this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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You're conflating population growth with capitalistic and exploitative growth. the fact that we're destroying our ecology does have little to do with the population and everything to do with capitalist overextraction.
The capitalists would extract less if they had fewer workers and not as many people to sell stuff to.
are u serious?
I’m being a little snide but yeah supply and demand right? If the population reduces it impacts the demand for products and also the supply of workers.
Capitalists aren’t going to stop ruining the earth out of the goodness of their hearts or anything.
I get that less workers would mean more power to the workers, but avoiding having kids to limit the supply of workers seems, idk, fucking weird and also weirdly passive?
You can protest, join a union, start a workers co-op or organise in different ways, but that takes effort. Or you could not have kids, which takes less effort than having kids, and say it’s praxis? Idk, to me this feels like packaging your own personal choice as a grand political stand, as if you would jump at the opportunity to have kids if we lived in a socialist society.
Also, to counter your point, historically a lot of protest and unrest came from a dissatisfied populace with not enough job opportunities. So by that logic you should just pop out kids so they’ll be a part of the revolution. I don’t believe this, to be clear, but I mention it as a way to illustrate that basing your decision to have kids on how it will affect the supply and demand of labour is really fucking weird, and also not even something with a predictable outcome.
Oh my heavens no it’s not the only reason not to have kids and it’s not even factor #1 for me as a reason to not. Just one factor among many.
But this part of the thread started with a claim, as I understood it, that population growth wasn’t the problem - that the problem was instead capitalistic exploitation.
I’m just pointing out that limiting one could solve the other. Because I don’t think the oligarchs who rule the world will ever let us protest/unrest in a meaningful way again. People are kept just comfortable enough with fast food, Starbucks, entertainment, etc and just tired enough from selling labour that the vast majority of people wouldn’t care or engage with any sort of meaningful reform to the system.
We can’t even get people to engage in not electing King Fascist (US) and far-right populist Milhouse (Canada). For what reason??? Our other alternatives are middling, one is too old and in Canada I think they’re just tired of the tone and the tone deafness of our current guy. Seems like pretty lame excuses peddled by media that is owned by the very same oligarchs who stand to benefit the most from far right governments. The recent news in the UK and France makes it sting a little less, I guess.
How bad are we prepared to let things get? It’s gonna have to get pretty ugly at a local level for any meaningful change to happen.
I get what you’re saying, but it just feels incredibly (and needlessly) defeatist to me.
Socialism would no doubt increase the planets carrying capacity for humans, but not make it limitless. It is also nowhere near close to being implemented so I am assessing the world that we have, not the one I'd like it to be. Also, even if we did away with capitalism tomorrow we'd probably still need to discuss reasonable population growth and come up with a reasonable estimate for our planet's carrying capacity which could be weighed against quality of life, human happiness, etc as we transition our economy away from late stage capitalism.
I'd argue that it's more likely that capitalism is abolished tomorrow than any government having a proposed solution to population control that's not fundamentally evil.
I wouldn't. Really all post industrial countries need to do is stop trying to directly insentivize having kids and maybe provide access to free/low cost contraceptives. I think that's a lot easier than having socialism implemented in enough countries for it to matter.
Maybe Santa will bring that to you next Christmas, if you're a good Femcowboy. /s