The Hague Congress of the First International September 2–7, 1872

Seven hundred pages of minutes, mandates, financial accounts, greetings telegrams and commission papers from the six days in September 1872 when the International Working Men's Association held its last congress - transcribed from the manuscripts in the Marx-Engels papers held in Moscow.

This is a serious scholarly edition, and the apparatus is where it earns that. The preface says exactly which manuscripts survive and in what state: Benjamin Le Moussu's official French minutes, which begin only at the third sitting; Friedrich Sorge's fuller notes, extant in two slightly differing copies, with variant readings given in footnotes; and the fragmentary notes of Nikolai Zhukovsky, whose mandate the congress refused. The notes describe the physical documents - pencil on the sheets of a ledger-book, measurements given, Engels writing on the inner envelope of a letter - with the fussiness of people who have handled the paper. Crossings-out are restored in footnotes, including unflattering ones.

More tellingly, the edition publishes its opponents. Zhukovsky was an anarchist and his minutes are printed anyway, and the notes reproduce, from Max Nettlau's biography of Bakunin, his pencil record of the expulsion debate - so that a Moscow institute printed James Guillaume calling the proceedings a tendentious trial.

For anyone who wants to know what actually happened at The Hague, where the International split and its seat was moved to New York, this is where you have to come.

Translated by Richard Dixon and Alex Miller.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.