ABSTRACT
The ‘best students’ are those who leave university having learnt that life is impossible outside, in the system. They are going to where the action is. Once they have abandoned the money-grubbing scum of the official Underground … there is no identity left except as part of the class of the un-socialised. It stretches from the depressive in Finsbury to the Diggers in Hyde Park … via Brixton, sheer beauty, Speed, smashed every single Saturday night. It is a class with a future, a class that is growing, and becoming conscious of its own despair – call it the new proletariat if it makes you feel better, or on more familiar ground (Heulsenback 1968).
