There has been an explosion of feminist scholarship on care. Whilst this literature visibilises and politicises care-giving, it often obscures the subjecthood and agency of those on the receiving end of care. This paper compares and assesses two influential feminist approaches to care and political agency from the perspective of care-receivers: Joan Tronto’s democratic care ethics and social reproduction theory. It pursues an immanent critique of Tronto’s liberal-democratic paradigm. It identifies the following features of Trontonian caring democracy as accommodating care-receivers as caring subjects: an ontology of care as relational and multidirectional; the institutionalisation of the “needs-interpretation struggle”; and non-hierarchical “caring with”. However, this paper argues that Tronto’s theory is socially weightless, methodologically statist, and ultimately democratically shallow. Tronto refrains from calling for the democratisation of caring relationships themselves, instead defaulting to a liberal real politics of “diverse” and “inclusive” representation sans structural transformation. For Tronto, the disability movement’s slogan “nothing about us without us” can be realised simply by making what Wendy Brown has termed the prerogative, capitalist, and juridical-legislative modalities of state power more “caring”. If Tronto sees like a responsible citizen of a liberal-democratic state, Marxist feminist social reproduction theory (SRT) sees like a worker. Using Susan Ferguson’s work on childcare as a “steel man,” this paper problematises SRT’s reduction of care to work on the grounds that it tends to reduce care-receivers to “products” of that work rather than as active, often recalcitrant participants in caring relationships capable of autonomous struggle – even if this capacity is systematically diminished by authoritarian caring institutions and practices. The only kind of democratisation to which care as work is amenable is workplace democracy: care workers’ collective ownership and control of the means of reproduction. Applying the Marxist Promethean conception of work to care, SRT imagines care-givers as working upon care-receivers, rather than their caring with each other. This paper proposes turning to the lesser-known literature on commoning care, which synthesises democratic care ethics with autonomist Marxism. It concludes that seeing care like a commoner could deepen Tronto’s caring democracy whilst avoiding SRT’s objectification of care-receivers.
