fbpx
Wikipedia

Marxists Internet Archive

October 16, 2023

Not to be confused with Internet Archive.

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, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Rosa Luxemburg, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 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.[1] All material in the archive is provided free of charge to users, though not necessarily free of copyright.[2]

Marxists Internet Archive
Screenshot of Marxists.org as of March 26, 2017
Type of site
Online encyclopedia
Available inMulti-lingual (80 languages)
URLmarxists.org
CommercialNo
Launched1990; 33 years ago (1990)
1993; 30 years ago (1993) (gopher site)

History Edit

Origins Edit

 
The forerunner of Marxists Internet archive was the Marx-Engels Archive, available on the Internet since 1993.

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 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.[3][4]

By 1996 the website, Marx.org, was hosted by a commercial ISP. 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.[3][5]

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.[3][5] 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.[6] Today the Marxists Internet Archive is a recognized repository for both Marxist and non-Marxist writers.[7][8][9][10] It is listed in the OCLC WorldCat catalog,[11] and has been selected for archiving by institutions such as the British Library,[12] Ireland's University College Cork,[13] and the US Library of Congress.

2007 attacks Edit

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 attacks, 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 issues.[14] 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 since the website was shortly blocked in China in 2005.[15] 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 Edit

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.[16] 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.[17][18] 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.[17] 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.'"[19]

A representative of MIA, Andy Blunden, did not dispute that L&W has copyright over the material.[16] 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.[16]

In response to widespread criticism, Lawrence and Wishart issued a statement objecting to the "campaign of online abuse."[16]

Structure Edit

Management Edit

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.[20]

The MIA is incorporated in the U.S. state of California and registered with the U.S. tax service as a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization.[21]

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, under the GNU Free Documentation License, or used with the copyright holders' permission. Any work created by MIA volunteers is under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.[22]

Physical location and mirrors Edit

The website is primarily served via an ISP in Germany, and three mirrors exist, two of them in Europe (in France and Germany 2015-04-06 at the Wayback Machine), and one in the USA.[23]

Distribution Edit

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."[24]

As of March 2014, the MIA was 138 GB; it was then decided to discontinue the DVD[25] 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 Edit

In addition to distribution of its hard drive archives, in 2008 the MIA launched Marxist Internet Archive Publications, which has, As of October 2022, published eight titles including volumes on philosophy, social history, Soviet psychology and pedagogy, and an anthology of writings by José Carlos Mariátegui,[26] which it distributes through Erythrós Press and Media, LLC.[27]

Archival structure Edit

Most of material on the website is formatted in HTML, and the style of the documents is determined with CSS. 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 and the Paris Commune as well as broader subject topics, such as philosophy. 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.[28] 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.

See also Edit

References Edit

  1. ^ "MIA Introduction". www.marxists.org.
  2. ^ "Charter of the Marxists Internet Archive (M.I.A.)". marxists.org.
  3. ^ a b c "History of MIA". Marxists Internet Archive. from the original on 2014-04-25. Retrieved September 6, 2009.
  4. ^ Newman, Nathan (June 20, 1995). "Marx/Engels WWW Archive – REMOVED (fwd)". PKT Mailing List (Mailing list). Archived from the original on 2003-11-20.
  5. ^ a b Empson, Martin (January 2005). "Marxism on the Web". International Socialism. No. 105. from the original on 2015-02-18.
  6. ^ "Introduction". Marxists Internet Archive. from the original on 2016-09-08. Retrieved September 6, 2009.
  7. ^ Kelly, Mills (2003). "Marxists Internet Archive". World History Sources. Fairfax County, Virginia, USA: George Mason University's Center for History and New Media. from the original on 2011-09-17.
  8. ^ Sullivan, Stefan (2002). Marx for a Post-Communist Era. Routledge. p. 173. ISBN 978-0415201933.
  9. ^ Kohan, Nestor; Brito, Pier (2007). Marxismo para principiantes: Leer a Marx desde el Siglo XXI. Buenos Aires: Era Naciente. p. 191.
  10. ^ . Departamento de Filosofía, Universidad de Granada (Spain). 20 January 2009. Archived from the original on 2010-06-22.
  11. ^ "Marxists Internet Archive". Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) Online Union Catalog. 20 August 2003. from the original on 2022-04-26. Retrieved 7 September 2009.
  12. ^ . British Library. Archived from the original on May 6, 2012.
  13. ^ "Archived copy of MIA". University College Cork's College of Arts, Celtic Studies, and Social Sciences. Retrieved 7 September 2009.[dead link]
  14. ^ . Marxists Internet Archive. January 2007. Archived from the original on 2007-12-12. Retrieved 6 September 2009.
  15. ^ Cohen, Noam (February 5, 2007). . International Herald Tribune. Archived from the original on 2007-02-07.
  16. ^ a b c d Howard, Jennifer (29 April 2014). "Readers of Marx and Engels Decry Publisher's Assertion of Copyright". Chronicle of Higher Education. from the original on 2017-02-01.
  17. ^ a b Cohen, Noam (30 April 2014). "Claiming a Copyright on Marx? How Uncomradely". New York Times. from the original on 2019-02-12.
  18. ^ Tobar, Hector (April 29, 2014). "Radicals fight over a Karl Marx copyright". Los Angeles Times. from the original on 2014-05-06.
  19. ^ Pearson, Jordan (May 2, 2014). "Not Even Radical Communist Literature Is Immune to Copyright Battles". Motherboard. from the original on 2014-05-03.
  20. ^ "Bylaws of MIA". Marxists Internet Archive. 18 November 2007. from the original on 2016-09-08.
  21. ^ "Letter from U.S. Internal Revenue Service to Marxists Internet Archive". 1 October 2003. from the original on 2016-09-09.
  22. ^ "Charter of the MIA". Marxists Internet Archive. 6 December 2004. from the original on 2016-09-08.
  23. ^ "Marxists Internet Archive Mirrors". Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 18 August 2020.
  24. ^ . Marxists Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 2014-04-25. Retrieved 6 September 2009.
  25. ^ "Marxists.org en DVD" (in Spanish). from the original on 2018-07-15. Retrieved 10 September 2019.
  26. ^ "Marxists Internet Archive Publications". Marxists Internet Archive. from the original on 2014-09-12. Retrieved 30 October 2022.
  27. ^ "Marxists Internet Archive Publications: Payment for Books". Marxists Internet Archive. from the original on 2021-09-17. Retrieved 30 October 2022.
  28. ^ "Marxists Internet Archive, Cross-Language Index". from the original on 2019-08-15.

