ABSTRACT
The spiritual legacy of the Middle Ages in western Europe left the would-be rich of later generations with a feeling of discomfort in the pursuit of their wealth. The primitive Marxism adopted by the young totally ignored the fact that in the 1960s the European working class was not living on the verge of starvation and in fear of unemployment. Employment in the production of consumer goods diminished and work in the capital goods industry became more and more specialized and added frictional to structural unemployment. The socialization process, which in the past had imposed on capitalism the necessary remedial modes of social conduct, tends to impose new practices, which are the product of capitalism itself and have a different effect. Capitalist society created another type of social and economic alignment, which was horizontal. People became aligned by belonging to similar income groups or by the nature of their occupations.
