2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST agricultural production and arising from large-scale deforestation and overgrazing. R. Shashidhar's paper examines critically the writings of Raymond Williams, an outstanding intellectual figure of the post-war British Left, and in particular his Culture and Society. Williams' work, very much in the tradition of British socialist writings, provides a counterpoint to the structuralist and post-structuralist tendencies, and may have suffered a degree of neglect for this very reason in recent years. The paper however highlights certain problems with Williams' work itself: in trying to overcome the positivist derivations of reductive Marxism, Williams tended to go to the opposite extreme, accepting "to some degree his opponents' way of seeing the problem" and underplaying the central Marxist concept of class-struggle and class conflict. Finally, V. Lal looks at the use of sanctions by the United States in maintaining its politics of dominance. A distinction is drawn between the South African case where the sanctions had the extensive support not only of the international community but of the majority of the people of the targeted country itself, and the case of Iraq where in the name of the Security Council the US is imposing sanctions in the pursuit of its own private agenda in cynical disregard of human suffering. This article is not written from a socialist point of view (the references to 25-30 million deaths in China during the Great Leap and to the "victims" of "social and economic" policies in the Soviet Union would be repudiated by socialists, the former for counting the unborn among the dead and the latter for decontextualising the issue). But at a time when India itself has become an object of US sanctions, it raises pertinent issues.