aimed at shoring up the nuclear family. In this context, it makes sense why natalists tend to be vehemently misogynistic, transphobic, etc. Perhaps the “crisis” of low birth rates is more accurately called a crisis for the nuclear family.
We must conclude that capitalism’s own development causes birth rates to decline. As capitalists continue to seek new investment opportunities for their expanding piles of wealth, these opportunities come at the expense of their society’s own future.
The terms of the debate in the ruling class over this issue are quite narrow. The progressive wing argues for reforms like baby bonuses, subsidized childcare, an equitable distribution of childrearing labor between men and women, and heightened immigration to supplement the nuclear family. The reactionary wing calls for a return to strict gender norms and increasing restrictions on access to contraceptives. The debate excludes support for non-traditional families, like LGBTQ+ or polyamorous families, since these family structures are outside the traditional nuclear family.
Some of these reforms are monetary incentives. In 2019 the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán, who is an authoritarian leader and natalist, offered couples an interest-free loan of about $36,000. The loan would be cancelled if the couples had three children. By 2024 the Hungarian birth rate sank to a new low of 1.38 from 1.45 in 2019. South Korea invested $200 billion in the past 16 years. Its birth rate remains extremely low at 0.75. Despite a recent small increase, for South Korea to reach a replacement rate the birth rate would need to triple. Finland with its famed family support programs like free daycare and housing subsidies had a birth rate of 1.32 in 2022.
The US ruling class has only begun to address this trend, so it is unclear what its response will be. But so far, it doesn’t seem like the ruling class is willing to invest much in changing the birth rate. The first explicitly natalist US policy, passed by the Republicans as part of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” is a single $1,000 “baby bonus” paid into a tax-deferred investment account. The Democratic Party has been tepid about the issue, but if they have acknowledged it, their proposed policies have generally been means-tested subsidies. If Orbán’s incentives haven’t raised birth rates, one may conclude that attempts by the US ruling class won’t either.
Coercive measures are unlikely to be effective. Measures like banning contraception, suppressing sexual education or making divorce more difficult are likely to create discontent and protests. Enforcing these coercive measures would be deeply unpopular. Regardless of the enforceability of such measures, there is no guarantee that capitalists would benefit. Studies support that unwanted children are often not cared for by their parents. Children without parental care often grow up to become violent or antisocial adults, which does not make for an exploitable labor force. For example, a study by Stanford Law estimates that Roe v. Wade, which effectively legalized most abortions in the US until its overturn in 2022, led to a 47 percent decline in violent crime due to the reduction in unwanted children.
Romania is the canonical example of this phenomenon. In response to a drop in Romanian birth rate, in 1967, the Stalinist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu passed Decree 770, banning abortion and contraception for women of reproductive age. Women of reproductive age were monitored for pregnancies by monthly gynecological exams to ensure that their pregnancies continued. The result was an initial rise in births followed by a steep dropoff. Unwanted children were left in orphanages en masse. Ceausescu was eventually overthrown and killed in 1989 in no small part thanks to the orphans he had created.
Ceausescu’s coercive natalism, while extreme, had precedence within other Stalinist regimes. Joseph Stalin engaged in similar coercive policies. In the 1930s under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet government banned abortion and made divorce difficult. However, the Russian birth rate largely continued to decline. China’s One-Child Policy intended to have the opposite effect, but was just as draconian. Couples were forced to pay fines for having “too many” children, and in some cases were forcibly sterilized. Due to a patriarchal preference for boys, female pregnancies were frequently aborted and infant girls were often abandoned, leading to a generation of “missing women” in China which remains to this day.
To be clear, Firebrand is pro-choice in the fullest sense. Policies that restrict reproductive autonomy in either direction have no place in a genuinely socialist society. These egregious violations of reproductive rights are among the reasons why we do not characterize the former Soviet Union, China, or any other Stalinist regimes as socialist.
If neither the stick nor the carrot change birth rates, can immigration fill in the cracks? While immigration could function as a supplement, it is not a permanent or a complete fix. Immigration already accounts for nearly all population growth in the US, but it is a temporary bandaid. Also, most of the world is experiencing declining birth rates. Global North countries will find themselves in competition with each other for a declining number of migrants in the years to come.
How should socialists respond?
In 1983, Wally Seccombe wrote in his 1983 article “Marxism and Demography” that Marxism has historically avoided questions of demography or birth rates. If Marxists have spoken on demography, it has been to counter Malthusian narratives. In contrast, Marxists have had plenty to say on family relations, the nuclear family, and patriarchy. This has changed recently, as Jacobin and the author Jenny Brown have addressed low birth rates, each reflecting a particular trend on the left.
