Marxists Internet Archive, also known as MIA or Marxists.org, is a non-profit

online encyclopedia An online encyclopedia, also called an Internet encyclopedia, is a digital encyclopedia accessible through the Internet. Some examples include pre-World Wide Web services that offered the '' Academic American Encyclopedia'' beginning in 1980, Enc ...

that hosts a multilingual library (created in 1990) of the works of

communist Communism () is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, di ...

anarchist Anarchism is a political philosophy and Political movement, movement that seeks to abolish all institutions that perpetuate authority, coercion, or Social hierarchy, hierarchy, primarily targeting the state (polity), state and capitalism. A ...

, and

socialist Socialism is an economic ideology, economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse Economic system, economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes ...

writers, such as

Karl Marx Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...

Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels ( ;"Engels"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''.Vladimir Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov ( 187021 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He was the first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until Death and state funeral of ...

Leon Trotsky Lev Davidovich Bronstein ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky,; ; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky'' was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and political theorist. He was a key figure ...

Joseph Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Dzhugashvili; 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin, his death in 1953. He held power as General Secret ...

Mao Zedong Mao Zedong pronounced ; traditionally Romanization of Chinese, romanised as Mao Tse-tung. (26December 18939September 1976) was a Chinese politician, revolutionary, and political theorist who founded the People's Republic of China (PRC) in ...

Rosa Luxemburg Rosa Luxemburg ( ; ; ; born Rozalia Luksenburg; 5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary and Marxist theorist. She was a key figure of the socialist movements in Poland and Germany in the early 20t ...

Mikhail Bakunin Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin. Sometimes anglicized to Michael Bakunin. ( ; – 1 July 1876) was a Russian revolutionary anarchist. He is among the most influential figures of anarchism and a major figure in the revolutionary socialist, s ...

Peter Kropotkin Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (9 December 1842 – 8 February 1921) was a Russian anarchist and geographer known as a proponent of anarchist communism. Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, Kropotkin attended the Page Corps and later s ...

, and

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (, ; ; 1809 – 19 January 1865) was a French anarchist, socialist, philosopher, and economist who founded mutualist philosophy and is considered by many to be the "father of anarchism". He was the first person to ca ...

, as well as that of writers of related ideologies, and even unrelated ones (for instance,

Sun Tzu Sun Tzu (; zh, t=孫子, s=孙子, first= t, p=Sūnzǐ) may have been a Chinese General, military general, strategist, philosopher, and writer who lived during the Eastern Zhou period (771–256 BC). Sun Tzu is traditionally credited as the au ...

). The collection is maintained by volunteers and is based on a collection of documents that were distributed by email and newsgroups, later collected into a single

gopher Pocket gophers, commonly referred to simply as gophers, are burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae. The roughly 41 speciesSearch results for "Geomyidae" on thASM Mammal Diversity Database are all endemic to North and Central America. They ar ...

site in 1993. It contains over 180,000 documents from over 850 authors in 80 languages. All material in the archive is provided free of charge to users, although not necessarily free of copyright.

History

Origins

The archive was created in 1990 by a person known only by their Internet tag, Zodiac, who started archiving Marxist texts by transcribing the works of

Marx Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...

and

Engels Friedrich Engels ( ;"Engels"
''

E-text e-text (from "''electronics, electronic text''"; sometimes written as etext) is a general term for any Electronic document, document that is read in digital data, digital form, and especially a document that is mainly text. For example, a compute ...

, starting with the ''

Communist Manifesto ''The Communist Manifesto'' (), originally the ''Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (), is a political pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848. The t ...

''. In 1993 the accumulated text was posted on a gopher site at csf.colorado.edu. Volunteers joined and helped spread and mirror the main archive. However, the main site and its mirrors were hosted on academic servers and by the end of 1995 almost all had been shut down. By 1996 the website, Marx.org, was hosted by a commercial

ISP An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides a myriad of services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non ...

. This was followed by an increased activity from the volunteers. In the following years, however, a conflict developed between the volunteers working on the website and Zodiac, who retained control of the project and domain name. As the scope of the archive expanded, Zodiac feared that the opening toward diverse currents of

Marxism Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, ...

was a "slippery slope" toward

sectarianism Sectarianism is a debated concept. Some scholars and journalists define it as pre-existing fixed communal categories in society, and use it to explain political, cultural, or Religious violence, religious conflicts between groups. Others conceiv ...

