As I have said, the real proletarian revolution in the rural district's began only in the summer of 1918." (V I Lenin, "Collected Works", Vol 29, Moscow, 1965, p 203, emphasis in the original.) There are, however, one or two methodological weaknesses in some of the analytical studies, which deserve to be noted. Desai has the habit of enumerating a series of features, developments, etc, related to any phenomenon or process under study (e g, pp 14-6, 24-5, 105-8). The features may sometimes be overlapping and at other times may belong to different levels of reality. Neither does he attempt to bring out the systemic interrelations, if any, between the separate features, nor does he distinguish between appearance and essence. As a result, the essence of the dialectical study, namely, the exposure of the inherent contradictions within the esssence of a phenomenon, gets seriously neglected.
