Recently a nurse who worked for decades with terminal patients, pointed out in a book that people's ultimate and most frequent regret in life was having worked far too much. This is where Marx was once again prophetical:

"Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth."

Unfortunately, Marx is still poorly understood. His work's main point is which was is more important, people or things ? I highly recommend the books, "To Have or to Be" and "The Overworked American".

@Spartans: Marx never spent much time or detail on presenting a solution - his main object was to point out how capitalism worked, and why & how it would self-destruct. Possible 'solutions' have been looked for all over the place, by marxists, fascists, Keynesian economists, socialists, democrats, marxist-leninists, anarchists, democrats, Christians etc. An ongoing project, which may fail in the long run - and this in a species that is dangerous both to itself and to others, and to the planet, if anybody cares.

Point out how capitalism worked as to understand how it affects life. While I agree that perhaps there ar no better alternatives at the present, still I think we should be aware of how it can damage our lives and human relations. I will instate Marx's full quote here:

"The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.

Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth".

German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm puts this beautifully here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7GpHrdXOFI

@Spartans: interesting quote, not sure where you got it. However, it's important to see that there's Marx's famous irony at work here - he's surely not making this statement in an approving manner.
All alternatives are always a matter of the future, never of the present - the future exists nowhere. And the future is always a project being created.

i think i read that some primitive cultures worked 4 hours a day to sustain their living, not 8.

maybe we need to go back to building our own homes as this would save years and year of working to pay off exorbitant home costs by (criminal?) real estate developers.

STONE AGE ECONOMICS, by Marshall Sahlins.
I think the trick is to develop participatory democratic means of developing real estate - otherwise everybody has to learn how to build houses, which, although it's probably a more useful skill than some that we employ to make our livings, would probably delineate the possible uses of the division of labor.
Having said this, I wonder if anybody else thinks we might have strayed from the OP's topic?

About 21 pages ago.