population under communism

[midnight888]

Hi all...

With todays technology and principles of communism, there is no need anyone to work full time hours and the entire world's standard of living can be increased. But how would we control the population, as this new system will allow people more time to have sex and more time to look after them. And since everything can be provided for their needs, there is no deterrent to stop at having 2 children. Basically everyone will be having 7 or more children. This will put stress on the finite resources.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

Surely you are aware of the fact that the higher living condition and the more equal rights for women are, the lower the birth rate generally is, right? Usually enormous families were a necessity for many poorer farmworker families in order to provide for the future. Why would everyone be having 7 children? I'm never having any.

Even at the current rate the world population is, even excluding losses due to unforeseen disasters, going to balance out at roughly 10 billion and begin to naturally decline due to falling birth rates.

[RedGuevara]

Takayuki has a point. It's already been shown that as education for women is not only increased, but encouraged, that their chances of having a cluster of kiddies declines. Think about it? Women aren't seen, nor should they be, as birthing machines but women and more importantly human beings. Therefore overpopulation takes care of itself when women are treated, not only equally, but given more chances to a proper and justified education. (Also I'm back.:D)

[Slavic]

Not to mention contraception would be more available and hopefully less stigmatized.

And lol at the idea that more free time equals more sex. There are plenty of people having sex all the time. The prospect of sex tends to make free time magicly appear despite how many hours a week you work.

[Comrade Strong]

No. The higher people's standards of living are, the less children they have. Population regulates itself.

[Tim Cornelis]

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Conclusion is 'babies per woman decrease when:
1. Children survive.
2. Many children are not needed for work
3. Women get education and join the labour force
4. Family planning is accessible.'

[RedWorker]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Countriesbyfertilityrate.svg

Children per woman per state.

[midnight888]

Thanks for the replies guys. You are right that educated couples are having less children. I fall in this category. But its because raising a child is expensive and time consuming which is why i only have 1, as opposed to 3 which is what i would prefer.

But under communism, the circumstances change. Money wont be a problem, and i will have plenty of time to raise my children. I will never aim for 7 children but i would have more than my one boy that i currently have now.

I still believe many couples who are currently stopping on 1 or 2 children, would be having bigger families under communism since there isnt a deterrent like there is now. The current "power woman" if thats the right term, who choses to climb the corporate ladder instead of having children will not exist under communism. Correct me if im wrong....

[Maraam]

Ditto what everyone else said above about the birth rate decreasing.

I'd also just add though that there isn't necessarily an problem of overpopulation? Malthusianism has been disproved countless times, and with correct management growth of population won't have much effect on the environment. This really isn't much of an issue, there's a possibility of some short term increase in the birth rate but statistically there is likely to be a long term decrease, or at the most, stabilization.

[#FF0000]

Thanks for the replies guys. You are right that educated couples are having less children. I fall in this category. But its because raising a child is expensive and time consuming which is why i only have 1, as opposed to 3 which is what i would prefer.

But under communism, the circumstances change. Money wont be a problem, and i will have plenty of time to raise my children. I will never aim for 7 children but i would have more than my one boy that i currently have now.

There's no reason to believe this, though. If anything, folks who make less end tend to have more kids (which in this case means like, 2.6 per household, as opposed to 2.3?)

[Jimmie Higgins]

Yeah, the more stable lives people have, the less kids they tend to have. There are practical reasons for this. When child mortality is high, people tend to have more kids generally. When agriculture or individual production dominates, larger families provide more labor.

Capitalism actually tends to hurt birth rates which is why industrial countries have developed ideologies around the nuclear family and why eventually women were pushed out of industrial labor and children were taken out of the labor force (fights to end child labor and to increase working class wages also played parts, but for the capitalists this was a good solution overall to a number of issues). Capitalism also needs positive population growth and will import workers when population rates decline.

These are overall trends, not what people may decide individually. But I think that even in industrial countries, beyond the glorification of the nuclear family and the sexist ideas around women only really being fulfilled by motherhood, while we don't need families for extra farm hands, we tend to need families to take care of social reproduction. In alienated and hostile communities, families are the readily available non-market relationship, the safe haven from a larger society where people are competing against you. We need kids to care for us in old age, to try and create unconditional bonds of love. Obviously this doesn't always... Or even usually... Play out that way, but it explain why most people could not imagine a worthwhile life without kids, family.

I don't know what effect communist society would have on population rates or what family relationships might look like, but population and social organization (like nuclear families) are deeply connected to the way a society reproduces itself. I'd speculate that populations would drop and maybe stabilize with any initial growth being more due to better healthcare and better lives. Since production would be cooperative, drops in population would not cause economic problems like in capitalism. Communities where people aren't in competition and aren't alienated and isolated would also mean that not having family or kids wouldn't be depressing and lonely.

[Argithia]

From my understanding of the above posts it sounds like everyone is responding as a capitalist. People are having less kids because people are working more male and females and they want to have a more prosperous materialistic life but if this egotistic drive is no longer then what will man/woman have to strive for?
Yes education decreases child birth but only under the current system.
Yes all these options also work under the current system, but what happens when this utopian society comes in. If you have no need to worry about money, health or a roof over your head then you will produce more kids as a large family provides more enjoyment more love and since you have an abundance of time and unlimited resources then why not. Yes its a very basic description but think about it in a non capitalist way. I know the only thing keeping me from having more kids is money and time cause i have to go to work, otherwise i would have 5 or 6, why not its good to experience things in numbers.

