Nothing so vividly describes my brief and confusing stint as a revolutionary in the latter half of the ?70s as the lingering recollection of feeling enthusiastic and proud about being broke.

My $50-a-week job editing the local co-op newspaper left me with money for rice and beans after the rent was paid, but not much else. Of course, my young comrades weren?t exactly rolling in the dough, either. But that was OK, because we didn?t need filthy lucre. We?d constructed an entire community around the idea of voluntary poverty, a bubble in the local economy that contained all our wildest sociopolitical fantasies. We had community-controlled food co-ops, worker-owned restaurants and clothing stores, co-op housing, and a people?s clinic, everything good revolutionaries needed to sustain themselves for the long battle ahead. Everything except money.

This distaste for the dollar, of course, was nothing new. Yippies Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman made headlines in the ?60s by scattering bills on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and starting a near riot. In Howl!, Allen Ginsberg wrote of burning all his money in a wastebasket.

Ginsberg, of course, sold his papers to Stanford University for nearly a million bucks. And though my literary output will never attract that much attention, I have somehow managed over the years to attain a life that, in the parlance of my former comrades, can only be called bourgeois. I own a house, for instance, and a car. It is, by almost any measure, a comfortable life?in many ways the kind of life coveted by the very people my former anti-bourgeois comrades and I were fighting to ?liberate.?

This irony was often lost on the revolutionaries of my day, a point made bluntly by Theodore Roszak in his seminal 1969 book, The Making of a Counter Culture: ?What, after all, does social justice mean to the outcast and dispossessed? Most obviously, it means gaining admission to everything from which middle-class selfishness excludes them.? Then, as now, progressives needed to deal with their own phobias about money if they really wanted to do the work of social change for any length of time?and with any degree of success. If you insist on embracing poverty in your own life, how do you become a credible advocate for folks who would do almost anything to escape it?