Anthropology and the social factory

Abstract

Since its birth in the early 1960s, Italian operaismo (workerism) has provided an optimistic reading of working-class militancy, a theoretically stimulating account of capitalist transformation, and a set of highly productive conceptual categories. Despite a shared provenance, however, operaista-influenced movements and theorists have since taken these categories in quite varied directions. Given this conceptual heterogeneity, I consider herein one such category—the “social factory”—and its conceptual reworking by Antonio Negri, as he elaborates in his 2017 book, Marx and Foucault. I employ, as means to pursue this inquiry, an anthropological lens—drawing, to do so, on anthropological theory and ethnographic research. My aim is to build toward to a reconception of the social factory analytic for use in a contemporary anthropology of state formation.