Modern production systems are characteristic of 'constructive groups' who construct a landscape to serve their economic aspirations, populating it beyond the limits of the local natural productivity, importing goods and services from elsewhere, thereby destroying its ecosystems. Costructive groups gather around sites where there is an application of inventions for mass production. Workers migrate attracted by better wages and prospects, taking advantage of improved communications.

No single technological change is sufficient to mark the onset of the industrial revolution. For example, to point to the steam engine as the keystone of the industrial revolution obscures those developments that preceded it and that made the steam engine so important.  Any sharp conceptual line of demarcation through what is actually a historical process, and not an isolated event, must be arbitrary to some extent. Nevertheless, it is clear that the gradual global dominance of industrial modes of production has fundamentally altered the ways in which people live and labour, with concurrent changes in social organization and human subjectivity Its effects upon the rest of nature have been equally profound

Industrial modes of production are not simply the concentration of labourers in one place nor the use of energy to power machines. Prior to the nineteenth century, there was a certain degree of concentration of labourers in the manufacture of textiles and other goods. Factories using energy sources, especially water, existed in mining, shipbuilding, and other industries as early as the sixteenth century   By the nineteenth century, material production with machinery powered by outside energy sources became the dominant form of production. Such machinery is expensive and requires a significant outlay of capital Braudel argues that "the industrial revolution was above all a transformation of fixed capital: from now on, it would be more costly but more durable: its quality would be improved and it would radically alter rates of productivity."

Several social conditions had to be met before large investments in fixed capital could dominate the production process. Relatively stable social and political organizations had to exist for such endeavours to be of tolerable risk, and there had to be opportunities for profit that compensated the risk.  Perhaps the most important point for understanding industrialism's impact upon all of nature is that capital investment in machinery and other conditions of industrial production requires an assurance that human labour and raw materials will be available in sufficient quantity.

Since elabourate machines are expensive they can be worked without a loss only if the vent of the goods is reasonably assured and if production need not be interrupted for want of the primary goods necessary to feed the machines. Unless this condition is fulfilled, production with the help of specialized machines is too risky to be undertaken both from the point of view of the merchant who stakes his money and of the community as a whole which comes to depend upon continuous production for incomes, employment, and provisions.

The need for large and consistently available quantities of nature as resources and humans as labour is as necessary within industrial socialism as it is within capitalism These imperatives of industrial production press hard whether capital investment decisions are made publicly or privately.

Industrial production crowds out all other forms of production. The cost of industrially produced commodities is so much less than handcrafted goods that the industrial system of production spread relentlessly. Marx and Engels saw this clearly a century ago. The cheap prices of its commodities compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production,-  it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. '

If craftsmanship remains, it is valued against the background of mass production and becomes an expensive "luxury" product.

The last century has seen a remarkable integration of the global economy. Increasingly, global resource systems are being managed by multinational corporations. . . Viewed from space, the Global Factory suggests a human organism. The brain is housed in steel-and-glass slabs located in or near a few crowded cities . . The blood is capital, and it is pumped through the system by global banks assisted by a few governments. The financial centres . . . function as the heart. The hands are steadily moving to the outer rim of civilization. More and more goods are now made in the poor countries of the southern periphery under the direction from the headquarters on the North and most are destined to be consumed in the industrial heartland with the new postindustrial look.

National economies which engage in export and import are tied into global markets The greater such international trade, the greater the impact of such markets on the life of such nations. Transnational corporations and international financial markets corrode the reality of autonomous nation states through the mechanism of international markets.

As industrial production increases in complexity and expense, the need for social planning increases.  Modern industrial production requires the subdivision of any task into its component parts so that organized intelligence can be utilized.   As the span of time between the inception and completion of the task increases, there are corresponding expansions in the amount of capital "fixed" to the performance of particular tasks. The need for specialized manpower and the need for forms of organization to coordinate these specialists also expands This requires a high degree of planning. From the nineteenth to the twentieth century, there has been a steady expansion in the need for planning. This need has grown from the provision of resources and labour into other dimensions of social life, including the state, the work place, all levels of education, scientific and technological research, mass communication, and entertainment.