AN EXPERIMENT THAT FAILED ? 5 process of transition from capitalism to socialism—the world proletariat. As important as the theoretical writings of Marx and Engels is the fact that, beginning with the League of the Just which was transformed into the Communist League and ending with the organisation of the First International in the days of Marx and of the Second International when Engels survived Marx, Marxism gave the world not only the theory but the subjective force that was to transform that theory into practice. Lenin supplemented his theoretical works such as Materialism and Empiric-Criticism and Imperialism the Last Stage of Capitalism with the organisation of the Third (Communist) International. It was this latter action of Lenin that brought together in a single organisation the working class of Europe and the millions of oppressed peoples of the non-European countries. The evolution of Marxism-Leninism was thus not only the substantiation of the theory but the ever-expanding organisation of the working class and the oppressed peoples of the whole world. This process has had its advances and retreats. The European revolutionary wars of the 1840s which brought Marx and Engels to the fore as the theoretical and practical leaders of the world proletariat, were followed by a period of reaction. There was however a revival of the revolutionary movement during their own lifetime, the glorious Paris Commune of 1871 being the high watermark of advance in their day. That revolutionary outbreak did not last more than a few weeks. Though brutally suppressed, it made a lasting impression on the consciousness of the world working class. Its experience was used by Marx and Engels t6 further enrich the theory of state and revolution. In Lenin's own time, the oppressed peoples of the East became awakened and joined the organised working class of the advanced capitalist countries. His own country, Russia, witnessed three revolutions in his lifetime—1905, February 1917 and November 1917. The 1917 November Revolution in Russia could not be suppressed but many others including the greatest of them, the German Revolution of 1918, were suppressed. The last years of Lenin's life were thus a period of the retreat of revolution in other European countries but of success for the Russian Revolution. He, therefore, had to march along the path of socialist construction in a very backward country, while capitalism had triumphed in the major developed capitalist countries. LENIN'S EXPERIMENTS AND VISION During the half-a-decade left to him after the 1917 Revolution, Lenin made two experiments—the War Communism of 1918-21 and the New Economic Policy of 1922-24. He knew that, although socialist