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No Wealth Without Work (From Emile KAHOUN, Lycee Yadega, Ouahigouya)

Before there can be any wealth to divide up, there must be labour at work. There can be no loaves without farmers and bakers. There are a few little islands, thousands of miles away, where men and women can lie enjoying the sun and live on the cocoa-nuts the monkeys thrown down to them. But for us there is no such possibility. Without incessant work, daily labour, we would starve. If anyone is idle, someone must also be working for both or there would be nothing for either of them to eat.
.......The burden of labour is imposed on us by nature, and has to be divided up as the wealth it produces.
But the two divisions need not correspond to one another. One person can produce much more than enough to feed himself. Otherwise the young children could not be fed, and the old people who are past working age would starve. Many women with nothing to help them but their two hands have brought up a family on their own earnings, and kept their aged parents well-fed as well as paid their rent. And with the help of water -power , steam power , electric power , and modern machinery, labour can be so organised that one hundred and fifty years ago. This saving of labour by substituting machines to natural forces, like wind and water and the heat latent in coal, produces leisure time which also has to be divided up. If one person's labour for ten hours can support ten people for a day, the ten people can arrange themselves in several different ways. They can put the ten hours work on one person and let the other nine have all the leisure time as well as free rations. Or they can each do one hour's work a day and have nine hours of leisure.

G.B Shaw, The intelligent woman's guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, fascism .

Vocabulary

Idle = lazy
To turn out = to produce
Wealth = richesse
Labour = le travail
Pre-requisite = qui précède ou qui vient avant

QUESTIONS
As much as possible use your own words and ideas.

1° Show how labour is a pre-requisite to wealth. Use examples from the text . ( 5 lines -- 4 marks )
2° Can everyone survive from his own labour ? Justify your answer. ( 5 lines -- 3 marks )
3° What improved human's production of food nowadays. ( 5 lines - 3 marks )
4° Basing yourself on the text , how can labour be organised to allow spare time for leisure ? ( 5 lines - 4 marks )
5° " There is no wealth without labour, and only work liberates man". Explain and comment on this idea. (10 lines - 6 marks ) .