2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST because of the current expenditure, composed mainly of transfers to the proprietary classes and of the costs of maintaining the mammoth government apparatus, have bloated to an extent where the current revenues, from whose incidence the proprietary classes have become increasingly insulated, are insufficient to finance them. The cost of maintaining our political system in other words exceeds the current receipts from the system, making it incapable of planned economic development under the aegis of the state. It is to this contradiction that the author traces the origin of the new turn in economic policy. Both these papers were presented at the Calcutta meet of economists in October. We are publishing them here in the hope that they would carry forward the discussion around the new economic policy which we have initiated in the pages of this journal over the last few months. The article by Ranjit Das Gupta on the characteristics of the tribal labour force recruited to work in the coal mines in the early years, raises important theoretical issues going beyond the specific historical context. This labour force, which moved back and forth between the tribal and peasant economy on the one hand and the coal mines on the other, symbolised a complex interaction between the capitalist and the pre-capitalist sectors. The meagre wages and the absence of any insurance against sickness, unemployment and old age, in the capitalist sector, forced the workers into reliance on their precapitalist ties for the maintenance and support of their families, the fact that die workers continued to exhibit features of a semi-proletariat was thus a response to a situation of extreme capitalist exploitation, which also evoked considerable resistance from below. The resistance to the ascendancy of capitalists in Europe in the entire period spanning the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century provided the milieu within which the creativity of Francisco, Goya, the Spanish painter, unfolded itself. A.N. Anwer's piece on Goya, which is inspired by an exhibition of Goya\s works held recently in Delhi, locates die creative vision of this rebel genius in the context of the protest against the tyranny of bourgeois "reason" in the period of growing ascendancy of capital. Finally, we publish a rejoinder by Sanjay Prasad to the communication by Partha Chatterjee, published in Social Scientist No. 141. This communication itself was a response to a long review article on Subaltren Studies II which Social Scientist had carried eailier. Ours has been one of the journals that has taken up for serious and critical examination the work being done by the group of historians who liave gathered together to bring out Subaltren Studies. We ate glad to carry di^s discussion forward.