Social factory

The Social factory is a concept developed by Italian autonomist Marxism 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 was one of the first theorists to develop the term in his text Factory and Society (1962).[1] Here Tronti uses the Marxist distinction between absolute and relative surplus value to explain how technical and social processes of post-fordist 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".[2]