2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST as such is of interest to every student of Marxism. We hope that this pioneering scholarly effort would stimulate a productive debate in the pages of this journal. The two other articles in this number are both concerned wifh the struggle of the coir workers in Alleppey. We publish both these articles together not only because of the outstanding importance of that struggle in the history of the toilers' movement in the country, but also because the articles complement one another and between them raise a number of important questions relating to theory, strategy and tactics. Thomas Isaac's piece, which discusses the changing organisational basis of the coir industry and thus provides the babkground against which the struggles described by Meera occurred, seeks to dispel any simpliste notions about some necessary and unilinear sequence of organisational forms through which an industry must pass under capitalism. To assert by invoking the authority of Marx that an industry which has come under the sway of capital must pass inevitably and irreversibly from the handicraft stage to the manufacturing stage, to machinofacture, is to misrepresent the Marxist position. The complexity of organisational transitions was underscored by Lenin in his study of Russian capitalism. Technological and organisational changes occur within a concrete situation, as a response to it; of this situation, inter alia, the nature and intensity of class struggle as experienced in the industry in question is a major determinant and constituent. Thus a study of changes cannot be divorced from the concrete conditions of the industry, and above all the nature of class struggle raging therein, as the history of the coir industry demonstrates. Meera's paper, focussing on the role of women workers In the Alleppey struggle, attempts to recover a tradition and recapitulate some of the problems it faced. The decentralisation of the coir industry and the consequent dispersal of workers, especially women workers, a large number of whom where reduced to a "marginalised existence", forced many women to move away from active trade unionism. It is not that their ideological beliefs had changed, but simply that the situation coerced many of them to withdraw from active political involvement. Insofar as technological and organisational changes are themselves often enough the capitalist's reponse to class struggle, both papers underscore the importance of an appropriate working class response to such changes. And finally we publish a note which critically examines the "social forestry" programme of the goverment to establish the distance between its professed aims and its actual achievements; this distance, it is argued, is not due to inefficiency, bungling or lackadaisical implementation, but because the programme is actually meant to benefit certain groups even though the rhetoric is about improving the people's lot.