ABSTRACT
If the real subsumption thesis shows how capitalist relations are immanent to the machine, it also shows how social relations as a whole become increasingly subordinated to capitalist regimes of production. As the compulsion of the machine replaces the need for a human master, the social itself emerges as a vast plane of capitalized activity in the development of what Mario Tronti called the ‘Social Factory’. As Tronti put it in 1962:
The more capitalist development advances, that is to say the more the production of relative surplus value penetrates everywhere, the more the circuit production – distribution – exchange – consumption inevitably develops; that is to say that the relationship between capitalist production and bourgeois society, between the factory and society, between society and the state, become [sic] more and more organic. At the highest level of capitalist development social relations become moments of the relations of production, and the whole society becomes an articulation of production. In short, all of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination over all of society.
