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Two centuries ago, capitalists had a problem: they were succeeding too well. Decades of worker resistance to machinery had been crushed, and the tide of change unleashed by the American, Haitian, and French revolutions was finally ebbing. Labor was cheap. In the most advanced capitalist countries, aristocrats had been sidelined or eliminated, and the church’s power was declining too. The rising capitalist class was expanding its power across the world.

But they quickly suffered from their success, because their rule was destroying society itself. I mean this quite literally. Capitalism in the United Kingdom was failing at what Marxists call “social reproduction”-- the ability to reproduce itself, which includes reproduction in the biological sense but also all the economic, social, and cultural elements necessary to reproduce a society and particular kinds of people and jobs and life as they are rather than the mere existence of human beings. British women in the mid 19th century frequently drugged their children with opium just so they could get a few hours of sleep before their next shift in the factory. Not infrequently this killed their children. In 1842, a drug seller in Nottingham testified that mothers replied with the “general expression” “it is a blessing that it is gone”-- better to die young than live in this nightmare (here I’m drawing on Terry Parssinen’s Secret Passions, Secret Remedies: Narcotic Drugs in British Society, 1820-1830). A few decades later, the Japanese diplomat Okubo Toshimichi was so horrified by visiting poorer parts of London, he reported feeling “the whole world appears despicable.”

Despite entirely different material conditions a similar sense of doom hangs over wealthy countries today. It is not uncommon cite to hear young adults report they don’t intend to have children because of the state of the world; it is equally common to hear mainstream commentators panic about “falling birth rates.” This is an extraordinarily difficult subject that is often poorly handled at best. A good amount of chatter on the issue comes from reactionaries who want to force women back into their imagined version of the 1950s. There are still many, many people who have more children than they would like to. But there are also plenty who have fewer than they would like to thanks to high childcare costs, economic uncertainty, and housing prices.

One way to think about falling birth rates without falling into eugenicist traps is the broader framework of social reproduction. Conveniently this framework also helps us better address another hot topic, this time one I’ve written about before: the infamous “vibecession.” While Americans continue to overstate how bad our economy is doing in relative terms writ large, in ways I think are harmful to workers and progressive politics, there is plenty of real economic pain, and much of it comes from areas of faltering social reproduction like homeownership, child-rearing, and education. All of these are places where we form people and lives and communities. Child-rearing literally forms people and who they will be; homeownership provides a space for that work and a financial asset that gives it some security; through education we recreate ourselves as people and as workers.

And in all of these areas, the US is struggling. Americans of prime career age are less likely to own a home than they were decades ago. A college education used to be a pathway to a professional/middle class life– that path is becoming more expensive and less financially valuable. Again I’m wary of certain arguments and interpretations of “falling birth rates,” but much less controversially we can say the ability to have and raise a child is becoming harder even if this is not the only reason for smaller families. There is a great deal of room to argue about how bad any of these problems are or what we do about them! But what’s clear is that many people feel, not without some material reason, that their ability to produce and reproduce themselves and their communities is under threat. What kinds of solutions does such a crisis promote? 

In 1848, lots of different ones! The world of the 1840s probably should have fallen apart, and a coalition of revolutionaries in Europe bet that it would; among them were liberal nationalists who believed the eternal nation-state was a progressive alternative to the multi-ethnic empires of central Europe, irredentists who believed said nations had territorial scores to settle with their neighbors, workers who hoped for a new world free of economic exploitation, and a thirty-year-old radical German writer named Karl Marx.

This coalition was less outlandish than it sounds after the fact. The successful American Revolution, for example, required the uneasy collaboration of southern slaveholders who wanted to make more money by stealing and selling Indigenous land, western settlers who wanted to buy or secure that land, northern merchants who had legitimate criticisms of British authority but also wanted to continue evading taxes, and free and enslaved urban artisans who did not want to be kidnapped by the imperial state. It was complicated, and produced a complicated state, but that complexity was at least in terms of political success an asset rather than a liability.

