Leicestershire is one of the East Midland's smaller coalfields, though it was growing faster than any other coalfield in the two decades before the First World War, and its output, and number of persons employed, unlike those of many far larger coalfields, were greater in 1925 than they had been in 1913. Annual average earnings per shift were also among the highest in the country and the level of unemployment among the miners was relatively low by coal-mining standards. The Leicestershire Miners' Association had 7,428 members at the end of 1925, which represented about three-quarters of the coal-miners employed in the coalfield, and relations with the coal-owners were by tradition peaceful with the owners agreeing to assist the LMA's “closed shop” policy and allowing union business to be conducted on colliery premises. The Leicestershire coalfield was one of that select band of inland coalfields that enjoyed relative prosperity in the early 1920's, and this state of affairs was reflected in the fact that the owners did not lock their men out to enforce either reduced wages or increased hours in May 1926, but rather the miners struck in support of the policies of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, to which they had been affiliated since its inception in 1889.

For the city of Bombay the establishment of British rule over Maharashtra (1818) inaugurated a period of extensive growth in trade, industry and banking. In search of wealth and power merchant communities and trading castes, mainly from the Northern province of Gujarat, settled in Bombay to exploit the economic opportunities that arose under the British raj. In the mid nineteenth century Indian entrepreneurs started a textile industry, which proved to be a new way to invest capital and to make profit. The management functions in their Bombay mills were filled by Europeans or Indians with an educated, middle-class background. The social and linguistic position of these people prevented their easy communication with the local labour-force of marathi-speaking peasant origin. Therefore, from the creation of the industry, mill-owners and management cadres delegated the task of labour recruitment to a special class of men, called jobbers.

Historical accounts of the First, Second and Third Internationals, i.e., those organizations that attempted to realize some sort of supranational working-class solidarity, have traditionally been presented in terms of congresses, programs and personalities. Invariably scholars have focused on the public and private debates at this or that international meeting and/or how Marx, Engels, Lenin or some other leading figure influenced or reacted to some specific development. In short, the history of the International has been looked at almost exclusively from the “top down”. There is not anything wrong with this approach per se, but it might be of some value to consider, occasionally at least, the people whom the various Internationals were supposed to be serving, in other words to examine the International not only from the “top down” but also from the “bottom up”.

The waterfront in the nineteenth century was notorious for its complex and fragmented labour market. The stevedores on board ship and the porters on the shore were always quite distinct. In London, there were then further divisions, between quay and warehouse workers, between the export and import trades. And within these broad divisions, workers would concentrate upon a particular commodity. Specialisation was rife: the labour-force was a complex body, lacking cohesion because of the diversity of products and functions, the variety of employers, and a casual system which restricted workers to particular localities and types of work. This clearly created problems when unionisation occurred. Each specialism tended to organise separately, and the result would be a plethora of unions somewhat overlapping and competing. In London, again, there was “an endless proliferation of small societies”.1 And quite apart from the complexity of union organisation amongst the dock workers there were the external relations with on the one side the seamen, and on the other railwaymen and carters. This is all to say that one of the key elements in labour relations on the waterfront before 1914 was inter-union relations.

The career of Ricardo Flores Magón, the foremost Mexican anarchist of the twentieth century, involves a curious paradox. On the one hand, he must be counted among the leading inspirers and martyrs of the Mexican Revolution. His movement, embodied in the Partido Liberal Mexicano, set in motion the forces that, in May 1911, drove Porfirio Díaz into exile; and his journal, Regeneración, which in the early stages of the Revolution reached a circulation of nearly 30,000, played an important part in rousing Mexican laborers, rural as well as urban, against the Díaz dictatorship and in pushing the Revolution in a more egalitarian direction than it might otherwise have taken. Under the banner of “Land and Liberty”, the Magonista revolt of 1911 in Baja California established short-lived revolutionary communes at Mexicali and Tijuana, having for their theoretical basis Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread, a work which Flores Magón regarded as a kind of anarchist bible and which his followers distributed in thousands of copies. Today the memory of Flores Magón is honored throughout Mexico. His remains rest in the Rotunda of Illustrious Men in Mexico City. In all parts of the country streets and squares bear his name, and Mexicans pay him homage as a great “precursor” of their Revolution, which was one of the major social upheavals of the twentieth century.

What follows is an edition of a Marx manuscript fragment: four pages in a notebook of Marx from 1860–63. The fragment is Marx's précis of Hegel's doctrine on “Being” in the “Minor Logic”, the First Part of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Marx's text is a combination of condensed quotation and paraphrase of the material in Hegel's paragraphs 83–111 of the Encyclopedia. There are no critical comments by Marx on the doctrine he summarizes. It seems that his aim was simply to trace out in a concise way the main line of Hegel's categorial development under the rubric on “Being”. The précis condenses into slightly less than four 18×111/2 cm. page sides material that fills some eighteen pages in the present standard edition of the Encyclopedia, and even more in the edition which Marx himself used: the Werke edition prepared after Hegel's death by Leopold von Henning. That Marx used this edition is evident from the fact that his précis includes material from the Zusätze which were a feature of the edition.