Of course, the factory is not the cause of all this. Nor is mechanization as such. The factory is the visible embodiment or techno-social symptom of the new values regime generated by a more fundamental material revolution in human history and consciousness. I speak of the revolution of capital. The capitalist revolution is the key material condition for the emergence of the modernity we are stuck with in the twenty-first century. Marx was not the only nineteenth-century thinker who came to understand that capitalism and the circulation of capital was in the process of revolutionizing, by dint of the industrial model of production, both the material world and the moral world as well. Many Victorian voices denounced the money economy, the cash nexus, and the factory system as soul-destroying and corrupting, in which inherited values were threatened as never before.

The irresistible advance of this system of capital accumulation and production, driven on by the market-form, had its necessary ideological dimension. The changes in the material environment all through the nineteenth century changed the common, or inherited, perceptions of what it meant to be a human being. These ideological shifts opened a wide rift between perception and reality. New philosophical and legal definitions of the person and the person as appropriated by the mechanical systems around which life was increasingly organized widened as the century progressed.