Title: Factory System | Encyclopedia.com
Headings: Factory System
Factory System
Factory System
BIBLIOGRAPHY
factory system
factory system

Content: 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.