Please share your definition of socialism.

I don’t understand how this a question? Socialism does work, everyday, in many places and certainly doesn’t need war or famine.

I mean, when people have education and free access to birth control birth rates go down without infringements on bodily autonomy.

Ideally, socialism isn’t just “the government provides for your needs”, it goes the other way around too. The point is to come together, pool resources and combine our strenghts. There’s no free handouts, you give and you receive.

You shouldn’t have to enforce a birth rate cap if the population understand that they need to match society’s capacity to expand and build the infrastructure. You’d announce the recommended number and danger number, and people would organically organize to on average make it, knowing their large family could lead to famine.

The main problem here is

If all basic needs were met (food, shelter, and medical)

That part does a lot of heavylifting there. People only play nice all together when society is working for them, people need to respect the society they live in. When scarcity happens, people become selfish, it’s survival of the strongest, and everything falls off the rails and naturally goes to capitalism and hoarding resources. The population cannot lose faith in the system.

Is your definition of socialism basic needs met or something else?

The Nordic countries gets close to the food, shelter, medical being met. Homelessness (sleeping in public) was surveyed at 0.04% according to first Google result (Sweden 2023). Healthcare is not free but very cheap.

Anyway if that qualifies then yes, birthrate is less than replacement level.

The only people that want to create issue around how many children you have are those that will eventually exploit your children. The number one polluter is the military industrial complex and our whole society revolves around killing people. Everything is a monopoly. So, I think we can’t even really address that question without seeing what the world would be like if we could… I don’t know. Tax the rich. So we can have the leverage to push back against our masters, or we could just use kinetic means, but either way. I don’t know. Naval gazing is not really going to… or is even fruitful when we have to deal with the class war, because there is no war but the class war.

One of the social factors that most limits procreation is the education of women. If advanced education is available and encouraged, the age a woman has their first child is pushed back. As fertile years are limited for women, this reduces their potential numbers of children. On top of that, educated women often seek careers which often further reduces their active reproductive years. This is why developed countries usually have much lower birthrates than underdeveloped countries.

Yes. Birth rates in developed countries naturally drop without government intervention.

That being said, socialism is more than just basic needs being met - it’s a question of who owns what laborers produce. Under socialism, the idea is that the workers themselves own what they produce (or the fruits of their labor, more generally), as opposed to shareholders or firm owners.

Socialism would certainly work better than capitalism does. Under capitalism, because every company is driven to increase profits and the rate of profits, we have tons and tons of:

• Production of shit we don’t need (which people buy because of desire manufactured by marketing and a sense of having little control or meaning in their lives)
• Overproduction of shit we do need (e.g. fast fashion)
• The replacement of diversity with monoculture everywhere, making ecosystems less resilient and outright destroying them
• War for resources among competing empires and companies

In a socialist society (and, I would argue, a [libertarian socialist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism society) society in which there were systems in place to prevent the accumulation of power), the base incentives of the system should be to fulfill human needs and promote human flourishing, as part of a web of ecosystems on Earth, and not to make a profit.

Here are a few examples of how that would make society much more efficient in its use of resources:

• We wouldn’t need to produce useless things for profit like superyachts or fast fashion. Instead, we could produce high-quality, long-lasting clothing and come up with interesting ways to wear, share, and repair it.
• Instead of growing mostly crops to feed livestock, produce corn syrup and other flavorings/additives, and ethanol (as we do in the US); we could grow a greater diversity of human-edible, nutritious food.
• We wouldn’t need to manufacture desire for consumption through marketing
• We wouldn’t have to fight or exploit each other to gain market access
• Programs like universal free healthcare would make for a healthier population that would need less emergency medical care
• People would have more agency in their own lives and more say over the decisions that affect their community, which would provide a level of satisfaction that would reduce “retail therapy”

I would also argue that there is no true socialism if it is not anti-hierarchical, which includes liberation and full bodily autonomy for everyone having childbearing anatomy. Among other things, that means the right to choose when and when not to have a child.

If we could achieve a libertarian socialist commune-of-communes in which we could guarantee ourselves and each other a dignified and abundant standard of living, in which we could provide for the varying needs of different kinds of people instead of demanding that we fit one or two pre-approved molds, and which has mechanisms to prevent the accumulation of power, then I think we can turn to questions about the number of humans who can exist on Earth, how we might travel the stars to find/create additional homes, and so on.

Is this question based on China?