The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 7 of 125
Poverty had become psychological
By the middle of the decade so many young people were dropping out that it looked as though “youth” was becoming a social class in its own right, one about to inherit the revolutionary dynamism Marx had ascribed to the industrial proletariat. For between the two world wars, capitalism had cut a deal with the traditional working class. The worst of the exploitation would be relegated to the Third World, and workers in the West would be given a larger slice of the capitalist pie—providing they stayed in line. Over the following years, standoff had become status quo; more than that, the ever-increasing consumption of goods by the updated, mid-twentieth-century working class had become an essential part of capitalist economy, one without which it couldn’t continue to function . . . but the exclusion of the vast majority of people from any real control of their own lives remained untouched. What the hippies were saying was that poverty and exploitation hadn’t been done away with, they had merely been modernized. The overcrowding, hunger, and disease of the nineteenth-century working class had been replaced by the loneliness, tension, and free-floating anxiety of its twentieth-century equivalent. Poverty had become psychological, and this at a time when there was logically no need for poverty at all. Technologically, humanity had reached the point where basic material survival could be assured with much less labor than ever before. In principle, at any rate, we stood on the verge of a new age of leisure. “Workers of the world disperse,” as one hippie graffito put it succinctly. That was the negative side of the ’60s political program, the refusal to work, the embracing of a degree of voluntary poverty. The positive side lay in trying to prospect the values of the new Renaissance now possible. If consumer goods are a mockery of true human desires, then what exactly do we want? Most of the ’60s experiments in creating a new lifestyle can be seen as an attempt to answer this question.