ABSTRACT
Capitalist development has been fast enough to enable all classes to share— albeit unequally— in the benefits. The ruling class was able to grant substantial political and economic concessions and yet retain the reins of political and economic power. More sophisticated machinery, invented during the Industrial Revolution, required free wage labor. Similarly, the highly capital intensive plants and automated lines of late capitalist society require a new kind of labor force. The erosion of legitimacy is always accompanied by an erosion of moral standards in public life. No social order can be changed if it succeeds in preserving its legitimacy. That is why the erosion of capitalist legitimacy is of fundamental importance for a socialist transformation. The hippie or psychedelic counterculture is not likely to provide the basis for social reconstruction, and its negative efficiency is dubious. However, it clearly indicates the legitimacy crisis of the system, now in the cultural realm.