. The volunteers who had been undertaking the work of transcribing texts resented having little influence over the way in which the archive was organized and run. In early 1998 Zodiac decided that Marx.org would return to its roots and that all writers other than Marx and Engels would be removed. In July 1998 the present form of the Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) was created by volunteers transferring files and archives from Marx.org. This led to a further increase in activity and an enlargement of the scope of the archive. As for Marx.org, Zodiac closed it down in 1999, and in 2002 he gave up the domain name, which was purchased by the MIA. Along with marxists.org, the MIA can be reached by two other domain names: lenin.org and trotsky.org. The site, and the group of volunteers working on it, has dramatically changed since its early beginnings. By 2014 it had grown to encompass 62 volunteers in 33 different countries, and held over 50,000 items in 54 languages covering the works of over 600 authors. Today the Marxists Internet Archive is a recognized

repository Repository may refer to: Archives and online databases * Content repository, a database with an associated set of data management tools, allowing application-independent access to the content * Disciplinary repository (or subject repository), an ...

for both Marxist and non-Marxist writers. It is listed in the

OCLC OCLC, Inc. See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was founded in 1967 as the ...

WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...

catalog, and has been selected for archiving by institutions such as the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...

, Ireland's

University College Cork University College Cork – National University of Ireland, Cork (UCC) () is a constituent university of the National University of Ireland, and located in Cork (city), Cork. The university was founded in 1845 as one of three Queen's Universit ...

, and the US

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...

2007 attacks

MIA has had problems with malicious attacks from online sources. Beginning in November 2006, the Marxists Internet Archive faced a number of serious

denial-of-service attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host co ...

s, attempting to exploit a misconfiguration in their server's operating system. By January 2007, the attacks had crippled much of the archive, and left volunteers with

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the primary processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes instructions of a computer program, such as arithmetic, log ...

issues. That the majority of systems involved in the attack were either in China or belonging to Chinese institutions led to speculation that the attacks may have been politically motivated and directed by the

People's Republic of China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

since the website was shortly blocked in China in 2005. The severity of the attack, coupled with other hosting issues, led to the closure of the Marxists Internet Archive's main server and several of its mirrors for a number of weeks in February and March 2007.

Copyright issue on Marx/Engels collected works

In late April 2014, the small British publishers

Lawrence & Wishart Lawrence & Wishart is a British publishing company formerly associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain. It was formed in 1936 through the merger of Martin Lawrence, the Communist Party's press, and Wishart Ltd, a family-owned left-wing ...

(L&W) chose to revoke their permission for their English language version of the

Marx/Engels Collected Works ''Marx/Engels Collected Works'' (also known as ''MECW'') is the largest existing collection of English translations of works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Its 50 volumes contain publications by Marx and Engels released during their lifeti ...

to be reprinted in part on MIA. In an email in late April 2014, L&W asked MIA to delete the contested material from their website by the end of April or face litigation. MIA chose to follow the request. An online petition was started against the L&W decision, and had the support of more than 4,500 people by the end of the month. The author of the petition,

Ammar Aziz Ammar Aziz is a Pakistani documentary filmmaker and poet. He's a recipient of the International Federation of Film Critics Award. His debut feature-length film A Walnut Tree had its world premiere at IDFA and North American premiere at Hot Docs ...

, was quoted in ''

Vice A vice is a practice, behaviour, Habit (psychology), habit or item generally considered morally wrong in the associated society. In more minor usage, vice can refer to a fault, a negative character trait, a defect, an infirmity, or a bad or unhe ...

'' magazine: "You cannot privatize their writings—they are the collective property of the people they wrote for. Privatization of Marx and Engels' writings is like getting a trademark for the words 'socialism' or 'communism.'" Andy Blunden, a representative of MIA, did not dispute that L&W has copyright over the material. He was quoted in the Washington D.C.–based ''

Chronicle of Higher Education ''The Chronicle of Higher Education'' is an American newspaper and website that presents news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty and student affairs professionals, including staff members and administrators. A subscriptio ...

'': "The professors and the historians will be able to write learned articles about what Marx said, but the general population are going to be left back in 1975 he year when the publication of the Collected Works began. In response to widespread criticism, L&W issued a statement objecting to the "campaign of online abuse".

Structure

Management

The MIA is administered by a

steering committee A committee or commission is a body of one or more persons subordinate to a deliberative assembly or other form of organization. A committee may not itself be considered to be a form of assembly or a decision-making body. Usually, an assembly o ...

, composed of all active volunteers. The committee decides issues such as the categorization of writers, modifications to the

bylaw A by-law (bye-law, by(e)law, by(e) law), is a set of rules or law established by an organization or community so as to regulate itself, as allowed or provided for by some higher authority. The higher authority, generally a legislature or some other ...

s (by 3/4 majority), financial issues of all kinds, and similar matters. Administrators are unpaid volunteers who assume additional responsibilities over certain section(s) of MIA. The MIA is incorporated in the U.S. state of

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

and registered with the U.S. tax service as a

non-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...

