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Anthropology and the social factory

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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.

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Notes

  1. Harry Cleaver, for example, cites Tronti’s article “Social Capital, or, Capital’s Plan” as the origin of the social factory concept (see Cleaver 2000 (1979), p. 70). Sylvia Federici notes that Tronti introduced the concept of the social factory, without using the term as such, in his 1966 book, Operai e Capitale (Workers and Capital), which included versions of “Factory and Society” and “Capital’s Plan” (see Federici 2016).

  2. See Della Costa 1975 (1971); Federici 2012; and Weeks 2011. Forunati (1996) does not explicitly employ the social factory concept, but her analysis runs along similar lines to that of Della Costa and Federici.

  3. It was Bruno Maffi who translated the text into Italian (see Marx 1969).

  4. For an elaboration of this discussion, see Campbell (2016: 73–74).

  5. For a more extended discussion of this case, see Campbell (2016).

  6. Gellner was explicit in pursuing functional explanations while rejecting teleology (Gellner 1988, pp.131–132), while for Spiro it was Kevin Avruch who labeled the former’s anthropology as a “non-teleological functionalism” (see Avruch 2015, pp.5–6).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Don Kalb and two anonymous reviewers for feedback on earlier drafts of this article. This article is part of an ongoing conversation connected to the Frontlines: Class, Value, and Social Transformation in twenty-first Century Capitalism research project, hosted by the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen.

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  1. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Stephen Campbell

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Campbell, S. Anthropology and the social factory. Dialect Anthropol 42, 227–239 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-018-9498-5

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