(in Russian, zavod). (1) An industrial enterprise with mechanized production processes, which manufactures primarily means of production.
(2) An enterprise for the breeding of pedigree animals (for example, konnyi zavod, “stud farm”).
an industrial enterprise based on the use of machines, characteristic of large-scale machine production. In Soviet political economy, the term fabrika (“factory”) is synonymous with zavod (“plant”) and is usually used for enterprises in light industry and the extracting industries, such as textile mills and ore-dressing and agglomeration enterprises.
The rise of the factory was a result of the industrial revolution of the last third of the 18th and first quarter of the 19th century. The first factory in Russia, the Alexandrov Manufactory, was founded in 1799. Historically, factory production was preceded by capitalist manufacture. The appearance of the machine and the development of the machine system marked the transition from the manufacturing workshop to the factory. The cooperation of workers performing part of the total work, based on a division of manual labor, was transformed in the factory into the cooperation of machines performing part of the total work, and the cooperative nature of the labor process became a technical necessity dictated by the means of labor (seeCOOPERATION, LABOR). With the transition from manufacture to factory production, capitalism created an adequate material and production basis, and capitalist industry entered a stage of large-scale machine production, which constitutes the basis for consolidating the capitalist mode of production.
“The transition from the manufactory to the factory,” wrote V. I. Lenin, “signifies a complete technical revolution, which does away with the craftsman’s manual skill that has taken centuries to acquire, and this technical revolution is inevitably followed by the most thoroughgoing destruction of social production relations, by a final split among the various groups of participants in production,... an intensification and extension of all the dark apsects of capitalism, and at the same time by a mass socialisation of labour by capitalism” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 3, p. 455).
On the one hand, the capitalist factory is a social productive force that creates the opportunity to raise labor productivity and efficiency; on the other, it acts as the productive force of capital, which capital uses to exploit hired labor and obtain surplus value. The development of factory production has become characteristic of and the basis for the real subjugation of labor to capital, and it constitutes a factor in the increasing intensification of the labor of workers, who become a mere appendage of the machine. It fosters the creation of an industrial reserve army and the exacerbation of the basic contradiction of capitalism between the social character of production and the private-capitalist form of appropriation.
Factory production constantly changes as the means of labor are developed. Major advances have occurred in factory production as a result of contemporary scientific and technological progress—electrification, the transition to machinery with numerical program control, the appearance of production-line manufacturing, and the introduction of modern automated machinery, automatic transfer machines, and computers. The industrialization of agriculture, construction, and transportation leads to the spread of factory-production methods in these sectors. As a traditional form of enterprise, the factory or plant is being increasingly replaced by a complex of enterprises, to which the factory belongs as a production component; this reflects the processes of concentration and centralization and the socialization of production.
Highly developed, large-scale machine production in all the corresponding sectors of the national economy serves as the material-production basis for a socialist society. The socialist factory is based on public ownership and cooperative labor, that is, the labor of employees who are free from exploitation and who perform their work in the interests of the whole society. The planned organization of production on a scale that covers the entire national economy creates possibilities for the fullest possible use of the advantages of large-scale machine production. Such production becomes a universal form of social production in all branches of the national economy in the process of creating the material and technical basis for communism.
D. G. PLAKHOTNAIA