Factory System

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Factory System

The factory system is a mode of capitalist production that emerged in the late eighteenth century as a result of England’s Industrial Revolution. Preindustrial England was largely organized around localized forms of production. Goods were produced on family-centered farms, and items such as yarn and other textiles were contracted for larger distribution or produced independently to be sold at a market. After technological innovations created the ability to produce textiles using waterpower, production became centralized in a single place: a factory owned in many cases by members of the former aristocratic class and staffed by workers who were paid a wage (see E. P. Thompson’s 1963 book, The Making of the English Working Class ). While this mode of production began with the cotton and textile industries, it was the development of the steam engine that fully established the shift from craftspeople and localized production into production under the factory system.

There are several interconnected factors beyond technological innovation that created the factory system in England in its particular moment in history. One was the development of banking institutions, which were able to channel investments into the establishment of factories, and which were also able to facilitate economic exchange. Similarly, landowners were able to take advantage of the banking industry’s low interest rates to facilitate and finance the development of transit systems, created to move goods produced under this new system. At the same time, a rise in the British population not only increased demand for goods, but also created a large pool of laborers who would eventually work for a wage after the development of the factory system. Finally, social changes in Britain at the time both facilitated the training of upper-middle-class men who would administrate the factory system and also the development of British persons as free workers, as opposed to serfs, who could sell their labor power in exchange for a wage.

As such, the development of the factory system was central to the eventual entrenchment of capitalism on a world scale. It was this very shift in production and landownership, combined with the legal backing of free individuals who may enter into a state-sanctioned contractual relationship, that created what Karl Marx (1818–1883) would identify as the two classes in capitalist society: those who own the means of productions and those who own labor power, which they exchange for a wage in the marketplace. Although both workers and owners share the distinction of equality under the law, it was the old aristocrats who were able to develop the infrastructure and purchase the land to develop factories, and the old serfs who had nothing to sell and exchange but their capacity for labor. This system, whereby the owners of the factories could, through the labor process, transfer the value of the worker’s productivity into the value of a commodity, established the efficient yet exploitative mode of capitalist production that is still with us today.

The factory system was not only the foundation for the development of capitalism; it also radically shifted many aspects of social organization and daily life. Agricultural families were largely disenfranchised by this process, and in many cases were required to move to industrial centers in order to survive. They were thrust into the system of wage labor, fundamentally changing relationships between men and women. Whereas in preindustrial societies, all members of the family were involved in production work, the advent of the factory system created a gendered division of labor for middle- and working-class families, whereby men went to work for a wage and women were relegated to household work. In poor and nonwhite families, women worked for a wage outside the home in both formal and informal settings. Men were nearly always wageworkers, while women were either relegated to unpaid work to support the work of the men in their families or themselves worked for wages as a means of survival.

The link of the wage system to factory production created not only a different work process and a gendered division of labor, but also a new form of work. Whereas work under preindustrial forms of organization was often exploitative, particularly under systems of slavery and feudalism, the development of the factory system as a defining feature of capitalism created alienated work for the first time. Work is said to be alienated when the worker is in a relationship of production whereby he or she has no autonomy or control over what he or she is producing, where the goods being produced belong exclusively to the owner of the factory, and whereby this process makes the worker alien to himself or herself and his or her community. Marx, in his book Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867) argued that workers are alienated to the same extent that they are subject to livelihood exclusively through the wage labor market. This same process has created a social life whereby workers are more fundamentally tied to the workplace than to their homes in terms of livelihood and dependence. This process has also created levels of bureaucracy that divide labor into segmented, de-skilled tasks.

There has been tremendous resistance to the organization of work and social life under the factory system of production. Historically, that resistance has resulted in the abolition of child labor, the creation of the eight-hour workday, and various other labor laws regulating the extent to which owners of the means of production may exploit their workers. Moral arguments about whose labor is fair to exploit, and under which conditions that labor power may be extracted, have resulted in change. Many of the first nations to develop the factory system are now seeing a decline in factory production, as its mode of efficiency under capitalism seeks ever-cheaper ways to produce goods outside the limits of environmental and labor laws. These same nations have seen a shift from factory production to a service economy. However, the fundamental form of factory production, and the inherent link to exploitative relationships under capitalism, is as yet unaltered.

SEE ALSO Factories