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The International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) was a groundbreaking effort to give power to the most exploited, voice to the voiceless, and collective cohesion to the most fractured. It was due to its uncompromising dedication to the working class that the IWA caught the attention of workers around the world. The spirit of internationalism, courage to face their most ruthless enemies, piercing insights into the complex issues of the time, and astonishingly creative proposals to overcome them are among the most enduring legacies of the IWA.

Marcello Musto, ed.,  Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (London: Bloomsbury, 2014)

For the last twenty-five years, income and wealth in the U.S. have shifted to the wealthiest Americans. Workers’ wages have stagnated while productivity (output per hour of work) has increased by 25 percent. In real terms, median weekly earnings between January 2004 and third quarter 2013 were down 1 percent.¹ This divergent trend between real wages and productivity means that working people are not reaping the gains of economic growth in the United States.

Introduction

The International Workingmen's Association (IWA) was born in London on September 28, 1864. Its founders, together with Marx, were a distinguished group of communist, socialist and anarchist intellectuals and activists, who dedicated to the project an important part of their lives.

If the emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfill that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people’s blood and treasure?

I

In the fall of 1864, Karl Marx was hard at work in London to complete the first volume of Capital when he chose to exit the study and put theory at the service of practice. Marx had done something similar in Brussels almost 20 years earlier. He and Frederick Engels had “settled accounts” with former associates, an assortment of Left Hegelians and proponents of “true socialism,” in a lengthy manuscript that was never to be published in their lifetimes.

The founding of the First International

Introduction: pre-1994 South African internationalism