this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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I'm a communist and don't want children, I guess for related reasons insofar as I don't think there's any such thing as a "good parent" and that raising children in an atomised nuclear family structure will inevitably harm them. I know people will continue to have kids regardless, but I don't feel comfortable being responsible for a child's trauma. I also don't think I'd be interested in having children even if we only consider selfish reasons; it sounds like a lot of stress and financial drain.
Just throwing this out there, the fascists and reactionaries have 0 qualms with having a bunch of kids. Do you want the generation of people who will be running the world when we're old to be entirely raised by fascists and reactionaries? Where will future leftists come from if not from present leftists?
That is not how the world works. I am also not a leftist; I am a communist.
That is, in fact, how the world works. And communists are leftists....
Communism is not concerned with "left" and "right", bourgeois ideological categories. Communism is the political programme of the revolutionary proletariat, or the real movement to abolish the current state of things, etc. I have no more in common with the liberal politicians who call themselves "left-wing" than I do with a fascist, so it makes no sense to place communism along a linear scale like left/right where it is suggested that communism holds more in common with a political position the further "left" it is. And whether or not communists hold a certain view has no relation to how "left-wing" it is; for instance, in the US, they consider being anti-gun to be a "left" position, but communists are pro-gun.
Communism arises out of an especially politically conscious stratum of the proletariat, and is generated more broadly by capitalism itself, which creates the conditions for its own demise. If communism could only come from already existing communists then there wouldn't be any communists anymore given all the massacres of communists throughout history.
Communists would not agree with you about politics working like a marketplace of ideas where each idea proponent has to convince enough people of their idea to get a foothold. We see politics as class conflict and communists coming from the militant working class. Capitalism creates the material conditions for a communist movement to arise, and communism will continue to spring up again time after time of suppressing, mass incarcerating, massacring, etc communists.
Finally, it is obviously a very reactionary take that anyone should be obliged to have children. There's a reason why it's mostly ethnonationalists who are big on that stuff... Doubly so if you mean actually creating children and not adopting existing children. It is incredibly misogynistic to expect women to give up our bodies for your fantasy of popping out "leftist" babies. Pregnancy permanently changes a person's body, is often disabling, and humans have one of the highest childbirth mortality rates in the animal kingdom not accounting for modern medicine. Not to mention that even if your body popped back to normal after giving birth, it's still fucked up to expect anyone to dedicate 9 months of their life to being essentially disabled and then go through agonising pain at the end of that 9 month period. Even if you only mean adopting children, those children have to come from somewhere, and implicit in that expectation would be the expectation for, primarily women, to have to sacrifice their health to produce children.