In passages of Marx’s Grundrisse known as the Fragment on Machines, Marx suggested that advanced capitalist development leads to the production of autonomous machines that replace labour-power in the direct production process. Autonomist Marxist interpretations of this text have emphasized that the proliferation of immaterial labour is the historical condition that is leading to a crisis in the measure of value based on labour-time and that will lead to a future communist mode of production. Further, Mario Tronti posited that as capitalist development unfolds, it subsumes both the state and society, a concept known as the ‘social factory thesis’. This integrated article analyzes Marx and autonomist Marxist perspectives in relation to the advanced development of information technology. The approach contributes to the field of library and information science (LIS) by introducing Marx’s materialist conception of history to the study of social consciousness, information and information technology and materialist conceptions of information. The thesis statement posits that the total replacement of labour-power with machine-power leads to the development of what I refer to as the autonomous mode of production while network information technologies have become capital and the bourgeois state’s means of subsuming and producing ‘the social factory’. Case studies of Industry 4.0, Uber and smart cities support the thesis statement. The conclusion examines the social and political implications of capitalist development of the autonomous mode of production and capitalist and bourgeois state control of network information technology, offering instead the alternative path of communisation
