While the past decade has seen a surge of thinking about what postcapitalism might mean, for the most part this work has silently passed over the tasks of social reproduction. Office work and factory work are to be automated away, while care work seemingly proliferates. In this talk, we'll look back at an earlier history of communist thinking about social reproduction to try and uncover an alternative way forward – setting out some of the ways in which we could reorganise social reproduction to reduce, redistribute, and recognise the essential labour of reproduction.

Helen Hester is Professor of Gender, Technology, and Cultural Politics at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, social reproduction and theories of work. She leads the Feminist Futures Programme for the think tank Autonomy.

Nick Srnicek is a Lecturer in Digital Economy at King's College London. He is the author of Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2016), Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso, 2015 with Alex Williams). With Helen Hester, he is currently writing After Work: The Fight for Free Time (Verso, 2022).