| US Americans work more than people in any industrialized country, longer hours and take fewer vacations.All workers have is their strength and their youth. If that fails they become homeless. Modern morality is based on private property and hired labor. The capitalist heart only beats when the market goes up or down. It is indifferent to human misery. Everything is for sale, with its resulting alienation. Virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience, are meaningless unless some profit can be gained from them. Profit determines the character of the press, of science, art, politics, law, education. It figures in the selection of a mate and of friends. It determines the level of respect to that one has from his peers. There is little difference between the behavior and attitudes of Wall Street businessmen and gangsters, who are also businessmen. The competitive rush to be “number one” creates an indifference to the social good. Number one´s only concern is to take from others to increase his holdings. All are equally indifferent to those weaker or less fortunate. Capitalists say that if you work hard and are honest you can get ahead. Most of the rich have inherited wealth and don’t work hard and never have. Their capacity for corruption is legendary. They have 24-hour leisure punctuated only by trips, parties and business meetings, where Byzantine intrigues are constant.
One of the great contradictions of capitalism where property is sacred is that more and more people become propertyless. Sources of wealth paradoxically become sources of privation and exhaustion for workers. The dream is to own a house but the reality is comprised of mortgages, high rents, stratospheric sale prices, foreclosures and evictions. Under capitalism, workers are tied to production, since they don’t own any of it. Their work is forced, not free. They do not work to satisfy their own needs, but rather the needs of others. Exploitation does not allow for the personality to develop.
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