Anti-authoritarian International

The Anti-Authoritarian International (also known as the Anarchist International of St. Imier) was an international workers' organization formed in 1872 after the split in the First International between the anarchists and the Marxists. This followed the 'expulsions' of Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume from the First International at the Hague Congress. It attracted some affiliates of the First International, repudiated the Hague resolutions, and adopted a Bakuninist programme, and lasted until 1877.

The Anti-Authoritarian International was created when the Swiss Jura Federation, the most important anarchist section of the old International Workingmen's Association (IWA), sent a proposal to the other sections, several of which then assembled at St. Imier to create a new anti-authoritarian organization. The organization was made up of various national federations of workers' societies, mainly the Italian, Spanish, Belgian, American, French and French-speaking Swiss federations, together with other individual organizations which all opposed Karl Marx's control of the General Council and favoured the autonomy of national sections from centralized control.

The Hague Congress decided to expel Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume from the International for not having dissolved the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, which caused the delegates from the Jurassic, Belgian and Spanish federations, together with a Dutch and a Swiss delegate, to sign a manifesto showing their disagreement. All of them, including Giuseppe Fanelli and Errico Malatesta, decided to meet in Saint-Imier to hold a separate Congress in which they rejected the expulsion of Bakunin and Guillaume, did not recognize the General Council appointed in The Hague and approved a resolution that included the anarchist theses and that contradicted the policy defended by the IWA. The resolution on the political action of the proletariat said:

1st, that the destruction of all political power is the first duty of the proletariat; 2nd, that any organization of a provisional and revolutionary political power intended to bring about this destruction cannot be more than a deception and would be as dangerous for the proletariat as all the governments that exist today; 3rd, that having rejected any commitment to achieve the realization of the social revolution, the proletarians of all countries must establish, outside of all bourgeois politics, the solidarity of revolutionary action.

The Congress, held on 15–16 September 1872, also approved the so-called "Pact of Friendship, Solidarity, and Mutual Defense between Free Federations" (also known as Saint-Imier Pact) in which it was said that:

considering that within the International there is a tendency, openly manifested at the Hague Congress by the authoritarian party, to substitute with the predominance and power of the heads of the German communist party the free development and spontaneous organization of the proletariat [...] the delegates of the Spanish, Italian, Jurassic, French and American federations, meeting at this congress establish this Pact:

The delegates also proclaimed:

[t]hat the aspirations of the proletariat can have no other aim than the creation of an absolutely free economic organisation and federation based upon work and equality and wholly independent of any political government, and that such an organisation or federation can only come into being through the spontaneous action of the proletariat itself, through its trade societies, and through self-governing communes.