Mass democracy, as interpreted by Kondylis, is also a global process. Moving from the West where it supplanted “an oligarchic and hierarchical bourgeois liberalism,” it is now “merging with a planetary landscape,” in which Marxism and Communism have become the preparatory phases in a mass democratic end of history.[12] Unlike the liberal age it ended or the Communism it surpassed in material productiveness, mass democratic society both proclaims and works toward providing material gratification. In a secularized and dehierarchical setting, it does what Marxist socialism promised but only occasionally could produce. Here Marx, according to Kondylis, offered a partially accurate prediction but grafted onto it a happy historical ending that is unlikely to come to pass. Marx “had clung to the idea of a normative-eschatological unification of world history” and “had explained this unitary character of a planetary event through social and economic factors while drawing appropriate political conclusions [from his assumptions].”But this unitary world history which Marx saw as tied to economic modernization is also intensifying the war against social cohesion, in the name of individual gratification and universal sameness. Kondylis observes the irony that the struggle against Communism, “fought not least of all for liberal ideals,” has resulted in the victory of a postliberal society, one whose dissimilarity from the bourgeois age is greater than the distance that had separated Europe before the French Revolution from the Europe of the late nineteenth century. This exemplifies the ideological misrepresentation that Kondylis believes characterizes the promoters of mass democracy. They insist on a fictional continuity with the liberal past.[13]