Manufactured Motherhood: Trump's Pronatalism Agenda and the Erosion of Reproductive Rights - Feminist Majority Foundation

We need to intentionally stop having children in order to starve the capital class of the workforce it needs to extract labour from. Declining birth rates could end up being a key weapon in the class war. It could parallel the Black Death which lead to the collapse of feudalism as labourers obtained far more bargaining power. Population collapse could similarly lead to the collapse of capitalism (or to the collapse of techno-feudalism should we regress to that stage).

In any case, these policies will fail to raise birth rates, as did all previous attempts to do so, as it results from a core contradiction in capitalism. Labour can be grossly divided into two parts, productive and reproductive labour. Productive labour is that directly used in the production of commodities, that is most waged labour under capitalism and it is this labour whose value is expropriated. Reproductive labour is that used to reproduce the conditions for future labour. Buying groceries, cooking falls into this category but so does dating, pregnancy and raising children. This is not directly expropriated by the capital class. In order to keep raising profits, capital needs to perpetually increase the amount of productive labour performed by the labouring class. Since labourers have a finite amount of labour they can perform in one day, this comes at the expense of reproductive labour. The largest share of this reproductive labour is that involved in raising children. This is also the part that, when cut, has the least effect on labourers immediate wellbeing. The result is that the working class meets increasing demands on productive labour by decreasing the labour it expends on raising kids. This leads to the birth rate falling precipitously. The total available labour for the capital class decreases in the space of a generation which requires it to take even more extreme measures to continue increasing profits. Eventually, economic collapse occurs as the few remaining working age labourers become unable meet extreme demands for profit.

This can only be solved through seizure of the means of production. The labouring class must reorganize productive labour into a democratically run configuration. The distinction between the labouring and capital classes must disappear in order to bring about the formation of a classless society. In the meantime, refusing to create new sources of labour value for the bourgeoisie can 1) weaken it in order to more easily overthrow it and 2) provoke the capital class into a draconian overreaction that would help us recruit women and LGBTQIA+ people into the struggle against the bourgeoisie.