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, Marx’s 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. Martin’s 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-year-old 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.
