man race appear on a single field
of competition and all the world as a single market, what is there
astonishing in the ideology which, reflecting intellectually these
conditions of fact, reaches the affirmation that the present historical
unity has been prepared by everything which precedes it? Translating
this concept of pretended _preparation_ into the altogether natural
concept of _successive condition_, and there is opened before us the
road by which the passage is made from the ideology of progress to
historical materialism; and now we arrive at the affirmation of Marx,
that this form of bourgeois production is the last antagonistic form of
the _processus_ of society.

The miracles of the bourgeois epoch, in the unification of the social
_processus_, find no parallel in the past. Here are the whole New World,
Australia, Northern Africa, and New Zealand! And they all resemble us!
And the rebound in the extreme East is made through imitation, and in
Africa through conquest! In the presence of this universality and this
cosmopolitanism, the acquisition of the Celts and the Iberians to Roman
civilization, and of the Germans and that the Slavs to the cycle of
Roman Byzantine Christian civilization shrink into insignificance. This
ever-growing unification is reflected more every day in the political
mechanism of Europe; this mechanism, because founded on the economic
conquest of the other parts of the world, oscillates henceforth with the
flux and reflux which come from the most distant regions. In this most
complicated mingling of action and reactions the war between Japan and
China, made with methods imitated, or directly borrowed, from European
technique, leaves its traces, deep and far-reaching, in the diplomatic
relations of Europe, and still clearer traces in the stock exchange,
which is the faithful interpreter of the consciousness of our time. This
Europe, mistress of all the rest of the world, has recently seen the
relations of the politics of the states of which it is composed
oscillate in consequence of a revolt in the Transvaal, and in
consequence of the ill success of the Italian armies in Abyssinia in
these last days.[30]

The centuries which have prepared and carried to its present form the
economic domination of bourgeois production have also developed the
tendency to a unification of history under a general view; and in this
fashion we find explained and justified the ideology of progress, which
fills