IV. Building construction was also revolutionized--metals, concrete,
glass and synthetics replaced wood and stone as the basic construction
materials.
V. New energy sources and the new capital expanded the volume and
variety of production far more rapidly than the increase in population
and turned the resulting surplus into a technical apparatus that made
possible mass production for a mass market.
VI. Mass production, transportation, construction and marketing ushered
in an era of surplus that replaced the age of comparative scarcity with
an age of rapidly increasing abundance.
Changes in the means of production play havoc with any established
social pattern. The economic alteration that accompanied and followed
the eighteenth and early nineteenth century transformation of western
economy overturned various aspects of the western social structure:
1. Representative government made its appearance and spread
widely;
2. Social services and social security, previously reserved for
the elite, were provided for wider and wider circles of the
population;
3. Changes in technology, advances in science, the replacement
of landlords, clergymen and soldiers by businessmen
and professionals, including the military, as the recognized
leaders of the modern society, put social control in the hands
of a new ruling bourgeois class;
4. The bourgeois revolution brought into existence two other
classes: the industrial proletariat as an ally and/or an
acceptable leader of the peasant masses of Europe.
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