20 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Asia, the calamitous disappearance of remittances from workers in the Persian Gulf region (formerly, 3 million foreign workers in Kuwait alone), it has become desperate. So the economic idiom of the free-marketeers is now one of prolonged sacrifice, and the presumptive rewards of free-market capitalism promise to be outstripped by its penalties as the real living standards for peoples supposedly basking in its blessings continue to fall. It is therefore a good moment to examine the fundamental claims of the free-marketeers. Does the present situation signal merely an uncomfortable detour along a path that is sound, following a model essentially impregnable in its assumptions? Is the socialist path forever a cul-de-sac, one of history's false turns in the road? THE MARKET LOVE FEAST The end of the eighties boom, imploding through 1990, did not slow the rush of converts to market discipline. In the course of just a couple of weeks last fall, two governments run by social democrats made public their conversion. Michael Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica, said, 'We are making a radical change in direction' that will, 'among other things, involve the free play of market forces in the determination of prices.* In Sweden, the model to which many leftists originally hoped Eastern Europe would turn, the government announced a deflationary package that cut social benefits, an action widely heralded in the international financial press as a dramatic retreat from more than half a century of left-oriented Keynesianism. In Latin America, Asia and Africa as well as Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, professed Friedmanites, Thatcherites and Reaganites hold high office: Brazil's President, Fernando Collor de Mello, styles himself the 'C.E.O. of Brazil Inc.* Vietnam's lop economic strategist is Nguyen Zuan Oanh, a man whose c.v. includes a stint as acting Prime Minister for the U.S. puppet regime in South Vietnam and a staff position at the International Monetary Fund. In Algeria, Economics Minister Ghazi Hidouci says his government's 'simple* plan for overcoming the country's economic crisis is to turn away from twenty-eight years of state socialism and toward private enterprise and a free market. Mozambique has also abandoned its commitment to socialism and now aggressively seeks investors from South Africa. It was recently rewarded with a nearly interest-free $112 million loan from the I.M.F. for its conversion to free-market policies. And despite mounting crisis, free-market thinking continues its advance in Eastern Europe. In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev has for now abandoned his firm judgement of just four months ago that 'the whole world experience proved the vitality and efficiency of the market economy.' Yet such statements still represent the views of a wide swath, and perhaps the majority, of leading Soviet policy makers. In Poland, Lech Walesa won the presidency stressing the