Further reading Edit

External links Edit

 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Marxists Internet Archive.
  • Marxists Internet Archive Internet frontpage of MIA.
    • MIA Mirrors Links to mirrors of Marxists.org
    • German Mirror 2015-04-06 at the Wayback Machine
    • U.S. Southern Mirror
  • Marxists Internet Archive Publications.
  • 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.
  • Review from "WorldHistorySources", Mills Kelly, 2003 Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, Fairfax County (USA).

October 16, 2023
marxists, internet, archive, confused, with, internet, archive, also, known, marxists, profit, online, encyclopedia, that, hosts, multilingual, library, created, 1990, works, communist, anarchist, socialist, writers, such, karl, marx, friedrich, engels, vladim. Not to be confused with Internet Archive 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 Friedrich Engels Vladimir Lenin Leon Trotsky Joseph Stalin Mao Zedong Rosa Luxemburg Mikhail Bakunin Peter Kropotkin and Pierre Joseph Proudhon 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 1 All material in the archive is provided free of charge to users though not necessarily free of copyright 2 Marxists Internet ArchiveScreenshot of Marxists org as of March 26 2017Type of siteOnline encyclopediaAvailable inMulti lingual 80 languages URLmarxists wbr orgCommercialNoLaunched1990 33 years ago 1990 1993 30 years ago 1993 gopher site Contents 1 History 1 1 Origins 1 2 2007 attacks 1 3 Copyright issue on Marx Engels collected works 2 Structure 2 1 Management 2 2 Physical location and mirrors 2 3 Distribution 2 4 MIA as a book publisher 3 Archival structure 4 See also 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External linksHistory EditOrigins Edit nbsp The forerunner of Marxists Internet archive was the Marx Engels Archive available on the Internet since 1993 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 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 3 4 By 1996 the website Marx org was hosted by a commercial ISP 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 3 5 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 3 5 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 6 Today the Marxists Internet Archive is a recognized repository for both Marxist and non Marxist writers 7 8 9 10 It is listed in the OCLC WorldCat catalog 11 and has been selected for archiving by institutions such as the British Library 12 Ireland s University College Cork 13 and the US Library of Congress 2007 attacks Edit 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 attacks 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 issues 14 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 since the website was shortly blocked in China in 2005 15 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 Edit 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 16 In an email in late April 2014 L amp W asked MIA to delete the contested material from their website by the end of April or face litigation 17 18 MIA chose to follow the request An online petition was started against the L amp W decision and had the support of more than 4 500 people by the end of the month 17 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 19 A representative of MIA Andy Blunden did not dispute that L amp W has copyright over the material 16 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 16 In response to widespread criticism Lawrence and Wishart issued a statement objecting to the campaign of online abuse 16 Structure EditManagement Edit 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 20 The MIA is incorporated in the U S state of California and registered with the U S tax service as a non profit 501 c 3 organization 21 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 under the GNU Free Documentation License or used with the copyright holders permission Any work created by MIA volunteers is under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2 0 license 22 Physical location and mirrors Edit The website is primarily served via an ISP in Germany and three mirrors exist two of them in Europe in France and Germany Archived 2015 04 06 at the Wayback Machine and one in the USA 23 Distribution Edit 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 24 As of March 2014 the MIA was 138 GB it was then decided to discontinue the DVD 25 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 Edit In addition to distribution of its hard drive archives in 2008 the MIA launched Marxist Internet Archive Publications which has As of October 2022 update published eight titles including volumes on philosophy social history Soviet psychology and pedagogy and an anthology of writings by Jose Carlos Mariategui 26 which it distributes through Erythros Press and Media LLC 27 Archival structure EditThis section needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this