ABSTRACT
‘All the world's a stage’, one of Marx's favourite writers once declared. To date there has been no actual performance which has adhered faithfully to Marx's original script. Such rehearsals as took place during his lifetime generally failed to meet the author's expectations, while those enacted in his name since then have for the most part been staged only after considerable modification of the initial scenario. If the world was Marx's stage, he expected that the revolutionary process to be enacted there would unfold by stages. From such works as the Communist Manifesto and the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy it was clear that he believed that the conditions from which the desired socialist order would emerge were those created by bourgeois society, which were at that time to be found only in the advanced countries of Western Europe and North America.
