The concept of revolution lies at the very heart of Marx's theory of social change, and the need for a revolutionary transformation of capitalist society has historically constituted the dividing wall between Marxists and reformist social democrats. And yet, despite the euphoria accompanying the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of "Stalinism" in Eastern Europe, the response to 1989 in terms of Marxist analysis has been strangely muted. This contrasts with the stream of analysis produced by Western political scientists, who have generally subsumed the revolutions under the broader heading of "transitions to democracy", creating in the process the new sub-discipline of "transitology".¹