As odd as this may seem in retrospect, the marxists at that time [late 1860's] represented a party of inclusion. They made considerable efforts to reach out to the many manifestations of independent oganizing on the part of working-class groups. Within their model of organization, the cooperatives became service organizations for the movement, the unions were viewed as auxiliaries to the socialist party, and development like the International and the Commune were seen as the ends to which all were striving.
This openness was not true, or not as true, for other orientations, which tended to draw sharper lines between apporved and disapproved activities. While not always obvious from the various ideologies that each of these groups adopted, the degree of openness defined their politics. The Lassalleans, for instance, were inconsistent on trade unions and women (besides their support for aristocratic rather than liberal politics and their adaptation of autocratic models of proletarian organization), the anarchists disavowed the political, while the liberals with some individual exceptions had little tolerance for anything except the educational associations and the cooperative movement (and even here, they tended to oppose producer cooperatives when these competed with their own business interests). The bitter polemics of these years, between and within groups, should not be allowed to obscure the generally inclusionary reputation of the early marxist movement. The marxists were more creative, even if at first less succesful (and numerically weaker) than their competitors within the labor movement.