Editorial Note With this number, Social Scientist completes nine years of publication. Its achievements during these nine years have been considerable. It has provided a forum for the expression of scientific views not only to well-known radical scholars in India and abroad, but, even more -important, to a large number of young researchers for whom the established avenues of publication are often foreclosed. It is a matter of great satisfaction for this journal that many of its young contributors are not merely from the metropolitan centres in India, but even from smaller towns and universities. It has nevertheless had its quota of problems. The lag between the scheduled and actual dates of publication has lengthened; inflation has escalated costs and created financial difficulties; advertisement revenues have been too meagre to permit the journal to break-even. These problems have forced the journal finally to resort to a number of measures which are unpleasant but essential to ensure its survival. These measures, announced elsewhere, include a rise in its price and a renumbering of its issues which wipes out the long lag that had developed between the scheduled and actual dates of publication. For these measures, the journal craves the indulgence of the readers. What is envisaged now is also a change in the character of the journal. The nine long years of its life have been marked by profound changes in the international as well as in the national scene. Capitalism which enjoyed a prolonged post-war boom is sunk today in the morass of a protracted crisis. The illusions fostered by that boom, illusions that capitalism can manipulate its contradictions through Keynesian demand-management policies to rid itself of serious crises, illusions that the necessity for the bourgeoisie to attempt to make onslaughts on bourgeois democracy is a thing of the past—all these illusions which came to be shared widely even within the ranks of the Left have been and are being decisively shattered. In India too the traumatic years of the Emergency, the steeply ascending curve of social discord, syndrome of the inflation-industrial stagnation