4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST general path along which capitalism will be replaced by socialism. At the same time, they were not merely theorists but men of action and, in this capacity, they wrote and spoke on innumerable current developments. There developed a tendency, after they were gone, to confuse their pronouncements on current developments with their perception of the way in which capitalism would be replaced by socialism. Those of us who did embrace Marxism-Leninism after the gigantic developments in the Soviet Union in the thirties and forties thought that what was happening in the Soviet Union was the essence of Marxism-Leninism. That however was only a half-truth. As Lenin himself had pointed out in his day, all countries and peoples would march towards socialism but not in exactly the same manner. The socialist 'experiment* in the Soviet Union was a mixture of the general and the concrete. To raise the concrete to the level of the general was the fallacy into which many of us fell. Let us therefore see what is the essence of the general theory of Marxism. Firstly, the laws of the development of capitalism as a system (which were briefly dealt with in the joint Marx-Engels work, Communist Manifesto and the much larger work, Marx's Capital) were such that the periodical economic crises of capitalism would inevitably grow into a general crisis out of which the only solution is the emergence of socialism. Secondly, capitalism thus continuously creates the objective conditions of its replacement by socialism. At the same time, it creates a subjective force which will operate in the process of humanity's transition from capitalism to socialism—the organised working class. Further developing these two major concepts of Marxism, Lenin pointed out that the emergence of monopoly capitalism created such a crisis in the system of capitalism that imperialist wars, national revolutionary wars and other peoples' upheavals have become the order of the day. Lenin however was not only the great theoretician who applied the theory of Marxism to the realities of the era of imperialism. He was also the practical leader of the Russian and world working class who saw that his country was the weakest link in the chain of capitalism where therefore the working class could take power and start the process of socialist construction. He thus became the founding father of the first land of socialism in the world. It was to further expand and elaborate these essential concepts of Marxism-Leninism that the three giants of the revolutionary proletariat undertook their theoretical and practical work. The great masters are, in other words, the effective exponents of the theory of proletarian revolution and at the same time practical activists who helped the development of the subjective force that operates in the