The 1848 revolutions, in contrast, failed. Some of their proposed solutions and blocs fared far better than others. The most left-wing ideas at play at the time have had a rocky history at best since. There was no successful socialist revolution in Europe for nearly three quarters of a century afterward, and the Soviet Union was hardly an ideal exemplar of socialist ideas. In contrast, the nationalist ideas at play in the ‘48 revolutions achieved reasonable political success even where they were defeated. Hungary would not escape what nationalists considered the yoke of empire (it was also an empire at which Hungary was near the center and benefitted from that; the politics here are immensely complicated; here I might ) for many many years. But Hungarian nationalism is a powerful force today. German socialism never prospered, while German nationalism shattered Europe and killed millions. 

While economic exploitation is a natural condition for the left politics that can actually address it, a declining economy is cataclysmic for progressive/left projects. This means that treating a decline in GDP or, potentially, population simply as desirable degrowth is not a viable option (I’d also oppose it on the merits). A declining, shrinking economic world of faltering social reproduction is poison for emancipatory and egalitarian political projects.

On this I can offer you evidence in the form of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. UK growth has been anemic for years. The country is currently boiling in a heat wave, in which many of its citizens are suffering without air conditioning. And yet their politics continues to be focused on repressing minorities– immigrants and trans people. Obviously the political reasons for this are complicated and multicausal, from centralized media and the particular, peculiar structure of UK elite politics to the malign influence of a certain author who wrote about wizard boarding schools. But economically stagnant regions of the US experience a similar rise in bigotry. It would be an oversimplification to say that a lack of economic growth straightforwardly creates these particular forms of hate. 

But it does facilitate it. Xenophobia and transphobia have key psychic similarities that help explain why. The former is predicated upon an idealization of the eternal nation state. In the nationalist mindset the world consists of discrete peoples, each of whom have a natural historic territory they should rule. Within that territory the cultural and linguistic customs of the designated group should dominate and those of other groups should be marginalized at best. Germany for the Germans! England for the English! 

This is of course incoherent. The language and customs of every “nation” have formed out of multiple previous foundations, then existed alongside and co-developed with their neighbors not merely as adjacent private houses, if you will, but as extended families. Prague was the capital of several key Holy Roman Emperors, who lead a composite political unit that ruled over much of what we now call Germany, in the name of Rome, via Austrian and Spanish leadership; it also has a Jewish community with a storied history. “Prague for the Czechs” would be a call that actually buries most of Prague itself.

Likewise, there is no stable and straightforward “woman” any more than there is a stable and straightforward “German,” outside of self-identification. Transphobes insist there is a stable medical definition, and this might seem more stable than nationalism’s categories. But “adult human female,” as their slogan goes, has blurry biological boundaries: various genetic differences will produce different sex characteristics, and gender-affirming care also really does alter them too. There are plenty of people who would say my political views or simply living on the coast make me less of a “real American”; the same people who insist that having a Y chromosome makes you a man would also tell you someone who does have one and who also wears a skirt is not a “real man.” Even the staunchest supposed defenders of these hard boundaries don’t actually act like they believe in them. They can’t. Prior to medical understanding of it, was a person with androgen sensitivity who lived their entire life as a woman secretly a man? Obviously not, any more than the Alamanni tribes of the 3rd century were secretly German.

18th-century shipwright William Chandler lived life as a girl until he decided he’d rather be a man, after which he earned a reputation as “a man and a half to a great many” in the British navy and shipbuilding community. When Chandler won a fistfight to convince new crew members to accept him, he was performing masculinity just like any other man aboard the ship had to, and in fact he appears to have done far better at that performance than I would expect of most eighteenth century men. People move. Things change. Expectations shift. Ethnicity and gender (and thanks to the power of modern medicine, sex!) are lived categories, not physical properties of geography or genetics, and life is dynamic, not static.

This is why recent UK legal guidance on trans citizens’ rights (or rather lack of rights) to use the bathroom is as incoherent as it is abhorrent. How do you check who is a woman? Who checks? When? Any attempt to enforce bathroom bans will involve invasive surveillance of even cisgender people, and will inevitably involve policing the boundaries of acceptable gender presentation: insufficiently “feminine” women are going to suffer across the supposedly straightforward boundary of biological sex. It would be wrong even if that weren’t the case. But intrusiveness and cruelty is intrinsic to the whole project— the fiction of hard boundaries on gender and sex, just like the fiction of hard borders between nations, can only be maintained by violence and surveillance.

