Anti-authoritarian International

Why did they meet separately?

In September 1872, days after the Hague Congress closed, delegates from Italy, Spain, France and the United States met at Saint-Imier at the invitation of the Swiss Jura Federation. They declared the Hague resolutions, the expulsion of Bakunin and the obligation of political struggle, null and void. The case rested on two claims: that the General Council had rigged the congress to impose one line, and that the Association had always been a free federation, not a hierarchy. Notably, they did not think they were founding a new organisation. They claimed to be the legitimate continuation of the International Working Men's Association, and counting the Belgian, Dutch and some English organisations, their base was broader than the Marx side's.

What did it stand for?

The Saint-Imier resolutions became the programmatic foundation of the anarchist movement. Any conquest of political power by the proletariat, they held, is only the beginning of a new domination; the task of the workers is not to seize the state but to destroy it. For means, it set strikes and insurrection, economic direct action, against parties and elections. The organisational principle matched: no binding central resolutions, only the autonomy of each federation and free agreements between them.

What became of it?

The organisation itself did not last. Congresses met from 1873 to 1877, but repression in Spain, the failure of insurrectionary attempts in Italy and the decline of the Jura Federation wore it down, and after the Verviers congress of 1877 it ceased to function. The death of the organisation was not the death of the current. The anti-political workers' movement formed here flowed into French and Spanish syndicalism, above all the Spanish CNT, and regained an international organisation in 1922 with the anarcho-syndicalist IWA founded in Berlin. Within socialist history this lineage has kept its own identity, distinct from the Marxist line: a fundamental distrust of the state and of parties.