# Social factory

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The **Social factory** is a concept developed in [Italy](/source/Italy) in the 1960s to help analyse how capitalist social relations had expanded outside the sphere of production to that of society as a whole. The [Autonomist Marxists](/source/Autonomism), [Mario Tronti](/source/Mario_Tronti) was one of the first theorists to develop the idea in his text *Factory and Society* (1962).[1] Here Tronti uses the Marxist distinction between [absolute and relative surplus value](/source/Surplus_value#Absolute_vs._relative) to explain how technical and social processes of [late capitalist](/source/Late_capitalism) 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]

## Origins in *Quaderni Rossi*

*[Quaderni Rossi](/source/Quaderni_Rossi)*

## References

1. Thoburn, Nicholas (2003). *Deleuze, Marx and Politics*. London: Routledge.

1. Tronti, Mario (1962). ["Factory and Society"](https://operaismoinenglish.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/factory-and-society/). *Operaismo in English*. Retrieved 6 May 2017.

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