International Workingmen's Association

The International Workingmen’s Association was founded on 28 September 1864 at a meeting of about 2,000 workers in St Martin’s Hall, London. It joined workers’ societies and trade unions from several countries under a General Council. Modern research puts its peak at around 150,000 members in 1871-72. The Times reported 2.5 million across Europe in 1871, a figure later historians treat as inflated.

At the Hague Congress of 2-7 September 1872, 65 delegates expelled Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume and moved the General Council’s seat from London to New York. The anti-authoritarian side held its own congress at St. Imier that September and set up a rival body that also claimed to be the International. It held congresses at Geneva, Brussels, Bern and Verviers (6-8 September 1877). Sources give 1877, 1880 and July 1881 for its end; a member, Anselmo Lorenzo, wrote that the International ceased to exist materially at Verviers.

The New York line ended at a delegate conference in Philadelphia on 15 July 1876, which abolished the General Council. A proclamation of that date states that the external bond of the organisation no longer existed. The Second International, founded in 1889, was described by Wilhelm Liebknecht as an offspring of the IWA; it was a new foundation 13 years later. The International Workers’ Association, founded in Berlin in December 1922 by anarcho-syndicalist unions, uses the same name and presents itself as the true heir of the First International.