Plan to care? Communal care, the revaluation of reproductive work, and status reconciliation

Despite increasing scholarly engagement with social reproduction, the care crisis, and gendered inequalities, systematic debate about institutional alternatives to existing arrangements of social reproduction remains limited. This article proposes that closer engagement between social reproduction feminism and recent debates on democratic planning can help address this gap. To provide an impetus for such an endeavour, it begins by revisiting social reproduction approaches to identify three key features that any post-capitalist alternative must confront: sphere separation, the structural devaluation of interpersonal reproductive work, and social production of difference. In response, the text explores transformative imaginaries for these three areas: first, the construction of communal care infrastructures, which partially socialise reproductive work and are integrated into societal planning; second, the revaluation of interpersonal reproductive work via negotiated remuneration, multi-criteria accounting, democratic control over social surplus, and deliberate steering of socio-technical development; and third, institutional designs that strengthen the power resources of reproductive workers and allow gender to cease functioning as a societal organising principle. The paper concludes by proposing a research agenda.