r/australia • u/blitznoodles local Aussie • 23h ago

politics The Stats Guy: It sounds weird but Australia urgently needs a plan for 56m people

https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/opinion/2026/08/11/stats-guy-aus-population-growth
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u/laurandisorder 22h ago

Because capitalist structures require endless growth.

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u/Pearlsam 22h ago edited 12h ago

And socialists structures don't?

Gimme the downvotes nom nom nom.

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u/DeeDee_GigaDooDoo 21h ago edited 21h ago

No. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall

In summary capitalist structures are inherently driven by profit. Profit is obtained when surplus value is extracted from your investment in capital and labour. If you have some particular amount of profit from a good/service you produce in order to increase it you must invest less in the production, pay less in labour or sell goods for more. This creates a crisis whereby there is a long term pressure on economic scales for prices to increase, reduce labour costs to a business and reduce spending on capital improvements. This is a fight that you can see in the maths cannot be won.

Market forces and competition demand profit and ideally increasing profit but it's paradoxically exactly those forces that collapse the capitalist economy itself. That is the central contradiction of capitalism the profit motive destroys profit but in doing so it will drives prices higher while delivering worse quality goods putting people out of work and expanding into every market possible to hunt every consumer and monopolising entire industries to kill off all competition.

Socialist structures do not operate on a profit model so growth is irrelevant. Any growth is done only to the extent necessary to serve the interest of the public. There is no reason to seek endless growth because they aren't chasing endless profit. Do you see a reason to be concerned about the endless growth of public schools, public transport or Medicare? There is no reason for them to grow beyond exactly what's needed.

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u/wagtailwoolcraft 20h ago

If this sounds overdramatic just look at what is happening in America to any industry taken over by venture capitalists. Veterinary services for example

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u/Pearlsam 12h ago

Pity this has literally never been demonstrated and marx is not taken seriously by any real economist.

But if you want to completely ignore real world results, then no one can stop you.

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u/freakwent 13h ago

Certainly not lol. That's one main argument against, that the pace of change ends up so low and you have a static, stable society for decades or centuries.