The conflict emerged as soon as Bakunin joined the International, late in 1868. Having been unsuccessful at radicalizing the League of Peace and Freedom, the group of which Bakunin was a part opted to join the International, but also to organize separately in an International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, which had some of its origins in the clandestine networks of which Bakunin was a part earlier in the 1860s. The International was presumably an umbrella organization for all the workers, while the Alliance would be more ideologically focused.

When the existence of the Alliance was announced to Marx, who was already established as a power within the International, Marx apparently assumed that Bakunin was the driving force behind it and that it was an attempt to assume control of the larger organization. In The First Socialist Schism, Wolfgang Eckhardt argues that Bakunin was still unaware of the nature of the announcement (by Johann Philipp Becker) when Marx began to circulate remarks about his conspiratorial intent.

The conflict deepened from there. Bakunin's movement towards anarchism, associated with Proudhon, with whom Marx had made a similar break in the 1840s, undoubtedly heightened tensions, but may also have been driven by them to some extent. The group around Bakunin defined themselves as collectivists, in contrast to the Parisian workers who still believed in individual property relations, but also as anti-authoritarians, in contrast to their understanding of Marx and his faction.

Eckhardt's book is a very interesting study of the development of the split. Robert Graham's book, We Do Not Fear Anarchy—We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement, is a well-researched history of the International from the anarchist perspective, which provides useful balance to the better-known Marxist accounts.