2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST The two main articles of the current number are being published with this objective. The lead article by Azizur Rahman Khan, after summarising the results in terms of growth and income distribution of the economic performance of the socialist systems in the Soviet Union and China, a summary based on careful statistical analysis (done elsewhere), argues the case for combining multiple forms of ownership (excluding capitalist ownership) in a socialist society and the pervasive use of markets and material incentives. The socialist regimes in the earlier phase, notwithstanding their dramatic success during the phase of extensive expanded reproduction, erred, he argues, in ignoring the importance of markets and material incentives, under the influence of a kind of utopianism which was particularly out of place in backward economics; in the more recent reform phase, when they have introduced markets and material incentives, they have erred in introducing capitalist ownership as well. The other article, by Robert Pollin and Alexander Cockburn, which was originally published in The Nation, argues by contrast for an attenuated role for free markets in a socialist society. Puncturing the current euphoria over free market capitalism, a euphoria particularly afflicting the literati in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and providing a comprehensive critique of free market policies, they argue that state intervention is not per se synonymous with bureaucratic degeneration. In the Indian context today when IMF-dictated 'stabilisation* and 'structural adjustment' policies are being embraced by the government as a panacea for our economic ailments, this article has a special relevance. Finally we publish a note by Suzan Hazra which argues that the occupational diversification of the work-force out of the agricultural sector, which occurred for the first time in this century during the 1970s, may not be a sustainable phenomenon over time, since the present constraints on resource mobilisation are unlikely to permit the pace of GDP growth required for sustaining it.