Responding to the care crisis through social protection and emancipation

What does social reproduction mean?

Social reproduction refers to the activities and relationships required to sustain life itself, both on a daily basis and across generations1. It encompasses the “fleshy, messy and indeterminate stuff of everyday life”2, such as cooking, cleaning and caring for older people. Increasingly, the concept also incorporates an ecological dimension, recognising that both human and non-human life are reproduced within ecological frameworks3.

What does care mean? 

Care is a set of activities fundamental to humanity, aimed at maintaining, continuing and repairing “our world”4. It is not merely labour, but also an ethical practice and a way of being that emphasises our interdependence5.

The care cycle6 consists of five stages:

• Caring about: recognising a need.
• Caring for: assuming responsibility for meeting that need.
• Care-giving: the actual provision of care work.
• Care-receiving: the response of the care recipient.
• Caring with: the collective organisation of care based on equality and justice.

Care and social reproduction

Despite their overlaps, the two concepts differ: care has a clear qualitative dimension, as a social relation grounded in affection and a sense of giving, whereas social reproduction is an analytical category used to understand how capitalism separates activities into productive and non-productive7.

Crisis of social reproduction and care crisis 

Within Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), we examine in an integrated way the challenges related to:

• the reproduction of people (demographic crisis, care crisis),
• the reproduction of species and ecosystems (climate and broader environmental crisis),
• the reproduction of workers (expansion of surplus populations)8,
• the self-maintenance of communities. 

When we speak of a crisis of social reproduction, we mean that we analyse the mechanisms that generate these threats in a unified way. This allows for a clearer and more politically useful understanding compared to terms such as polycrisis and/or permanent crisis9. In short, we understand that capitalism is devouring its own conditions of existence, producing crisis not only in the economy, but also in the reproduction of life and nature10.

The “care diamond”11 shows that the social organisation of care rests on four pillars: the family, the state, the market and the community. The crisis in the field of care cuts across all these pillars and is driven by structural transformations12:

• The dual-earner household model (driven by the need for survival) limits the time that can be devoted to necessary care activities.
• Women, traditionally responsible for care within the household, can no longer assume these roles — both because they lack the time and because they refuse to see them as part of a “female nature.”
• The state implements policies that allow, support or impose the use of market mechanisms in the allocation of care.
• Large multinational corporations are increasingly active in the care sector, integrating care activities into financial markets.
• Third-sector organisations –that is, the institutionalised part of the community– are forced to conform to market pressures (e.g. reducing labour costs) in order to compete with large for-profit firms and gain access to public funding.

These transformations lead to the following outcomes: 

• Deteriorating working conditions for care providers in both the public and private sectors.
• Migrant women fill care gaps in households in the Global North, while shifting the care of their own families onto even more deprived subjects. This, however, constitutes only a temporary fix for countries of the Global North13.
• Social needs remain unmet, while others are marginalized — that is, they cannot be articulated in public discourse despite their acute urgency (a prime example being elder care).

Towards a reformist utopia

Under these conditions, it is important to explore policy strategies that aim simultaneously at social protection and emancipation, while countering commodification and privatisation. In this direction, three policy strategies appear particularly promising and, under certain conditions, can be seen as complementary:

• Reducing working time, so that sufficient time is available to care for ourselves and others beyond the narrow framework of the nuclear heteronormative family14.
• Ensuring Universal Basic Services, with an emphasis on care as a right for all those in need, regardless of their ability to pay15.
• Building practices of the commons and the Social Solidarity Economy (SSE), which have the potential to reveal new social needs and new ways of meeting them16.

We need to reconceptualise the public as universal, and not necessarily as state-provided. We need to compel the state, particularly at the local level, to allocate space and resources to grassroots initiatives. At the same time, we must experiment with new institutional tools and forms of social control in order to:

• ensure that efforts of collective self-organisation (i.e. the commons) are not used to justify the further withdrawal of the state from social protection,
• monitor collaborations between local authorities and self-organised practices so as to avoid the formation of clientelist networks,
• guarantee universal coverage without increasing bureaucratic requirements that would discourage the most disadvantaged citizens from accessing services.

The urgency of the care crisis does not allow us to remain at the level of diagnosing challenges. It calls on us to move beyond them by building a shared political direction, a common language, shared demands and new institutional tools. Let us meet, then, in necessity, so that we do not meet in despair.