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