Notes

On September 28, 1864 an international meeting was held at St. Martin's Hall,. Long Acre, London. It was organised by the London trade-union leaders and a group of Paris Proudhonist workers jointly with the representatives of German, Italian and other foreign workers then living in London and a number of prominent European democratic émigrés. The meeting resolved to found an International Working Men's Association (later known as the First International) and elected a Provisional Committee which shortly afterwards constituted itself as the leading body of the Association. This body, known as the General Council of the International, was mainly called the Central Council until the end of 1866. Karl Marx was elected to this Committee and later to the Sub-Committee appointed at its first meeting on October 5 to draw up the Association's programme documents. The Sub-Committee, or Standing Committee, subsequently functioned as an executive body and included the President of the Central (General) Council (until autumn 1867, when this post was abolished), the General Secretary and the corresponding secretaries for different countries. Marx did not attend its first meetings, when the Sub-Committee drew up a document consisting of an introductory declaration of principles, written by the Owenite John Weston and edited by the French petty-bourgeois democrat Victor Le Lubez, and the Rules of the Italian workers' societies, drawn up by Mazzini and translated into English by the Italian Luigi Wolff.

This document, edited by Le Lubez, was discussed at the Sub-Committee meeting on October 15 about which Marx was informed too late for him to attend, and at the Provisional Committee meeting on October 18, when Marx first familiarised himself with this material. His critical assessment of it is to be found in his letter to Engels of November 4, 1864 (see present edition, Vol. 42). Circumstances did not allow Marx to prevent the Provisional Committee's approval of the declaration of principles and the Rules, but he convinced the Committee members that the document needed polishing and insisted on referring it back to the Sub-Committee for final editing. On October 20 the Sub-Committee met at Marx's house; at that meeting th^7

managed to edit only the first point of the Rules. By the next meeting of the Sub-Committee on October 27 Marx had completely revised the submitted document. He wrote a new document — the Inaugural Address of the

17* he altered the Preamble to the Rules, discarding the loosely-phrased declaration of principles, reduced the 40 points of the Rules to 10, and formulated them in a way which expressed the proletarian nature of the organisation then being founded, and eliminated all Mazzinian organisational principles (petty regulation typical of secret societies, etc.). The Sub-Committee approved the Address and the Rules as drawn up by Marx, stipulating, however, that two declarative phrases on "rights and duties" and "truth, justice, and morality" be inserted in the Preamble to the Rules.

On November 1, 1864 both documents were unanimously approved by the Provisional Committee. On the proposal of a Committee member, Whitlock, Marx supplemented the Inaugural Address with a note on carbon and nitrogen as most important elements of food.

The Inaugural Address was first published by The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 160, November 5, 1864 without the sanction of the Central Council and as an offprint to be sent to various newspapers. Marx strongly disapproved of this publication which contained a number of misprints (see this volume, p. 353). In November 1864 the Address and the Rules were published in London as a pamphlet Address and Provisional Rules of the Working Men's International Association, Established September 28, 1864, at a Public Meeting Held at St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, London. On the decision of the Central Council of May 9, 1866 the English version of the Inaugural Address, the Provisional Rules and some other documents were again published as a pamphlet in London in August that year. The Address was also published in The Miner & Workman's Advocate, No. 93, December 10, 1864. The German authorised translation entitled "Manifest an die arbeitende Klasse Europa's" was published in Der Social-Demokrat, Nos. 2 and 3, December 21 and 30, 1864.

During 1865, 1866 and later, various translations of the Inaugural Address appeared: into French in Paris, Geneva and Brussels; into Italian in Genoa and Naples; into German in Leipzig, Geneva, Berlin and Vienna in 1866 and 1868; into Hungarian in Pest in 1868; into Russian in Geneva in 1871; into Spanish and Portuguese in Madrid and Lisbon in 1873. Various German translations continued to be published in Germany and Switzerland (Zurich) in the early 1870s as well.

The Inaugural Address has survived in two manuscript copies written by Mrs. Marx and Jenny Marx (Marx's daughter), and copies of pamphlets with Marx's corrections.

In this volume the document is published according to the English pamphlet of 1864. The most important differences between the English version and the German authorised translation are given in footnotes.

At the end of the pamphlet there was a list of the Central Council members:

"Names and Nationalities of the Central Provisional Council. "English: Longmaid, Worley, Leno, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon,

Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Shearman, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Odger, Howell, Osborne, Carter, Gray, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Cremer, Dick. "French: Dénouai, Le Lubez, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont. "Italian: L. Wolff, Fontana, Setacci, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri. "Swiss: Nusperli, Jung. "German: Eccarius, Wolff, Otto, Lessner, Pfänder, Lochner, Marx, Kaub, Bolleter. "Polish: Holtorp, Rybczinski.

George Odger, President of the Central Council. George W. Wheeler, Honorary Treasurer. Karl Marx, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for Germany. G. P. Fontana, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for Italy. /. E. Holtorp, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for Poland. Hermann F. Jung, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland. V. Le Lubez, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for France. William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.» p. 5