Questionnaire for workers

The questionnaire for workers is a questionnaire written by Karl Marx in 1880 , which was intended to examine the living and working conditions of the French working class with the help of a worker survey and at the same time to give the respondents a self-confidence in their living situation. It is considered to be one of the first works of socially critical empirical social research .

background

Already in the International Workers' Association , which Marx co-founded in 1864 (existing until 1876), the necessity of a statistical survey of the situation of the working class was discussed, but implementation failed for financial reasons. At the request of the editor of the magazine “La Revue Socialiste”, Marx finally wrote a questionnaire in English in the first half of April 1880 with four sections and a total of 99 questions to be answered in writing. This was published in the April 20th edition in French under the title “Enquête Ouvrière” without naming the author. The editors preceded the questionnaire with an introduction and added two questions. In addition, 25,000 separate copies of the questionnaire were sent to working-class societies and socialist and democratic associations. The questionnaire was published in Geneva in 1880 in French and a Polish translation, and in Italian in Milan. Nothing has been handed down about recovery. The response rate was too low to get results. The questionnaire was long forgotten and was first published in German in 1933 by the “Organ of the Executive Committee of the Communist International”. In the Marx-Engels works , the questionnaire is reproduced in the English handwriting.

In the operaist movements in Italy and later elsewhere, workers' questionnaires for analysis, awareness-raising and agitation have been used since the late 1960s. The term militant investigation was later used for this .

expenditure

• Questionnaire for workers , Marx-Engels-Werke Volume 19, pp. 230–237.
• A Workers' Inquiry (en, 100 questions, plus foreword), on marxists.org

  A Workers' Inquiry , New International, No. 12, December 1938, pp. 379-381. (en, 101 questions, plus foreword)

• Enquête ouvrière (fr, 101 questions, plus foreword)

literature

• Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe Vol. 25: Works, Articles, Drafts, May 1875 to May 1883. Karl Marx Questionnaire for Workers , pp. 795–98. ISBN 3-05-003362-2
• Hilde Weiss: "The 'Enquete Ouvriere' by Karl Marx", Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , vol. 5, 1936, p. 76 ff.
• Anna Brake: Written survey . in: Stefan Kühl , Petra Strodtholz, Andreas Taffertshofer: Quantitative Methods of Organizational Research: A Handbook. Vs Verlag 2005. pp. 33-34.
• Yaak Karsunke , Günter Wallraff : " Questionnaire for workers 1880/1970 ", in: Kursbuch 21, Kapitalismus in der Bundes Republik , Berlin: Kursbuch Verlag / Wagenbach 1970.
• Marta Malo de Molina: worker survey and worker co-investigation, self-awareness. Translated by Birgit Mennel, 2004.
• Irmgard Weyrather: The woman on the assembly line: The image of the factory worker in social research 1870–1985. Campus 2003. p. 21.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ For an early example from 1969 cf. Davide Serafino, The fight against unhealthy working conditions using the example of "Chicago Bridge" in Sestri Ponente (Genoa) 1968/1969 , in: Work - Movement - History. Journal for Historical Studies , Issue I / 2016; ISBN 978-3-86331-281-7 .