page_title: International Workingmen's Association in America
section_title: Move of IWA headquarters to New York
hierarchical_section_title: International Workingmen's Association in America / Organizational history / Move of IWA headquarters to New York
caption_attribution_description: English: Mikhail Bakunin, russian Anarchist
context_page_description: The International Workingmen's Association in the United States of America took the form of a loose network of about 35 frequently discordant local "sections," each professing allegiance to the London-based IWA, commonly known as the "First International." These sections were divided geographically and by the language spoken by their members, frequently new immigrants to America, including those who spoke German, French, Czech, as well as Irish and "American" English-language groups.
  The peak membership of the various sections of the International Workingmen's Association in the United States has been variously estimated in the vicinity of 4,000 to 5,000.
context_section_description: The Americans were not the only national division of the International fighting a factional war for control of the organization. The General Council, which had long been divided between moderate trade union reformers and international socialist revolutionaries, was becoming the object of a still greater fight — a battle between anarchists and socialists. More than an ideological battle, this struggle also fell into the realm of personal antipathy between the primary leaders of the two wings, the German émigré Karl Marx and the Russian émigré Mikhail Bakunin.
  Marx saw a socialist future as the inevitable result of a process of economic growth and development, with the revolutionary transformation making it possible conducted by an educated and disciplined working class led by a political party. In the view of Bakunin, the new world would emerge via the revolt of the poor and oppressed masses, workers and peasant farmers alike, suffering under the heel of an exploitative semi-feudal economic and political structure. Bakunin was contemptuous of the educated industrial workers favored by Marx, believing they were "infected with a bourgeois outlook," and instead favored an alliance of radical intellectuals, the peasant masses,  as well as the most impoverished and unwashed workers of the cities.
  Bakunin rejected the coordinated trade union and political action favored by the international socialists, instead professing the expedience and necessity of the armed uprising. He sought the forcible destruction of state power and its replacement with what historian Juilius Braunthal has characterized as a "stateless federation of communes free from all outside coercion and authority." Marx, on the other hand, saw a long process of education and organization as a necessary precursor for a revolutionary overthrow of the ruling class, followed by a "withering away" of the coercive state in the new non-exploitative world. In short, Bakunin and Marx agreed upon little, rejected the fundamental ideas of the other, and saw themselves as antagonistic rivals locked in an irreconcilable conflict for control of the fledgling IWA organization.
caption: Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) an émigré from Tsarist Russia, was an anarchist theoretician and competitor with Marx for control of the IWA.
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