There are only two sources of wealth: Nature and human labour. Human labour is now bought and sold in the marketplace for wages. The bulk of the wealth of the society is piled up in commodities which are not owned by their creators as Nature 'owns' nothing and workers own only their own skills and time which they are obliged to sell for wages, if they want to make a living.
Some of the wealth workers produce during the time they've sold to their employers, goes to the State via various forms of taxation and that wealth is used to fund various activities of the political State e.g. military, roads, administrative bureaucracies, police, fire, schools and so on. The point is that all this wealth should be controlled by its producers. Obiviously, it's not controlled by Nature nor by the working class. It is controlled by the owning classes: the capitalists and landlords and by the politicians they get elected to their State.
The fight for shorter work hours is probably the most important part of the class struggle between the owning classes and the producers of wealth for down its path lies freedom from the necessity of spending so much of one's life making commodities for the owning classes to hoard, waste and speculate with. The fight for shorter work hours will only end when the workers of the world decide to take, hold and operate the means of production for themselves. Until then, we can beg, demand and cajole the powers that be to give us back parts of our lives and control over the wealth we produce.
