ws a steady stream of migrants from the countryside into the
cities.

Civilizations are dominated by business interests. It is for them to
provide facilities for the transaction of business, cash money, credit
instruments, installment buying, means for changing money, insurance,
discounting facilities. As a civilization grows in wealth and population
the political apparatus becomes a major employer, a major producer of
goods and services, a major purchaser of producer and consumer goods, a
major agency for borrowing, lending, insuring, in short a major factor
in the multitudinous activities of a commercial, industrial community.

Classes, class interests and class lines are a part and parcel of all
civilizations. They are less rigid and more flexible than similar lines
existing in an agrarian community where land ownership plays so large a
role in determining social forms and social functions. In a static
agrarian community dominated by landlords, war-lords and the clergy,
rigid class lines help to hold the community together. In a community
dominated by business interests, both labor power and purchasing power
must be free to respond to demand and supply. This is as true in a
planned public economy as it is in a private enterprise economy. In
accordance with the same principle, facilities are provided for the
movement of individuals back and forth across class lines.

The specialized, interdependent structure of civilization with its city
control of the hinterland, its products and inhabitants, enabled the
city-centered oligarchy to accumulate and concentrate wealth and
monopolize power, to skim the cream from the available milk, monopolize
the cream, distribute the skimmed milk judiciously and thus perpetuate
its ascendancy through generations and centuries. During periods of
expansion civilized communities develop a dynamism which maintains their
ascendancy. In subsequent periods of contraction form takes over,
imposing conformity on the status quo.

During their periods of expansion civilizations are dynamic. Their
history records growth at home, expansion abroad, exploitation,
domestic and foreign under the pressure of effective motivating forces.
The resulting dynamism leads to the contradictions, confrontations and
conflicts which have studded the internal and external life story of
every civilization.

Perhaps the most outstanding aspect of the dynamic functioning of
civilization is its growth in magnitude.