June 15th is marked as the World Elder Abuse Awareness Day by the United Nations. In the capitalist world where workers burn out early, the population is aging according to the bourgeois definition of age. If the current trends continue, by 2050, the number of elderly in the developed capitalist world will surpass that of the youth. This issue has drawn the attention of governments and cabinets, and some, like China and South Korea, have spent large budgets to curb this trend. However, since these solutions do not align with the needs of capital accumulation and profit increase, the plans have failed. In a country like Italy, a threatening nationalist and fascist policy has been adopted to encourage more births among Italians. Research by the United Nations and charities advocating for the rights of the elderly show that such policies have failed. The facts indicate that with increasing age in all countries, poverty, diseases, humiliation, neglect, violence, exploitation, and discrimination against both men and women have increased. The reason is that capitalists have frozen or lowered wages over the past thirty years and reduced social and insurance services. Meanwhile, they have increased working hours, forced female workers to raise the next generation without pay, and care for the exhausted population. Families have realized that with the rising costs of child-rearing, rent, inflation, and the exhaustion from work and the erosion of their democratic rights, they must limit childbearing despite their desires. Estimates show that raising a child to university graduation age in the United States costs $400,000. Consequently, 46% of the citizens in that country have fewer children than they desire. This trend in the US is true to varying degrees for all countries. For example, let’s look at Iran under the rule of the Islamic Republic.
Iran’s population is also aging. According to the latest human achievements, what rights should the elderly have? They should have the right to housing, food, clothing, insurance, and appropriate care. They should benefit from an independent and sufficient source of income. They should remain an active part of society, not be excluded, and be able to participate in determining the fate of society with the right to freedom of association and expression. The elderly should have the right to develop their potential abilities within society.
A look at the life of retirees, for example, shows that in the capitalist, corrupt, and dictatorial Islamic regime, none of these basic rights are provided; in fact, the opposite has occurred. With the deepening multi-faceted crises of the regime, the situation regarding pensions, insurance, and consequently the living and medical conditions of the majority of retirees, who are part of the working class, has worsened. Their monthly pensions do not cover even a week of living expenses. Their insurance booklets have little value due to corruption, and their political rights have also been trampled. Since 2020, instead of resting, they have been forced to take to the streets one day a week to shout their political and livelihood demands and simultaneously struggle against various forms of repression.
The situation of elderly women in the Islamic Republic is even worse than that of retirees. According to research conducted in 2020, more than 50% of elderly women in Iran lack the most basic economic facilities and are entirely dependent. 17% of them have no income, and 91% live with their families. There is no support system for the elderly, and 70% of the elderly do not have supplementary insurance. Today, the situation is worse in every aspect.
Without recognizing the social woes, only a few of which have been mentioned, the regime’s leaders have sought to solve the global problem of an aging population through authoritarian policies. They have tried to coerce, threaten, and incentivize women with minor financial and livelihood incentives to encourage childbearing. However, policies rooted in economic neoliberalism and rampant despotism, strongly supported by Khamenei himself, have faced rightful resistance from families, especially women, and have resulted in a spectacular failure.
The aging population in the capitalist system is a global problem. For several decades, governments and cabinets in the East and West have tried to reverse the trend of an aging population by adopting seemingly suitable policies and actions to increase population and childbearing.
As bourgeois economists themselves admit, this requires measures such as significantly reducing working hours, increasing wages and purchasing power for the majority, improving insurance services, providing affordable and safe housing, and enhancing medical care from infancy to old age to keep the population young, but these measures are not sufficient. To achieve this, there needs to be a system in society where all citizens who reach young adulthood recognize their real interests and participate in determining their destiny based on that. The trajectory of administration in bourgeois societies shows that capitalists and their governments are heading in the opposite direction. In today’s world, it is not the population that has aged and become incapacitated; rather, it is the capitalist system that has become old and feeble and must be replaced by a popular system where production serves the welfare of the people, not profit.
