Everyone has a smartphone or a laptop, maybe a car, probably with five years of payments left. You can book a plane ticket whenever you want with just a few taps. Abundant of food. Somehow, looking at all that, it feels like prosperity.
Then when payday comes, the rent takes a cut, insurance takes another, the student loan is always there, and groceries, of course, take some too. Then you look at your hours and wonder whether there will be enough hours next month.
A lot of people are asking why young people don’t want to have children.
The part of Marx they would rather skip
Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto that under capitalism, the cost of producing a worker, meaning the wage, is restricted almost entirely to the bare minimum of subsistence needed to keep that worker alive and able to reproduce for the next generation.
And what happens after? When the worker gets the paycheck, the landlord, the shopkeepers, and the pawnbrokers are lining up for their share.
A lot of names, a lot of things have changed compared to a hundred years ago. However, the landlord is still there. Now we have insurance brokers, bankers, and student loans. The worker’s paycheck passes through a lot of hands before it actually ends up in your own pocket for your own home or a future.
In today’s society, most workers can barely cover the first part of it. The second part, which is for their future and their own home, is somewhat out of reach.
A phone is cheaper than a future
In 2024, 22.7 million American renter households spent more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. According to Harvard’s housing researchers, for 12.1 million households, housing took more than half. That leaves the rest of the paycheck to cover everything else.
A family health plan through an employer carried an average annual premium of nearly $27,000 in 2025. KFF found workers paid an average of $6,850 of that themselves. A job can help you get coverage, but losing the job can put the coverage in danger too. You can’t lose the job. You have to keep working. Even that is still not easy.
If a parent returns to work, someone must care for the child. U.S. Labor Department figures put the 2022 annual price of full-day childcare for one child between about $6,500 and $15,600, depending on where and how care is provided. The parent works to pay the bill for the care that makes working possible.
This is what a young person who has just started their life sees before deciding whether to have a child: Rent is due every month because housing is so expensive. They are not paying a mortgage, so they are not building up their assets. Childcare is due every month. A child needs you for years, but an employer can cut your hours next week, and any policy that benefits people can be cut next week too.
Yeah, it seems like everybody has phones and cars, but those things are just a sideshow. They don’t show the issues in your life. Everything gets more expensive at once, but the basic cost of staying alive and raising a family eats up the wage.
Who carries the cost?
The employer needs workers rested and ready, the landlord wants the rent on time, the insurer wants a premium, and the lender wants a monthly payment. None of these bills are going to stop when a worker gets laid off, or life gets hard, or your baby gets sick, or your family has a hard time. None of those bills stop.
The family will absorb the shock. Savings disappear. You have to have parents or grandparents provide care for free. Someone has to work an extra shift and miss some dinners. Someone else leaves a job because paying for childcare would swallow the wages.
So that is how the cost of reproducing the working class gets passed around. Everyone wants the worker, yet the worker’s family is left figuring out how to pay for the human being.
In a Pew survey, 36 percent of childless Americans under 50 who said they were unlikely to have children cited the cost of raising a child as a major reason. These are people looking at their own paychecks and making a decision the speeches about “family values” cannot make for them.
For some workers, some young people who wanted a family, they usually say, “I like my freedom.” But that sentence can be an excuse, a way to live with the future they can still afford. They call this a lifestyle they choose, something they want, but you still have to pay your rent. You still have to pay your bills.
This goes beyond America
Across OECD countries, the average fertility rate fell from 3.3 children per woman in 1960 to 1.5 in 2022. China recorded 7.92 million births in 2025. Different countries have different jobs, housing systems, and family pressures. But young people in many places are asking a similar question: how do you commit to raising someone when you cannot count on the ground beneath your own feet?
Politicians can tell young people to have more children and form a family. Employers and corporations can say they need more workers. But within this capitalist society, none of these statements pays the rent, covers months without wages, or takes care of the child when both parents are working.
Marx and Engels saw that wages are pressed against the cost of keeping workers alive and reproducing the next generation. Today, we have shelves full of different kinds of products. We have tiny computers in our pockets. We have planes, thousands of planes in the sky, ships and submarines. With all this technology and possibility, it is disappointing how little has changed in who gets the worker’s paycheck. Many workers still cannot see how to support the next generation.
The economy needs workers to reproduce, but it refuses to pay the cost of raising them. If we want society to move forward, we have to step up and break this capitalist economic structure. We need to change the way the economy works so the cost of raising the next generation does not fall on working families alone.
Hey Neil, I think what is notably absent in this analysis of worker reproduction is all the work done by Marxist Feminists on this very issue. You are pointing out the contradiction but not who subsidizes the contradiction on the ground with their unpaid or low-paid labour. Women. Women are more likely to do child and elder care because they earn less than men for work of the same value, or they are expected to stop work and provide care simply because they are female. Women lose promotions and pension earnings because of maternity and elder care leaves. Women do their day job and then go home and do the vast majority of domestic work on nights and weekends. And don't get me started on who is doing the majority of community work. On top of that, you have the exploitation of racialized workers who are expected to provide substitute care for children, people with disabilities and the elderly at starvation wages, with no benefits and no pensions. Which means racialized women are being multiply exploited both on the job and at home, and often they are supporting their communities with their unpaid community work. All of this is occurring on stolen Indigenous land, whose nations are paying the price of colonial capitalism and where Indigenous women are also being multiply exploited. We cannot just point to the contradiction, right? We have to be clear about who pays for it. Stolen land, stolen labour.
Also interesting to note that some of the same US voices decrying the lack of "worker production" are also trying to stop and reverse immigration; their concern is not just with the number of workers generated, but the color as well. 💀