III. This revolution in the tempo of production and capital accumulation was parallelled by a like revolution in transportation and communication by land, water, and eventually by air and in space. Electricity played an essential part in the process by speeding communication and helping to put transportation on wheels.
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. At the same time it enlarged the middle class to a point at which it was able to play a decisive role in the formulation and direction of social policy in industrialized communities.
5. Fragments of the industrial proletariat and the greatly enlarged middle class came together in an avowedly revolutionary movement: socialism-communism, which reached the power summit between 1910 and 1917.