First International

What was it trying to do?

The International Working Men's Association began in September 1864, when British trade union leaders and French workers' delegates meeting at St Martin's Hall in London decided to found an international organisation. The motives were practical: to stop the import of foreign strike-breakers, and to organise cross-border political solidarity of the kind shown for the Polish uprising. Marx, invited to the founding meeting, drafted the Inaugural Address and the statutes, and became the effective centre of the General Council. The Address's conclusion summarises the programme: the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself, and it cannot be completed within one country.

The Association was nothing like a modern party. Trade unions, cooperatives, educational societies and émigré circles were loosely tied together in national sections, and even its membership figures are uncertain. Governments nevertheless saw it as far larger than it was. After the Paris Commune of 1871 the rumour spread that the International stood behind the Commune, and The Civil War in France, which Marx wrote in the General Council's name, made it the most notorious organisation in Europe.

Why did Marx and Bakunin part ways?

After Bakunin joined in 1868, two lines grew up inside the Association. Marx's side held that the working class had to build its own party and conquer political power. Bakunin's side held that every state power breeds a new domination, and set economic direct action and the immediate abolition of the state against political struggle. A question of organisation ran alongside: attempts to strengthen the General Council's powers struck the Bakuninists as centralised rule.

At the Hague Congress of 1872 the Marx side secured a majority, expelled Bakunin, made political struggle obligatory, and moved the General Council to New York to keep it out of Bakuninist hands. The federations of Switzerland, Spain, Italy and Belgium rejected these decisions and split away as the Anti-authoritarian International. The New York council, cut off from its base, declared the Association dissolved at the Philadelphia conference of 1876.

What did it leave behind?

As an organisation the First International lasted only twelve years, yet every later international traced its lineage here. The Second International of 1889 understood itself as its refoundation, and the anarcho-syndicalist IWA of 1922 revived the very name. The Hague Congress is also the point where Marxism and anarchism became separate movements. The pattern that the great splits of socialist history would repeat, a programmatic quarrel fused with a fight over organisational control, was first cast in this mould.