section Unsourced material may be challenged and removed Find sources Marxists Internet Archive news newspapers books scholar JSTOR November 2018 Learn how and when to remove this template message Most of material on the website is formatted in HTML and the style of the documents is determined with CSS 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 and the Paris Commune as well as broader subject topics such as philosophy 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 update the MIA website included content in 80 languages 28 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 See also EditList of digital library projects List of online encyclopediasReferences Edit MIA Introduction www marxists org Charter of the Marxists Internet Archive M I A marxists org a b c History of MIA Marxists Internet Archive Archived from the original on 2014 04 25 Retrieved September 6 2009 Newman Nathan June 20 1995 Marx Engels WWW Archive REMOVED fwd PKT Mailing List Mailing list Archived from the original on 2003 11 20 a b Empson Martin January 2005 Marxism on the Web International Socialism No 105 Archived from the original on 2015 02 18 Introduction Marxists Internet Archive Archived from the original on 2016 09 08 Retrieved September 6 2009 Kelly Mills 2003 Marxists Internet Archive World History Sources Fairfax County Virginia USA George Mason University s Center for History and New Media Archived from the original on 2011 09 17 Sullivan Stefan 2002 Marx for a Post Communist Era Routledge p 173 ISBN 978 0415201933 Kohan Nestor Brito Pier 2007 Marxismo para principiantes Leer a Marx desde el Siglo XXI Buenos Aires Era Naciente p 191 Los mejores portales de filosofia contemporanea Departamento de Filosofia Universidad de Granada Spain 20 January 2009 Archived from the original on 2010 06 22 Marxists Internet Archive Online Computer Library Center OCLC Online Union Catalog 20 August 2003 Archived from the original on 2022 04 26 Retrieved 7 September 2009 UK Web Archive British Library Archived from the original on May 6 2012 Archived copy of MIA University College Cork s College of Arts Celtic Studies and Social Sciences Retrieved 7 September 2009 dead link Attack Log Marxists Internet Archive January 2007 Archived from the original on 2007 12 12 Retrieved 6 September 2009 Cohen Noam February 5 2007 Online Marxist archive blames China for electronic attacks International Herald Tribune Archived from the original on 2007 02 07 a b c d Howard Jennifer 29 April 2014 Readers of Marx and Engels Decry Publisher s Assertion of Copyright Chronicle of Higher Education Archived from the original on 2017 02 01 a b Cohen Noam 30 April 2014 Claiming a Copyright on Marx How Uncomradely New York Times Archived from the original on 2019 02 12 Tobar Hector April 29 2014 Radicals fight over a Karl Marx copyright Los Angeles Times Archived from the original on 2014 05 06 Pearson Jordan May 2 2014 Not Even Radical Communist Literature Is Immune to Copyright Battles Motherboard Archived from the original on 2014 05 03 Bylaws of MIA Marxists Internet Archive 18 November 2007 Archived from the original on 2016 09 08 Letter from U S Internal Revenue Service to Marxists Internet Archive 1 October 2003 Archived from the original on 2016 09 09 Charter of the MIA Marxists Internet Archive 6 December 2004 Archived from the original on 2016 09 08 Marxists Internet Archive Mirrors Marxists Internet Archive Retrieved 18 August 2020 Marxists org on 160GB HD Marxists Internet Archive Archived from the original on 2014 04 25 Retrieved 6 September 2009 Marxists org en DVD in Spanish Archived from the original on 2018 07 15 Retrieved 10 September 2019 Marxists Internet Archive Publications Marxists Internet Archive Archived from the original on 2014 09 12 Retrieved 30 October 2022 Marxists Internet Archive Publications Payment for Books Marxists Internet Archive Archived from the original on 2021 09 17 Retrieved 30 October 2022 Marxists Internet Archive Cross Language Index Archived from the original on 2019 08 15 Further reading EditMcLemee Scott April 30 2014 Value Price and Profit Inside Higher Ed External links Edit nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to Marxists Internet Archive Marxists Internet Archive Internet frontpage of MIA MIA Mirrors Links to mirrors of Marxists org French Mirror German Mirror Archived 2015 04 06 at the Wayback Machine U S Southern Mirror Marxists Internet Archive Publications 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 Review from WorldHistorySources Mills Kelly 2003 Center for History and New Media George Mason University Fairfax County USA Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Marxists Internet Archive amp oldid 1173913722, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

article

, read, download, free, free download, mp3, video, mp4, 3gp, jpg, jpeg, gif, png, picture, music, song, movie, book, game, games.