The Social factory is a concept developed in
Italy
Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...
in the 1960s to help analyse how capitalist social relations had expanded outside the sphere of production to that of society as a whole.
Mario Tronti
Mario Tronti (24 July 1931 – 7 August 2023) was an Italian philosopher and politician, considered one of the founders of the theory of operaismo in the 1960s.
An active member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) during the 1950s, he was, ...
was one of the first theorists to develop the idea in his text ''Factory and Society'' (1962).
Here Tronti uses the Marxist distinction between
absolute and relative surplus value to explain how technical and social processes of
late capitalist society become entwined, so that "the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society".
have later coined the term "social factory" to refer to this concept.
Origins in ''Quaderni Rossi''
''
Quaderni Rossi
''Quaderni Rossi'' (Italian for "Red Notebooks") was an Italian political journal founded in 1961 which became one of the primary sources of autonomist Marxism. The journal had a pro-Chinese stance. Its first issue appeared on 30 September 1961. ...
''
References
{{Reflist
Autonomism
Marxist theory