International Working Men's Association

First International

 officially International Working Men's Association

Federation of workers' groups, founded in 1864 by British and French trade-union leaders. Its structure was highly centralized, based on local groups that were integrated into national federations. It was split by conflicting schools of socialist thought, including those of Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, and Mikhail Bakunin. A clash between Marx's centralized socialism and Bakunin's anarchism in 1872 caused the International to split, and it was dissolved in 1876. Though it was feared at the time as a formidable power with millions of members, and several countries tried to have it outlawed, its membership was never more than 20,000 and it served mainly as a unifying force for labour in Europe.

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International Working Men’s Association 

(also called the Berlin International of Trade Unions), an international anarcho-syndicalist association founded at a conference of anarcho-syndicalists held in Berlin from Dec. 25, 1922, to Jan. 2, 1923. Representatives from Argentina, Chile, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden attended. It did not enjoy much influence. In the early 1930’s its total membership was only about 300,000. The leaders of the association, who took an anticommunist stand, opposed any united actions by workers of different political tendencies. After World War II several meetings and conferences of the association were held in France, attended by representatives of various isolated anarcho-syndicalist groups in Spain, France, and several other European and Latin American countries.