"social production controlled by social foresight"

[Michael Hoover]

> In article <3.0.2.32.19990617015517.00c07240 at pop.gn.apc.org>, Chris
> Burford <cburford at gn.apc.org> writes
> >But if Marx
> >himself did not campaign for the 10 Hour Bill he certainly writes as if the
> >English working classes did!
> 
> There is no actual evidence for working class involvement. In Marx's
> defence it can be said that all this happened before he settled in
> Britain. His speech was written nearly 20 years later, probably based on
> the unreliable testimony of trade union leaders.
> Lew

Chris B. makes a fetish of reforms but the suggestion that M's comment 
in his 1864 inaugural address to the 1st Int'l was based on 'unreliable
testimony from trade union leaders' is erroneous...

Engels writes favorably about Chartism in his 1844 review essay Carlyle 
_The Past and Present_ entitled *The Condition of England*...Chartism, 
often relegated to having been a movement (and an unsuccessful one at 
that) for universal manhood suffrage and parliamentary reform also 
involved various kinds of agitation about other issues, including 
factory reform...

Marx participated in a Chartist conference in London in 1845 and he
writes in an 1847 piece *Moralizing Criticism and Criticizing Morality*
that the Chartists had 'formed a political party whose battle slogan
(is) rule of the working class against rule of the bourgeois class'
(M echoes this view in Capital Vol 1 when he asserts that the
determination of a normal working-day is the result of a struggle
between capitalists and workers)...

in the 1848 *Manifesto*, M&E assert that the organized working class
'compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the
workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie
itself.  Thus the ten-hours bill in England carried.' (Marx 
characterizes this as split between landlords and money-lords in his 
above-noted address)...and the tract refers specifically to the
Chartists as a working class party in its closing paragraphs...Engels 
returns to the subject in 1850 articles entitled *The English Ten 
Hours Bill* & *The Ten Hours Question*...

at the time Marx was invited (belatedly, he was unaware of plans until 
one week prior) to the founding meeting of what became the IWMA, he had 
few connections to English radicals & trade unionists (Chartist Ernest 
Jones was a notable exception)...Marx's politics during the 1st Int'l 
period were largely 'practical' - direct taxation, universal manhood 
suffrage, shorter work week, cooperatives, land nationalization...
writing in 1871 to German socialist leader Friedrich Bolte, M argues 
that workers should engage in incessant struggles, even for limited 
objectives....

Marx should be read dialectically...for example, in Capital Vol 1 (ch. 
10) he tempers his approval of the ten-hours bill by emphasizing the 
advantages of Factory Acts to big capital...but, as he writes in
Capital Vol 3, the 'primary requisite' of the 'realm of freedom' is
a shorter work-day'(something that Marx both championed and struggled
for throughout his life while always keeping his 'eyes on the prize' -
the overthrow of capital)...   Michael Hoover