the intensity and duration of work in capitalism - shorter work time

[rc-am]

"Capital is contradiction in actuality: it tries to reduce working time to a
minimum, whilst making it the sole source and measure of wealth. It reduces
it in its necessary form in order to increase it in its unnecessary form,
making the time of surplus labour the condition - a question of life or
death - of necessary labour time. ... "But all methods for the production of
surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation, and every
extension of accumulation becomes, conversely, a means for the development of
those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates
the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.
Finally, the law which always holds the relative surplus population or
industrial reserve army in equilibrium with the extent and energy of
accumulation rivets the worker to capital more firmly than the wedges of
Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock. It makes an accumulation of misery  a
necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth.
Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time
accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance,
brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of
the class that produces its own product as capital."

      (Marx, "Capital")