Marxists Internet Archive (also known as MIA or Marxists.org) is a non-profit online encyclopedia that hosts a multilingual library (created in 1990) of the works of communist, anarchist, and socialist writers, such as
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong pronounced ; also Romanization of Chinese, romanised traditionally as Mao Tse-tung. (26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976), also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the List of national founde ...
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (, , ; 15 January 1809, Besançon – 19 January 1865, Paris) was a French socialist,Landauer, Carl; Landauer, Hilde Stein; Valkenier, Elizabeth Kridl (1979) 959 "The Three Anticapitalistic Movements". ''European Socia ...
, as well as that of writers of related ideologies, and even unrelated ones (for instance, Sun Tzu). 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 site in 1993. It contains over 180,000 documents from over 850 authors in 80 languages.
History
Origins
The archive was created in 1990 by a person — known only by his Internet tag, Zodiac — who started archiving Marxist texts by transcribing the works of Marx and Engels into E-text, starting with the '' Communist Manifesto''. 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.History of MIA , Marxists Internet Archive, accessed 06 Sept, 2009.
By 1996 the website, Marx.org, was hosted by a commercial
ISP
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...
. 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 was a "slippery slope" toward sectarianism. 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.Martin Empso "Marxism on the Web" , ''
International Socialism
Proletarian internationalism, sometimes referred to as international socialism, is the perception of all communist revolutions as being part of a single global class struggle rather than separate localized events. It is based on the theory that ...
'' no.105 (Jan. 2005)
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 for both Marxist and non-Marxist writers. It is listed in the OCLCWorldCat 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 and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the Briti ...
, Ireland's
University College Cork
University College Cork – National University of Ireland, Cork (UCC) ( ga, Coláiste na hOllscoile Corcaigh) is a constituent university of the National University of Ireland, and located in Cork.
The university was founded in 1845 as one o ...
, and the US
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The libra ...
.
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 cyber-attack 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 conne ...
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 electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, a ...
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. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...
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. The problem was rectified.
Copyright issue on Marx/Engels Collected Works
In late April 2014, the small British publishers Lawrence and Wishart chose to revoke their permission for their English language version of the Marx/Engels Collected Works to be reprinted in part on MIA.Jennifer Howar "Readers of Marx and Engels Decry Publisher’s Assertion of Copyright" , ''Chronicle of Higher Education'', 29 April 2014 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.Noam Cohe , ''New York Times'', 30 April 2014 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, was quoted in '' Vice'' 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.'"
A representative of MIA, Andy Blunden, 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 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", the year when the publication of the Collected Works began.
In response to widespread criticism, Lawrence and Wishart issued a statement objecting to the "campaign of online abuse."
Structure
Management
The MIA is administered by a steering committee, composed of all active volunteers. The committee decides issues such as the categorization of writers, modifications to the bylaws (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 state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
and registered with the U.S. tax service as a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization.
According to the MIA charter, 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 intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired ...
, under the GNU Free Documentation License, or used with the copyright holders' permission. Any work created by MIA volunteers is under the Creative Commons Attribute, Share-Alike 2.0 license.
Physical location and mirrors
The website is primarily served via an
ISP
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...
in
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwee ...
Europe
Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...
Through 2013, a 3-disc CD/ DVD 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 launche Marxist Internet Archive Publications which has, as of October 2022, published eight titles including volumes on
philosophy
Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. ...
psychology
Psychology is the science, scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immens ...
José Carlos Mariátegui
José Carlos Mariátegui La Chira (June 14, 1894 - April 16, 1930) was a Peruvian writer, journalist, politician and Marxist–Leninist philosopher.
A prolific author despite his early death, El Amauta (from Quechua: hamawt'a, "teacher", a ...
HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaS ...
, and the style of the documents is determined with
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone technolo ...
. PDF is sometimes used, especially for languages which don't yet have computer fonts or OCR software 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 Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
and the Paris Commune as well as broader subject topics, such as
philosophy
Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. ...
. It also includes a reference section called the "Encyclopedia of Marxism", containing definitions of Marxist terms, short biographies, and historical material.
The MIA is also divided into a number of non-English language sections. As of 6 April 2020, 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 section has the complete collected works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
Audiobooks
Many audiobooks for the works shared on the Marxists Internet Archive have been created. These audiobooks are not on the main website, but instead created by the independent
YouTube channel
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second most vis ...