In an Aug. 4 Financial Times column, Pilita Clark, an associate editor at the paper and Harvard graduate, joined the liberal chorus attacking Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, for comments he made in 2021 about “childless cat ladies.”
Few actually quote what he said. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Vance said, “We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. How does it make sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t have a direct stake in it?”
“It’s well known that birth rates have plummeted in the U.S. and other rich economies,” Clark wrote. Women are having fewer children, she claimed, because “they simply don’t want to.”
Clark thinks this is a good thing. “If you are the only childless employee in a team,” she says, describing her experience in the upper-middle-class world she lives in, “it takes a certain level of temerity to insist on taking leave in school holidays. … I imagine resistance will be easier once the ranks of the childless grow.”
Childless Americans get asked to take on extra work or change schedules, she argues. “Again, you can imagine this sort of thing changing as the workplace fills with more nonparents.”
Clark lives in a petty-bourgeois, self-absorbed world that has nothing in common with lives of the working class in this country, which faces serious challenges trying to start and raise a family.
Hundreds of thousands of workers have taken to the streets over the last few years, fighting for wages that keep up with inflation, for affordable health care, affordable child care and work schedules that will allow family life.
The working class doesn’t live in a “rich economy,” that’s reserved for the ruling class and its minions and mouthpieces, like Clark and the other editors of the Financial Times.
But working people have something better, the will — and the numbers — to fight for and win a better world.
For the working-class movement, these questions aren’t new. In 1913, during a debate on abortion at a doctors’ conference in czarist Russia, applause rang out after a Mr. Astrakhan snidely remarked, “We have to convince mothers to bear children so that they can be maimed in educational establishments, so that lots can be drawn for them, so that they can be driven to suicide!”
V.I. Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Party, who organized workers and peasants in their millions to overthrow capitalist rule in 1917, explained his revulsion to these attitudes. “The audience was made up of bourgeois, middle and petty bourgeois, who have the psychology of the philistine,” Lenin said. Working people, to the contrary, want to bring children into the world and fight for social conditions for them to prosper, he explained.
“Yes, we workers and the mass of small proprietors lead a life that is filled with unbearable oppression and suffering,” he said, but we have begun to fight. “We are fighting better than our fathers did. Our children will fight better than we do, and they will be victorious.”
“It goes without saying that this does not by any means prevent us from demanding the unconditional annulment of all laws against abortions,” Lenin said. But the social theory of Neo-Malthusianism brandied about at the doctors’ conference — the fewer people the better — is quite another thing. Lenin said they “whisper in scared voices: ‘God grant we manage somehow by ourselves. So much better if we have no children.’”
“Class-conscious workers will always conduct the most ruthless struggle against attempts to impose that reactionary and cowardly theory on the most progressive and strongest class in modern society,” he answered, “the class that is the best prepared for great changes.”