On September 28, 1864, a large meeting at St. Martin's Hall in London brought together British trade unionists, French workers, and continental exiles to form the International Workingmen's Association, commonly called the First International. Karl Marx, present at the founding, was elected to its General Council and soon drafted its inaugural address, steering the organization toward his revolutionary socialist vision and setting the stage for decades of ideological struggle within the international labor movement.
The meeting that filled St. Martin's Hall on Long Acre in London in late September 1864 grew out of a few years of growing contact between British and French workers. French artisans had visited the London International Exhibition in 1862, and the next year labor leaders on both sides of the Channel rallied in support of the Polish uprising against Russia. The hall was crowded with English trade unionists, French delegates led by the engraver Henri Tolain, and exiles from Germany, Italy, and Poland who had found refuge in the British capital. Edward Spencer Beesly, a history professor at University College London, took the chair. Karl Marx, then a largely obscure émigré journalist, had been invited to represent the German workers. He later told Friedrich Engels that he sat silently on the platform throughout the proceedings.
That silence did not last. The meeting chose a committee to draft a founding program, and early proposals came from a follower of the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini and from the Owenite John Weston. Marx judged both drafts vague and sentimental, and he maneuvered to rewrite them himself. His Inaugural Address and Provisional Rules were adopted by the new General Council. The rules opened with a line that became a creed for later labor movements: the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. The address ended with the call Marx and Engels had first issued in the Communist Manifesto of 1848: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" To hold together British unionists, French followers of Proudhon, and Mazzinian republicans, Marx deliberately softened his tone, and he kept his own revolutionary program in the background.
The International Workingmen's Association spread across Europe and into the United States, supported strikes, and held annual congresses, but its members never agreed for long. After the Paris Commune of 1871, governments across Europe treated the association as a revolutionary menace, and its internal feud between Marx's supporters and the anarchists around Mikhail Bakunin became bitter. At the Hague Congress in 1872, Bakunin was expelled and the General Council was moved to New York, which effectively removed it from European politics. The organization was formally dissolved in Philadelphia in 1876. The disputes it could not resolve, over the state, political parties, and revolution, shaped the socialist and anarchist movements that followed.
Key people: Karl Marx