The fact
that 10% of Australian households own 45% of Australia's wealth while 50% of
Australian households own only 7% of Australia's wealth is information which is
unknown to most Australian workers.
The
source is this inequality lies in the wages system. Workers create the wealth
in the economy. Of course they use wealth lying dormant in Nature to do it, for
example in mining. Workers sell their skills for defined periods of time to
employers to create the wealth of society which is then measured in the sales
of goods and services, aka the GDP. The price workers get for their sale on the
labour market is called wages.
More than
120 years ago, workers came out in the streets of Chicago to demand the 8 hour
day. Productivity since 1886 has skyrocketed. Workers deserve more free-time.
Workers have earned it. Workers today should have a four hour day with no cut
in pay. Shorter work time could solve many of what seem to be today's
unsolvable problems: climate change, unemployment, child care, social alienation,
cultural development and the overproduction of garbage polluting the
environment.
The more the productiveness of labour increases,
the more can the working-day be shortened; and
the more the working-day is shortened,
the more can the intensity of labour increase.
From a social point of view,the productiveness
increases in the same ratio as the economy of labour,
which, in its turn, includes not only economy of
the means of production,but also the avoidance of
all useless labour. The capitalist mode of production,
while on the one hand, enforcing economy in each
individual business, on the other hand, begets, by its
anarchical system of competition, the most
outrageous squandering of labour-power and of the
social
means of production,not to mention the creation of a
vast number of employments, at
present indispensable,
but in themselves superfluous. The intensity and
productiveness of labour being given, the time
which society is bound to devote to material
production is shorter, and as a consequence, the
time
at its disposal for the free development, intellectual
and social, of the individual is greater, in proportion
as the work is more and more evenly divided among
all
the able-bodied members of society,and as a particular
class is more and more deprived of the power to shift
the natural burden of labour from its own shoulders to
those of another layer of society. In this
direction,
the shortening of the working-day finds at last a
limit
in the generalisation of labour. In capitalist society
spare time is acquired for one class by converting the
whole life-time of the masses into labour time.
From CAPITAL, Vol. I by Karl Marx
The theft of alien labour time, on which the present
wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face
of this new one, created by large-scale industry
itself.
As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be
the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and
must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value
[must cease to be the measure] of use value. The
surplus
labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for
the
development of general wealth, just as the non-labour
of
the few, for the development of the general powers of
the
human head. With that, production based on exchange
value
breaks down, and the direct, material production
process
is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.
The
free development of individualities, and hence not the
reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus
labour, but rather the general reduction of the
necessary
labour of society to a minimum, which
then corresponds
to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the
individuals in the time set free, and with the
means created, for all of them.
from the
GRUNDRISSE by Karl Marx
