Proletarians in Care: Laboring Animals and Plants

This article examines the concept of socialist care as depicted in Soviet agricultural brochures, manuals, and guides from the 1920s to the 1930s, with a particular focus on how care practices extended from the human to nonhuman workers. Care and care work are approached through feminist social reproduction theory, particularly through a rereading of Alexandra Kollontai’s ideas from an animal-centered optic. In this perspective, the socialization of all spheres of life was expected to generate new forms of care, including for nonhuman proletarians, with Kollontai emphasizing the production of life itself rather than its mere reproduction for capital. This article traces a trajectory from the revolutionary vision of animal liberation from suffering, imagined as following women’s emancipation and their contribution to class struggle, to the rejection of this ideology during Soviet collectivization and industrialization, when it was dismissed as utopian and misleading. As a result, labor itself became naturalized, and women’s reproductive functions were redistributed during collectivization across all participants in production relations, irrespective of gender or species. This shift gave way to a discussion of conceiving production as labor conjugations (Alexander Bogdanov’s term) that extend beyond the human body to include animals, machines, and plants. The article also problematizes the concept of care, tracing its Heideggerian origins and linking it to contemporary theories of interspecies and feminist care. As a concluding conceptual element, the works of Soviet writer Andrey Platonov are employed as a critical source for reimagining care as care for yet-to-come communism, deferred for future use.