ABSTRACT
In the very early days of factory development there was much anxiety that machinery would displace more handwork than it could re-employ. The essential feature characterizing the factory system in contrast to the preceding system of industrial capitalist organization has been its independence from control by commercial capitalism. The genuine factory system represented then a sort of industrial organization more closely resembling the system of handicrafts, before it was used by the financial and commercial industrialists as a means towards their expansive aims of control. The factory was indeed a sort of renaissance of the independent industrial producer, regarding capital as a more or less necessary evil and without any object of "control" or commercial domination. The contrasting of the rise of the factory system and its aspects in the nineteenth century with the former concentrative tendencies of early industrial capitalism brings us face to face with its corresponding contrasts to the most modern development in industrial organization.