Nationalists and transphobes often claim they alone are reasonable, defenders of real categories against the woke postmodernist left. But the United Kingdom needs a 340 baffling pages to explain who can legally use the toilet and who can access public spaces like hospitals and gyms is telling. The United States needs countless pages and an entire government apparatus to determine who can be where. I in all my supposedly moral relativist anti-objectivity leftism could answer either question with the single word “everyone.”

Unfortunately I suspect that the incoherence of nationalism and transphobia is actually part of its appeal. Forget historical circumstances for a moment: being a human and being alive is difficult and confusing. You live in quicksand: the ground of what’s possible and afforable and acceptable shifts, the assumptions and circumstances you build your life on are always moving, and you yourself are sinking every day toward an eventual end. Nationalism and anti-trans bigotry promise a handhold. What could be more solid, to those willing to believe a dreadful lie, than a solidity formed out of air? 

And more insidiously, being formed of air does not mean being formed of nothing. Nationalism assembles a spread of everything you love and tells you it is under assault. Your food, your songs, your everyday life– all of this is property of the eternal nation, and exists only as long as you police borders and language. Press 1 for English becomes a violation of all that you are; imprisoning children who dare cross a line on a map becomes the necessary payment for remaining yourself and part of your community. Transphobia is similarly insidious, and can also assimilates one’s suffering: within the bigots’ framework, trans women’s mere existence become an invalidation of the heavy price men force themselves to pay to remain “real men,” and an invalidation of the pain that those same men force on women. Both ideologies thus build a lie out of very real experiences.

This alone won’t explain why these particular lies are so effective though– for that we have to turn to class politics. Unlike left economic ideas or religious ethics, reactionary ideas of gender and nation present no intrinsic threat to class hierarchy. To be clear, they can be a problem for particular forms of class hierarchy! They were real problems for 19th-century empires, and one way you might look at the long nineteenth century is a rearrangement of the economic order to fit within and across the emerging nation-state framework rather than the preceding imperial one; this culminates eventually in the rise of the multinational corporation in the mid 20th-century. It did take adjustment. But in and of themselves, “Germany for the Germans” and “women have two X chromosomes” do not have any egalitarian content. 

This allows for the assembly of cross-class and cross-political coalitions. Religious fundamentalists on the far right and trans-exclusive “feminists” who claim to be on the left can work together to persecute trans people. Liberal nationalists and conservative nationalists could and did work together in the 19th and 20th centuries, and liberal and conservative xenophobes work together well today. These coalitions favor the right of course, but that’s another reason they can achieve success, since it makes this kind of bigotry attractive to existing elites and at the very least not something they have much of a financial stake in attacking (at least until the resulting far-right coalitions and their disastrous economic ideas truly come to power). Finally, crises of any kind necessarily promote a politics of purported change– if things feel bad people want something different. Gender and national essentialism is perhaps the “something different” least harmful to capitalism.  

A crisis of social reproduction is more than a grave threat to the existing social order, because there’s no guarantee that the alternative that will emerge is an improvement. More than anyone else, the left should know well that social collapse does not mean one’s preferred ideology will rise from the ashes. A focus on social reproduction has some implications for how we might combat hate and promote our solutions to this crisis proactively, and as part of a broader political coalition.

Xenophobia and transphobia promise to protect people’s ability to reproduce their conceptions of America (or Britain or Germany) and womanhood. But while these concepts can be interlinked to everything about our lives, they aren’t the most important parts of who we are. The right promises you’ll feel like a man again? The left can give you more time with your family and friends thanks to a shorter work week. The right claims to “know what a woman is”— the left believes women should still be able to have jobs and bank accounts without their husbands’ permission. The right promises to protect you from immigrants “taking jobs”— the left can offer a world where you can pursue the job you want to without constantly pleading for the market to offer you an opportunity. The right promises you will be able to recreate the kind of person you believe you are and force your children into the same mold. The left can make it easier for you and your family to become who you want to be— to reproduce not the categories you have been given but the communities and convictions you have chosen.