The Social factory is a concept developed 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 (born 24 July 1931 in Rome) is 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, with Ra ...

was one of the first theorists to develop the term 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".

Origins in ''Quaderni Rossi''

Quaderni Rossi ''Quaderni Rossi'' ( Italian:Red Notebooks) was an Italian political journal founded in 1961 which became one of the primary sources of autonomist Marxism. The first issue appeared on 30 September 1961. Raniero Panzieri played a central role in ...

References

{{Reflist Autonomism Marxist theory