this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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That depends, really. I'm sorry, but these anti capitalism memes always show such over simplified view of the world, this is not how things work.
Take South Korea, for example. The way they are going right now, 50 years from now it might not even exist anymore. Granted, the underlying causes there for the low birth rates have a lot to do with uncontrolled capitalism, but communism won't save the country from this problem.
You still have a shrinking work force to do the required work, you still have a relatively expanding section of elders that won't work anymore but requires care instead, being an extra "burden" on the country. Less people will have to do more work over time and it causes a huge list of issues that communism really isn't going to solve.
The actual solution for South krea would be in tightening laws on their capitalist system, allowing people more time to have children in the first place. Then they need immigrants, and probably quite a few of them. Like Japan, South Korea is rather homogeneous, they're in for a surprise, I guess.
Either way, just posting these "but of course communism will solve this, communism solves everything" memes is so naive it's just child level dumb.
Communism hasn't worked well anywhere, how about some pragmatism and we start hard limiting capitalism instead, which we know does work
Birth rates are so low
The low birth rates aren't just rampant capitalism though; it's also SK women having a choice to not get married and have children, combined with a culture that's almost rabidly misogynistic. If I were a Korean woman, I absolutely would not want to get hitched to a Korean man and have children with him, because I know that it would be very unlikely that I'd treated like a real person or an equal partner. But the culture--much like Japan--seems to prize people that put in horrifically long hours, and even if you fix the cultural misogyny, you're still stuck with not having much time to spend with your partner.
Being against capitalism =/= supporting communism.
Why do you believe everyone who hates capitalism thinks communism is the only viable alternative?
The meme implies “not capitalism is the answer” and you’re not answering OP’s question.
I’m with Phoenix here, this is a fundamental labor/production problem, not an organizational one. Even if wealth and work was magically, perfectly redistributed via some system (take your pick), life would still suck for younger people in SK.
But "not capitalism" is the solution.
A lot of the low birthrate comes from people choosing careers over families. Gee i wonder what system propagates such behaviour?
It’s too late for SK.
And even if it weren’t, there’s a lot of policy problems (immigration, sexism, internal cultural ones) that fall outside economic systems. “Just switch the economic system so people will want to have babies” is the other side of the coin of the hard right’s “just value traditional families so people will want to have babies.”
To reiterate, I am saying this meme is wrong in portraying low birth rates as mostly a problem of the neoliberal capitalist economic system, even though it is a major contributor. A magic switchover would not fix it.