, 501(c)(3) organization. According to the MIA

charter A charter is the grant of authority or rights, stating that the granter formally recognizes the prerogative of the recipient to exercise the rights specified. It is implicit that the granter retains superiority (or sovereignty), and that the ...

, its content will always be offered 100% free, in compliance with all capitalist copyright laws. All the material stored in the archives is either

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

, under the

GNU Free Documentation License The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or GFDL) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights ...

, or used with the copyright holders' permission. Any work created by MIA volunteers is under the

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and bui ...

2.0 license.

Physical location and mirrors

The website is primarily served via an

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

, and three

mirrors A mirror, also known as a looking glass, is an object that reflects an image. Light that bounces off a mirror forms an image of whatever is in front of it, which is then focused through the lens of the eye or a camera. Mirrors reverse the ...

exist, two of them in

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

(i
France
an
Germany
), and one in th
United States

Distribution

Through 2013, a 3-disc CD/

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for digital video disc or digital versatile disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...

volume archive (containing the material on the website) was sold, although many copies were distributed every year for free to individuals and groups in developing and underdeveloped countries. These measures were not only meant to allow easy access to the material in the archive, but also as a way of ensuring the continuity of the archive. As they put it: "If the Archive is shut down by a publishing conglomerate or the government, having this information widely dispersed around the world, essentially untraceable, with the content entirely intact, is a great thing." As of March 2014, the MIA was 138 GB; it was then decided to discontinue the DVD and to distribute a portable USB hard drive that contains the entire contents of the MIA on it. The portable HDD has now also been discontinued.

MIA as a book publisher

In addition to distribution of its hard drive archives, in 2008 the MIA launched Marxist Internet Archive Publications, which has, , published eight titles including volumes on

philosophy Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...

social history Social history, often called history from below, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians. Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, spreading f ...

, Soviet

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

and

pedagogy Pedagogy (), most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political, and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken ...

, and an anthology of writings by

José Carlos Mariátegui José Carlos Mariátegui La Chira (; June 14, 1894 – April 16, 1930) was a Peruvian writer, sociologist, historian, journalist, politician, and Marxist philosopher. A prolific author despite his early death, El Amauta (from Quechua: ham ...

, which it distributes through Erythrós Press and Media, LLC.

Archival structure

Most of material on the website is formatted in

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

, and the style of the documents is determined with CSS.

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

is sometimes used, especially for languages which don't yet have computer

font In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a ''typeface'', defined as the set of fonts that share an overall design. For instance, the typeface Bauer Bodoni (shown in the figure) includes fonts " Roman" (or "regul ...

s or

OCR software This comparison of optical character recognition software includes: * OCR engines, that do the actual character identification * Layout analysis software, that divide scanned documents into zones suitable for OCR * Graphical interfaces to one or m ...

available. Many PDFs have been added for the purposes of putting up revolutionary and socialist publications, presented as they were printed. This has added to the bulk of the growth of the MIA. The markup and style of the archive varies from one section to the other, depending on the volunteers who work there, but all are built on a common basic document template. The archive includes section dedicated to specific historical topics, such as the history of the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

and the

Paris Commune The Paris Commune (, ) was a French revolutionary government that seized power in Paris on 18 March 1871 and controlled parts of the city until 28 May 1871. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, the French National Guard (France), Nation ...

, as well as broader subject topics, such as

. It also includes a reference section called the "Encyclopedia of Marxism", containing definitions of Marxist terms, short biographies, and historical material. The MIA is divided into a number of non-English language sections. , the MIA website included content in 80 languages. Although each of the non-English sections is intended over time to replicate the basic structure of the main (English-language) section, in practice these vary widely in size and scope. Some of these language sections house only a few documents by Marx and Engels, while others are more extensive—for example, the

Chinese Chinese may refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people identified with China, through nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **Han Chinese, East Asian ethnic group native to China. **'' Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic ...

section has the complete collected works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

References

External links

Marxists Internet Archive
Internet frontpage of MIA. *

Links to mirrors of Marxists.org *

*
German Mirror
*
U.S. Southern Mirror

Interview with volunteers of the Marxists Internet Archive

International Socialism
'' no. 105 (Jan. 2005).
Research Note on the Archive
''Capital and Class,'' no. 89.
"Research Note on the Marxists Internet Archive"
Conference of Socialist Economists, Summer 2006.

Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, Fairfax County (USA). {{Authority control American political websites Marxism Communist works Discipline-oriented digital libraries Internet properties established in 1990 Multilingual websites American digital libraries