2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST The trio of papers dealing with aspects of Marxist theory is completed by Asim Chaudhuri's piece on the specificities of monopoly capital in the Third World countries. The emergence of monopoly out of "free competition" in the advanced capitalist countries is contrasted by him to the formation of monopoly groups, with their origin in commercial capital, in a colonial environment and their subsequent evolution in the post-colonial period. On the basis of the specificities of this monopoly, he concludes that Lenin's proposition that "under the capitalist system...unlimited expansion, perpetual progress becomes the law of production" does not apply in Third World countries like India. W^iile this conclusion is debatable, e g, while it may be argued that tlie tendency for expansion is not so much absent as manifesting itself in particular ways in such economies, tlierc is no gainsaying the fact thai the nature of monopoly capital severely constrains the bourgeois transformation of Third World societies and economies A great deal of complacency exists in our country, even in supposedly well-informed circles, on the enhanced threat of nulear war arising from Reagan's Euromissile deployment. Raja Mohan's article should shake this complacency. Not only would a "limited" nulear war^ in Europe also destroy all the "developing countries55 of the South, but, what is more, the prospects of such a war are no longer as remote as is often imagined, owing to the dangerous belief entertained of late by the US that a nuclear war can be fought and won. This belief underlies the aggressive nuclear strategy of the US, though that strategy is sought to be justified in terms of concoctions like "Soviet first strike threat", "window of vulnerability of the US", "missile gap" etc. The article exposes the falsity of these justifications, establishes that the Soviet Union has all along been genuinely interested in nuclear de-escalation and explores the chequered history of the SALT and START negotiations. At the same time it locates the shift in U S nuclear policy within the broader transformation of U S foreign policy in an aggressive interventionist direction. Grenada of course is the latest example of this transformation. The brief note on Grenada, which refutes the fatuous arguments for intervention advanced by the Reagan Administration, forms a useful complement to Raja Mohan's article. Finally, we are happy to publish a note on Santosh Kumari Devi, perhaps the first woman trade union leader in the country, whose views and activities constitute the moment of transition between the period of exclusive bourgeois leadership of working class struggles and the emergence of Communist trade unions. Social Scientist would welcome more such pieces, which, in recapturing certain outstanding personalities and events, recover for us the history of the struggle of the working class and the toiling people.