On September 28, 1864, a meeting of about 2,000 people at St Martin's Hall in Long Acre, London, resolved to establish the International Workingmen's Association, and elected a general council of 32. The meeting had been called by French and British trade unionists in support of the Polish rising of 1863, and the Polish question is the only political subject in the original programme.
The people in the hall were a coalition that should not have held together: British trade unionists of the London Trades Council, who wanted practical solidarity over strikes; French Proudhonists, who wanted mutual credit and were against the state; Italian followers of Mazzini, who were nationalists before they were socialists; German exiles; Irish republicans; and a scattering of Owenites and Chartists.
Karl Marx was there, at the back, invited by a French delegate at short notice, and he wrote the Inaugural Address and the provisional rules, which the general council adopted. The address is shorter and more moderate than the Manifesto of 1848: it says that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves, and that the first task is the conquest of political power, and it argues that the ten-hour day had shown what legislation could do.
What the organisation actually did in its first years was strike support. It raised money for locked-out workers, it publicised their case, and it prevented the import of blackleg labour from Belgium and France during the London tailors' strike of 1866, which is the thing British unions valued it for and the reason they stayed in it.
It broke on the state. Mikhail Bakunin, who joined in 1868 with his programme of collectivism and insurrection, argued that political action was a trap and that the state had to be abolished rather than taken. Marx argued the opposite. The Hague Congress of 1872 expelled Bakunin and his Swiss supporters by a small majority, and Marx then had the general council moved to New York, which he said was to keep it out of the Europeans' hands.
It did not survive that. The Geneva congress of 1873 was a rump, the Philadelphia conference of 1876 dissolved it, and Friedrich Sorge, who had been general secretary, wound it up. Its achievement was not organisational but conceptual: it established the idea that the labour movement is international, and the Second International, founded in Paris in 1889, and the socialist parties that came out of it, treated that as given.