Jacobin’s view is almost indistinguishable from the progressive liberal position. In his article “Why the Left Should Care About Population Decline,” David Calnitsky argues that a declining population will make the welfare state untenable and will lead to economic decline. The focus of his argument is what he calls a breakdown in social cohesion and thus, democracy..
Calnitsky joins many liberals in saying that as the population declines society will become less democratic, because the elderly will outvote younger people. They also conclude that welfare state programs like Medicare, Social Security, old-age pensions, etc. will inescapably burden the youth against a burgeoning elderly population.
An issue with this argument is that the biggest drain on the wealth of all working people — young and elderly alike — is from capitalists. Soaring rents, exorbitant medical bills, and extortionate child- and eldercare costs hit the whole of the working class in one way or another. There is also the plain exploitation of capitalist social relations. The average CEO is paid 632 times their lowest-paid employee. The taxes paid for Medicare and Social Security are nothing compared to the wealth regularly stolen by capitalists.
Another issue is the presumption that the elderly vote to keep these programs. The reality is that no capitalist government is genuinely democratic. The elderly cannot vote to keep Social Security anymore than the young can vote for better childcare. Capitalist governments around the world have been trying for decades to roll back gains won by the elderly regardless of their voting base.
Capitalist attempts to increase the birth rate should be understood as a political project aimed at shoring up the nuclear family. In this context, it makes sense why natalists tend to be vehemently misogynistic, transphobic, etc.
Lastly, they assume that programs meant to keep the elderly out of poverty are a net loss for the young. Realistically, it is the opposite. Anyone who has cared for an aging parent knows it is difficult, thankless, expensive, and can easily upend your life. Programs that help care for the elderly prevent such responsibilities from falling upon the shoulders of their family members. Also, when it is easier for the elderly to retire, their retirements tend to create job openings for younger workers. Do not forget that young people will join the elderly population eventually — one presumes they would not want to be stuck in poverty for the crime of growing old either!
It is true that welfare programs today are set up to require an ever-expanding population. It does not have to be done this way. Enormous productivity gains have been made over the past decades, but the benefits have been concentrated for a small group of capitalists. If those gains were used to reduce workloads or provide the elderly with increased support, the living standards of the majority of workers would remain intact without sending the elderly into poverty.
Calnitsky is right to an extent in that population decline will render the welfare state untenable under capitalism. The welfare state (and social democracy in general) is a compromise between capitalists and workers, usually following a period of heightened class struggle. The welfare state is in essence a luxury that capitalists can only afford in an environment of economic growth and profits. Otherwise capitalists must attack working-class living standards and the welfare state to achieve profitability. If the working population declines, profits will become harder to come by, and social democracy will be untenable.
In contrast to the typical Jacobin view, Jenny Brown’s 2019 book Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight Over Women’s Work views low birth rates as a kind of protest against declining living standards for families — an unconscious birth slowdown or “birth strike.” While not completely analogous to a traditional strike with demands and union leadership, it is a thought-provoking way to look at the issue.
Brown’s framing is an improvement over the mainstream discourse for her recognition that the unpaid childrearing done by parents, and especially women, is labor. It naturally leads to questions about why this labor is unpaid and made so difficult by society. She makes clear the class conflict that underlies the fight over childrearing labor and birth rates. Brown provides the real reason why billionaires are against reproductive rights and how little it does with their religion.
However, Brown’s argument is not without its drawbacks. Calling low birth rates a birth strike implies a wage-labor relationship. It runs the risk of implicitly accepting the capitalist framing of familial relations. For capitalists, working-class families are just a way to produce their future workforce. Children are a mere product for capitalists to exploit like any other resource.
However, working-class parents do not see it that way. Rearing one’s own children is labor and often the most fulfilling labor one can do. Childrearing is mostly unalienated labor and unlike any other kind of work under capitalism. For most would-be parents, forgoing children is as much a personal loss as it is a refusal of unpaid labor. To paraphrase Marx, having children is not a sacrifice to life like wage labor is, but a part of living itself.
Socialists must maintain that low birth rates are not a crisis. Working-class living standards can be maintained in spite of a declining population by lowering exploitation, which will require class struggle. We must raise bold demands like housing allowances, free universal childcare, pay for parents, and more to make the lives of parents and children easier — not to raise birth rates, but because we believe that parents deserve to be recognized for their labor and that all children deserve to live free of poverty.
