First International (International Workingmens Association)

When the International was formed in September 1864, Marx was

a relatively obscure refugee journalist, Saul Padover notes in the
introduction to a volume of select works written by Marx for the
International:
Exiled from his native Germany, thrown out of Belgium, and expelled
from France, Marx found refuge in the British capital in 1849. In the 15
years before the founding of the International, Marx eked out a living from
journalism saved from actual starvation by Frederick Engels, who was in
the textile business in Manchester and spent most of his time writing,
reading, and researching (in the British Museum). After the traumatic defeat
of the revolutions of 1848-49 in Europe, he became for a time politically
inactive.
In London, Marxs main contacts were with other Europeans,
particularly German and French radicals and refugees, with many of whom
he had intermittent squabbles and disagreements. While showing deep
interest in British politics, institutions, and movements notably the history
of Chartism, which was not without influence on his own political thinking
he kept himself, or was kept, aloof from English activists, including trade
unionists. With few exceptions, one of them being the Chartist leader and
editor Ernest Charles Jones, Marx had no close connection with English
radicals or laborites, and vice versa. His led the politically isolated life of
an unassimilated continental refugee. The International was to change all
this.
It is still not entirely clear why Marx was invited to what turned out to
be a historic meeting at St. Martins Hall. Until about a week before the
meeting, on September 28, he apparently knew nothing about any
preparations for it. Then he was told about it by Victor Le Lubez, a 30-yearold French radical republican living in London, who invited him to come as
a representtive of German workers. Marx accepted and proposed that he be
joined by Johann Georg Eccarius, a tailor living in London, as another
German representative. As it turned out, Marx and Eccarius were to become
the two mainstays of the International from its inception to its end.
The meeting was jammed with a large number of assorted radicals.
There were English Owenties and Chartists, French Proudhonists and
Blanquists, Irish nationalists, Polish patriots, Italian Mazzinists, and
German Socialists. It was an assortment united not by a commonly shared
ideology or even by genuine internationalism, but by an accumulated
burden of variated grievances crying for an outlet. The English were against
special privilege, the French against Bonapartism, the Irish against the
British, the Poles against Russia [Poland was occupied by Russia in 1795],
the Italians against Austria, and the Germans against capitalism. There was
no necessary or integral interconnection among them except what Marx
later tried to provide in the organizaton that followed the meeting. Under
the chairmanship of Edward Spencer Beesly, an English Positivist historian
and professor at London University, radical oratory was given free rein.
Marx himself did not speak. He was, as he wrote later, a silent figure on
the platform.

The meeting voted unanimously to appoint a provisional committee to

work out a program and membership rules for the proposed international
organizaton. Marx was appointed a member of the committee, which met a
week later and, being large and unweildy, agreed on a small subcommittee
to do the actual work. Marx became a member of this crucial
subcommittee. The only other German on it was my old friend, the tailor
Eccarius", as Marx wrote to a communist friend in Solingen. The
subcommittee met in Marxs house, and so powerful was his intellectual
ascendency and certainty of purpose the In Augural Address and the
rules Provisional Statutes of the new organization. Henceforth Marx
was to remain its predominant spirit and the indomitable personality that
held the disparate International Association together for eight difficult and
often stormy years, until it was shattered by bitter internal dissensions.
In the International, Marx saw a great historic opportunity, and seized
it. Indeed, it is questionable whether the organization would have survived,
or would have had any meaning, without him. His steely will and
impassioned commitment to the idea of the revolutionary role of the world
proletariat prevented the International from passing into the same oblivion
as had other dreams of squabbly radicals, confused in their philosophy and
at cross-purposes in their aims.

See History of the First International, for documents and eye-witness

histories.
General Council::
Architect

Karl
Marx,
Peter
Fox
Tailor

Eccarius,
Lessner,
Maurice,
Milner,
Stainsby
Carpenter

Applegarth,
Cremer,
Lochner,
Weston
Weaver

Bradnick,
J.
Hales,
Mottershead
Shoemaker

Morgan,
Odger,
Serraillier
Furniture
Maker

Dell,
Lucraft
Watchmaker

Jung
Mason

Howell
Musical-instrument
maker

Dupont
Hairdresser Lassassie

Marx was one of few who kept his seat in the General Council
from the formation of the International Working Mens Association
over many years. He would relinquish it in 1872 when the
International moved to New York. The General Council fluctuated
greatly in size the Address to President Lincoln, for example, had
58 signatures. The Council met weekly. Marx was almost always in
attendance, unless limited by illness.
Further Reading: A Collection of articles by Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels on The First International.