Workers Inquiry refs and what not.

First of all reference is to Engels The Condition of the Working Class in Manchester, then the huge chapter ‘The Working Day’ in Marx’s Capital, volume one, right through to very late in Marx’s life when he penned 100 questions for a ‘Workers Inquiry’ wanting to generalize the Factory Inspections of England to France, and beyond? Then trace this perhaps to  the Bolsheviks, and Lenin of 1902, the so-called Factory Exposures, to Mao in Hunan, and many other examples. Even that called a parallel sociology, owing debts to Adorno as well as Kracauer’s 1920s work on the Salaried Masses, through to the Italian post-war Marxist Operaist tradition starting with Panzieri in the journal Quaderni Rossi (Wright 2002:21) and the Workerism of Italian autonomia, on up to Negri and Hardt (though of course with reservations (Hutnyk 2004)). I am also tempted to explore, alongside this, from outside the labour movement, how the collection of oral histories and questionnaires of the ‘poverty-stricken’ came to be known as co-research, and how the term Inquiry has much wider appeal among contemporary activists. Journals like Ephemera, The Commune, Common Sense, Capital and Class, Aufheben, Riff Raff, all have interesting things to say about Workers Inquiries. There is a ton of stuff to read.

It is of course standard to say, as I think we must, that everyone can trace this work back to the figure of the Factory Inspector Leonard Horner as described by Marx in his chapter on ‘The Working Day’ in Capital.

Towards the very end of his life, Marx declared as much in a short notice in La Revue Socialiste April, 20, 1980, that called for a official Inquiry:

The blackguardly features of capitalist exploitation which were exposed by the official investigation organized by the English government and the legislation which was necessitated there as a result of these revelations (legal limitation of the working day to 10 hours, the law concerning female and child labor, etc.), have forced the French bourgeoisie to tremble even more before the dangers which an impartial and systematic investigation might represent. In the hope that maybe we shall induce a republican government to follow the example of the monarchical government of England by likewise organizing a far reaching investigation into facts and crimes of capitalist exploitation, we shall attempt to initiate an inquiry of this kind with those poor resources which are at our disposal. We hope to meet in this work with the support of all workers in town and country who understand that they alone can describe with full knowledge the misfortunes form which they suffer and that only they, and not saviors sent by providence, can energetically apply the healing remedies for the social ills which they are prey. We also rely upon socialists of all schools who, being wishful for social reform, must wish for an exact and positive knowledge of the conditions in which the working class — the class to whom the future belongs -works and moves.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/04/20.htm

Recommend reading:

Wright, 2000 Storming Heaven, London: Pluto.

Kolinko 1999 Hotlines: Call Centre Communism – http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/lebuk/e_lebuk.htm

Dowling, Emma, R. Nunes & B. Trott (eds) special issue on Affective Labour in Ephemera http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-1/7-1index.htm

Shukaitus, Stevphen and David Graeber 2007 Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization AK Press.

Palgin, Trevor and Thompson, A.C 2006 Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights, Hoboken: Melville House Publishing.

Otterman, Michael 2007 American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond, London: Pluto Press.

Kracauer, Siegfried 1930 The Salaried Masses London: Verso 1998

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio 1994 The Labour of Dionysius University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Negri, Antonio 1991 Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons in the Grundrisse Autonomedia, New York

Negri, Antonio 1999 Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern StateMassechusetts: University of Minnesota Press

Negri, Antonio 1988 Revolution Retrieved London: Red Notes

Negri, Antonio 2005 Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy London: Verso

There are a lot more refs here - and it needs further updating, please add things in the comments.