REVOLUTION is a science and a passion. It 'happens' but it is also 'made'. It is a product of circumstances which change the whole balance of social forces and the appropriators get appropriated. But even though economic and political crisis fuel a revolutionary situation, what is crucial here is the preparedness of an 'agency', in the form of a party or an organised class force. Even when there is a spontaneous revolution, a long history of subjective or objective preparations lie behind it. In 1857, during the first war of Indian independence, there was no party in the contemporary sense. But, as Marx noted, there existed an armed, prepared, organised peasantry, in the form of the 'Sepoy army', standing as the vanguard of Indian society.

Revolutions in the era of imperialism acquire, a scientific and professional character. They are engineered not by suppressed individuals or sections of the society but by rising, mainstream class forces, conscious individuals and professional revolutionaries aspiring for change and power. But when they actually happen, they explode all rational and calculated expectations to pieces and offer a tantalising glimpse of the past, present and future in one instance.

Marxism presents the aspect of force and violence as a 'natural' principle attendant upon the very phenomena of societal change, the need of which arises from within, not without. As such, it cannot be either imposed or withdrawn as an autonomous factor and is forever subservient to politics.

Democratic revolutions in the 20th century imply social change in those countries where the bourgeoisie rules in an alliance with feudal and imperialist forces and thus has abrogated its anti-feudal, bourgeois-democratic and nationalist tasks. In those countries. Marxists arc called upon to lead a bourgeois-democratic revolution. The state they create is not a proletarian state acting as a transition between capitalism and socialism, but a new democratic one acting as a transition between a bourgeois-landlord dispensation and a modern, socialist one.