Factory
Etymology
Mark Rediker:
"Most people do not know that the word “factory” has an African origin. European slave traders grounded ships along the coast of West Africa and used them as places of business for buying human bodies. The root-word of factory is «factor», or merchant, who organizes production and trade. So that is one way in which a ship was literally a factory. The slave ship was also a machine, a floating factory that produced specific things, and we have to look at it in this way in order to understand how it was a site of history-making."
Example
Mark Rediker:
"I argued in The Slave Ship: A Human History that the ship/factory produced two things.
First, by transporting human bodies from one place to another, from the coast of West Africa to the plantation system of the New World, it produced labor power that would be redeployed in a new setting for the accumulation of capital. The accumulation of labor power happened on the ship, valorized by the workers who were on board.
The second thing the ship produced was categories of race. Let me give two examples. The ship’s crew in the 18th century – then and still today – was always multi-ethnic. A ship might begin its voyage from Liverpool with 40 sailors on board – English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, French, Greek, African, African American. But when they arrived on the coast of West Africa and began trading for enslaved people, the people on that ship would be called the “white people,” not because of the color of their skin, but because of their control of the technology, the ship, that made the trade possible. Sailors went from multi-ethnic to “white.” They actually lost some of their whiteness on the Atlantic voyage and I can say more about that if you like. Now let’s look at it from the African Side. The people who were loaded onto the ships were also multi-ethnic – Fante, Igbo, Mende, and dozens of other ethnicities. But once transported across the Atlantic, they disembarked the ship as members of a single «negro race». What we see is that race formation was going on board of the ship – and of course it continued in the port cities and on plantations, but the ship marked the original racial transformation.
I developed the idea of the ship as a floating factory in the first book I wrote, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Cambridge University Press 1987), about merchant ships and sailors in the 18th century. The idea was that workers from many different backgrounds came together on the ship, as waged laborers, to toil cooperatively. The ship captain, armed with extreme and violent authority, oversaw and often forced their cooperation within a complex division of labor. The ship was in all of these ways a precursor of the modern factory.
Labor historians had rarely seen the ship as a factory, nor the sailor as a kind of industrial worker, because work at sea did not produce commodities. But thinking of production as only involving commodities is a mistake: production involves the creation of value through time and space. Sailors created part of the value of the commodity called “slave.” When enslaved workers produced the original value of sugar, tobacco, rice, or cotton on the plantation, sailors created additional value by moving those commodities through space to international markets. A related point is that women’s domestic labor also produces value, but does not necessarily produce commodities, so reproductive labor fits in the same category. Thinking about the ship as a factory help us to think about the nature of both the factory and the working class."