paper is a valuable reminder of the amount of work that needs to be done. Rajeev Bhargava's paper argues that the central problem of the socialist democracy is to grasp how meanings can be shared, how common meanings can be gestated. But it argues against traditional theories of meaning which have an individualist flavour and are committed to an individualist metaphysics. Meanings are common not in the sense that everyone is in the same mental state as everyone else, but in the sense that they are generated within a set of social relations, where this is a structured interdependence between people. Given this interdependence, the demand often made that meanings be made simple and literally available to all cannot be met; due place must be given within any theory of socialist democracy to a concept of authority, which does not amount to endorsing bureaucratic or technocratic power. Technology power is also the focus of attention in Basabi Sur's paper on technology and social organisation. The paper examines the question of whether the traditional conception of class has been superseded in the contemporary world by the technological revolution, and surveys the writings of a host of authors from Burnham and Galbraith to Poulantzas, Marcuse and Andre Gorz. An important conclusion of the paper, inspired by Gorz's words, is that the transition for capitalism to socialism must involve a change not only in property relations, but also in the entire principle of work organisation and hence the development of a specifically socialist form of technology. In contrast to the technological revolution and the embourgeoisment of words at the core, discussed in Sur's paper, capitalism continues to use the most primitive methods of coercive exploitation in the periphery. This has been the case all through history, and the paper by Atis Dasgupta and Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty draws attention to this phenomenon in the early colonial period. While giving a fascinating account of the growth of Calcutta after the battle of Plassey, the paper highlights the use made of 'forced labour* by the East India Company for its construction activity during this period. Finally, we publish a note by Ela Mukhopadhyay which gives an account of the distintegration of the social and cultural fabric of Arunachal Pradesh under the impact of monetisation that has accompanied the growth of Indian military presence in the region.