I think there's actually a neat metaphor about this somewhere in Marx, that enough quantity can have a quality of its own. You can heat water 1 degree at a time, but once you reach the melting or boiling points, that same 1 degree increase causes the water to act radically differently.
I'm not sure where this analogy is useful, but it's neat. Maybe something along the lines of e.g., while feudal socities had limited wage labor, the amount of people dependent on wages for survival had not reached the boiling point where the economy became capitalist. Or, while everyone has some amount of money, it's only once you have reached a boiling point that you can invest in and thereby influence a corporation.