On the Industrial Revolution, the Democratization of Material Life, and the Massification of Consumption

The process of human consumption of various material and spiritual goods is a striking landmark phenomenon of our time. The whole nature and mental meanings of capitalism are imbued with the consumer activity of a social subject. As the phenomenon of consumption itself is ambiguous (from the point of view of opposite assessments of representatives of two antagonistic “camps” – conditionally “idealists” and “materialists”), so the influence of this process on people’s minds and behavior receives different explanations and predictions. It can be unequivocally stated that the democratization of consumption, the availability of previously inaccessible products and services to an ever-wider range of people, is one of the main achievements of human civilization. The following thesis can be considered reasonable: reducing material needs leads to greater political stability in society, which in turn reduces the likelihood of social disasters, but most importantly, the efficiency of production and consumption removes the issue of the importance of mass democratization from the mass agenda, replacing it with the issue of increasing the efficiency of the economic model of society (regardless of the political system).