[Slavic]

From my understanding of the above posts it sounds like everyone is responding as a capitalist. People are having less kids because people are working more male and females and they want to have a more prosperous materialistic life but if this egotistic drive is no longer then what will man/woman have to strive for?
Yes education decreases child birth but only under the current system.
Yes all these options also work under the current system, but what happens when this utopian society comes in. If you have no need to worry about money, health or a roof over your head then you will produce more kids as a large family provides more enjoyment more love and since you have an abundance of time and unlimited resources then why not. Yes its a very basic description but think about it in a non capitalist way. I know the only thing keeping me from having more kids is money and time cause i have to go to work, otherwise i would have 5 or 6, why not its good to experience things in numbers.

While it is true that all of these studies and findings are within a capitalist system, they still disprove that more free time increases the desire for larger families.

If we followed this free time model then we should see negative population growth in societies relying on substanence farming such as in sub Sahara Africa and positive growth in societies with shorten work works such as western Europe. What we see in fact is the complete opposite.

[#FF0000]

I know the only thing keeping me from having more kids is money and time cause i have to go to work, otherwise i would have 5 or 6, why not its good to experience things in numbers.

Folks with more money tend to have fewer kids too, though. There's no reason to think that fewer financial burdens = more kids. Plus I think more gender equality would continue to contribute to declining birth rates as women are taking part in society more and more beyond the domestic sphere, deciding to do other things and put off on having kids, if at all.

[BIXX]

The prospect of sex tends to make free time magicly appear despite how many hours a week you work.


I've always wondered how this worked. Like, how is it that one minute, a friend is too busy to hang out, but the next minute someone is getting a ride on the boner coaster?

[DigitalBluster]

When child mortality is high, people tend to have more kids generally.

This is an important point. The upper classes of old often had families as large as the lower classes because no family was immune to mysterious child-killing diseases. Irrelevant to communism perhaps but important historically.

[Slavic]

I've always wondered how this worked. Like, how is it that one minute, a friend is too busy to hang out, but the next minute someone is getting a ride on the boner coaster?

That is what we in the academic field refer to as the boner constant.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

[QUOTE=Argithia;2763602]From my understanding of the above posts it sounds like everyone is responding as a capitalist.

That makes no sense. Nobody here is responding as a shareholder, business owner, or profit-maker. So no, nobody is "responding as a capitalist".

People are having less kids because people are working more male and females and they want to have a more prosperous materialistic life but if this egotistic drive is no longer then what will man/woman have to strive for?


Yes education decreases child birth but only under the current system.

Your conclusion is completely reductive. The factors that drive reductions in pregnancies as education increases are largely independent of the political system. The reasons that education decreases pregnancies include:

a) women (and men) are educated on contraception
b) higher education tends to correlate to higher living standards and better access to methods of contraception and (free) abortion

These would continue to be important factors under a post-capitalist social and political system. A poor agricultural labourer from a small village in China would still be able to be educated on contraception, and still be able to have greater access to contraception, thus probably resulting in a lower chance of pregnancy (or multiple pregnancies).


Yes all these options also work under the current system, but what happens when this utopian society comes in.

Utopia is a myth. I've never heard any socialist deride their own ideas as 'this utopian society'. Are you trolling?


If you have no need to worry about money, health or a roof over your head then you will produce more kids as a large family provides more enjoyment more love and since you have an abundance of time and unlimited resources then why not.

This conjecture is all good and well but the evidence doesn't agree with what you're saying.


Yes its a very basic description but think about it in a non capitalist way.

What does this mean? How can I 'think about it in a non capitalist way'? It's surely optimal to think about this in an evidence-based way. You cannot discount the various and rigorous studies that disprove these population doomsday scenarios because they were created in a capitalist world. By that logic, we should just abandon all research because it exists in a capitalist world.


I know the only thing keeping me from having more kids is money and time cause i have to go to work, otherwise i would have 5 or 6, why not its good to experience things in numbers.

That may be your point of view but several of us have already pointed to the well-established fact that the evidence doesn't agree with your hypothesis.

[Trap Queen Voxxy]

There's Mars to be colonized, space stations, the moon and I'm sure other celestial bodies we could infect. Don't think so small pal. Plus we haven't even started building cities under the sea and on it yet. Plenty of room brah.

[Argithia]

ok Vlad you have misunderstood what i was aiming to say. The answers given have all been given under the current system and yes everything that everyone has said is true under the system we live in today. But when we look at the original question from midnight888 and if everything is provided for you and work is next to negligible then you have an abundance of time.

your a) women (and men) are educated on contraception
b) higher education tends to correlate to higher living standards and better access to methods of contraception and (free) abortion, makes sense under the current system but thats not what the original question is asking for which is very important in understanding all of my response.

what is higher living standards when everyone has everything they need while not needing to work. There is no money, no superior positions to strive for so the only living standards that you can control would be your family size.

"Yes its a very basic description but think about it in a non capitalist way" what i was trying to say was that the evidence that we have is only for the current system and when things change as dramatically as the initial question asks then these so called evidence reasoning is no more. im not talking about everything but definitely population will grow and the finite resources will end unless new sources or techniques are found.

"That may be your point of view but several of us have already pointed to the well-established fact that the evidence doesn't agree with your hypothesis." Your evidence does not agree because you have not understood the question correctly, therefore not understood my response.

To midnight888 your answer is this: population will continue to increase until some sort of authority puts a restriction on how many kids you can have aka China. Possibly ending with some form of hierarchy.

[Slavic]

You basically made any talk about communism invalid because we live in a Capitalist society. By this reasoning Marx must be a dirty Capitalist because he could only think within a Capitalist society.

[Remus Bleys]

You basically made any talk about communism invalid because we live in a Capitalist society. By this reasoning Marx must be a dirty Capitalist because he could only think within a Capitalist society.
Camatte called Marxism the real ideology of capital and wrote pretty good arguments on why x was objectively serving capital, x being anything that wasn't completely and totally reactionary. I dont think Camatte was correct in this assessment of course, but this very well could be the actual argument that is being made.