George Metefsky

No one really consciously planned the thorough integration of the middle-class worker with capitalism. Capitalists were forced to develop a more productive worker, a more extravagant consumer, simply because their own fixation on accumulation (profit) is continuously frustrated by the tendency of the rate of profit to decline as automation grows.

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Part I

These are the last days of the Weimar Republic.

In Berkeley, police ‘opened fire with buckshot on unarmed people by the Peoples’ Park, wounding over a hundred and killing one, James Rector. Across the country—in Madison, in Ann Arbor—police repeated the same repression with only slightly less savagery. Meanwhile, the government is quietly extending its stop-and-frisk, no-knock police state over almost everybody under 30.

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The danger facing freeks—even many so-called “cultural revolutionaries”—is that hip culture is close to a revolutionary cultural movement, but more of a lumpen middle-class culture, deformed by capitalist society, to the extent that it even preserved class-lines between the upper and lower middle-class (plastic hippie and freek).

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