[1] The IWA explicitly rejects centralism, political parties, parliamentarism and statism, including the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as offering the means to carry out such change, drawing heavily on anarchist critiques written both before and after the Russian revolution, most famously Mikhail Bakunin's suggestion that: "If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

However heavy repression in France of the Paris Commune, as well as in Spain and Italy, alongside the rise of propaganda of the deed within the anarchist movement and a dominant strand of social-democracy on the wider left wing in Europe, meant that serious moves to establish an anarcho-syndicalist international would not begin until the early 20th century.

"[1] For many in this new revolutionary wave, Russia seemed to offer a successful alternative to social democratic reformism, so when in 1919 the Bolshevik Party issued an appeal for all workers to join it in building a new Red International it was met with great interest.

The single largest anarcho-syndicalist union at the time, the CNT in Spain, was unable to attend when their delegates were arrested on the way to the conference, though they did join the following year, bringing 600,000 members into the international.

Massive government repression repeated such defeats around the world, as anarcho-syndicalist unions were destroyed in Peru, Brazil, Columbia, Japan, Cuba, Bulgaria, Paraguay and Bolivia.

It withdrew from the IWA following its failure to amend the body's statutes to allow it to stand in municipal elections and amid concerns over its integration with the state over distribution of unemployment benefits.

It has published the journal Žerme bohatých (English: Let's eat the rich), which has reported on strike actions and trade union struggles in both Slovakia and the rest of the world.

[11] Alongside the CNT, USI and FAU, other affiliated organisations included the North American Regional Administration of the IWW, FORA (Argentina), ESE (Greece), and IP (Poland).