Marxists Internet Archive
Encyclopedia
Marxists Internet Archive (also known as MIA or Marxists.org) is a volunteer based non-profit organization that maintains a multi-lingual Internet archive
of Marxist
writers and other similar authors (socialists, anarchists, etc.). Established in 1990, the archive is currently among the largest producers of digital texts by Marxist authors in the world.
and Engels into E-Text
, starting with the Communist Manifesto. In 1993 the accumulated text was posted on a website for the first time. Volunteers joined and helped spread and mirror the main archive. However, the main website 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 on a commercial internet service provider
. 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 doing the work of transcribing texts resented having little say in how 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.
The website, and the group of volunteers working on it, has dramatically changed since its early beginnings. By 2007 it had grown to encompass 62 volunteers in 33 different countries, and held over 50,000 items in 45 languages covering the works of some 600 authors. Today the Marxists Internet Archive is a recognized repository
for both Marxist and non-Marxist writers. It is listed in the OCLC
WorldCat
catalog, and has been selected for archiving by institutions such as the British Library
and Ireland's University College Cork.
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 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
. The seriousness 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 has subsequently been rectified.
. The committee decides issues such as the categorization of writers, modifications to the bylaw
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
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. 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
Attribute, Share-Alike 2.0 license.
, and five mirrors
exist, two of them in the USA (Texas
, and Virginia
), two in Europe
(France
, and Germany
), and a further one in Australia
.
archive (containing the material on the website) is also sold, although many copies are distributed every year free of charge to individuals and groups in developing and underdeveloped countries. Also, local distribution networks for the CD version of the archives have been established in areas of India
, Nepal
, Sri Lanka
, Pakistan
, and South America
in which Internet access is scarce or prohibitively expensive.
These measures are 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."
, social history
, and Soviet psychology
and pedagogy
, which it distributes through Erythrós Press.
, and the style of the documents is determined with CSS
. PDF is sometimes used, especially for languages which don't yet have computer font
s or OCR software
available.
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 March 2011, the MIA website included content in 48 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 archives have 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.
Archive
An archive is a collection of historical records, or the physical place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of an organization...
of Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
writers and other similar authors (socialists, anarchists, etc.). Established in 1990, the archive is currently among the largest producers of digital texts by Marxist authors in the world.
Origins
The archive was created in 1990 by a person - known only by his Internet nickname, Zodiac — who started archiving Marxist texts by transcribing the works of MarxKarl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
and Engels into E-Text
E-text
An e-text is, generally, any text-based information that is available in a digitally encoded human-readable format and read by electronic means, but more specifically it refers to files in the ASCII character encoding.E-text has the broad meaning of something electronic that represents words, a...
, starting with the Communist Manifesto. In 1993 the accumulated text was posted on a website for the first time. Volunteers joined and helped spread and mirror the main archive. However, the main website 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 on a commercial internet service provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
. 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
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
was a "slippery slope" toward sectarianism. The volunteers who had been doing the work of transcribing texts resented having little say in how 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.
The website, and the group of volunteers working on it, has dramatically changed since its early beginnings. By 2007 it had grown to encompass 62 volunteers in 33 different countries, and held over 50,000 items in 45 languages covering the works of some 600 authors. Today the Marxists Internet Archive is a recognized repository
Repository (publishing)
A repository in publishing, and especially in academic publishing,is a real or virtual facility for the deposit of academic publications, such as academic journal articles....
for both Marxist and non-Marxist writers. It is listed in the OCLC
OCLC
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. is "a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs"...
WorldCat
WorldCat
WorldCat is a union catalog which itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories which participate in the Online Computer Library Center global cooperative...
catalog, and has been selected for archiving by institutions such as the British Library
British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...
and Ireland's University College Cork.
2007 attacks
As with many politically-oriented internet sites, MIA has had it share of problems with malicious external attacks. Beginning in November 2006, the Marxists Internet Archive faced a number of serious Denial-of-service attackDenial-of-service attack
A denial-of-service attack or distributed denial-of-service attack is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users...
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 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
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
. The seriousness 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 has subsequently been rectified.
Management
The MIA is controlled by a steering committeeCommittee
A committee is a type of small deliberative assembly that is usually intended to remain subordinate to another, larger deliberative assembly—which when organized so that action on committee requires a vote by all its entitled members, is called the "Committee of the Whole"...
. The committee decides issues such as the categorization of writers, modifications to the bylaw
Bylaw
By-law can refer to a law of local or limited application passed under the authority of a higher law specifying what things may be regulated by the by-law...
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
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
and registered with the U.S. tax service as a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization.
According to the MIA charter
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...
, its content will always be offered 100% free. All the material stored in the archives is either public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
, under the GNU Free Documentation License
GNU Free Documentation License
The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify a work and requires all copies and...
, or used with the copyright holders' permission. Any work created by MIA volunteers is under the Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
Attribute, Share-Alike 2.0 license.
Physical location
The website is primarily served from a server in CaliforniaCalifornia
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, and five mirrors
Mirror (computing)
In computing, a mirror is an exact copy of a data set. On the Internet, a mirror site is an exact copy of another Internet site.Mirror sites are most commonly used to provide multiple sources of the same information, and are of particular value as a way of providing reliable access to large downloads...
exist, two of them in the USA (Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
, and Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
), two in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
(France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, and Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
), and a further one in Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
.
Distribution
A CD/DVDDVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
archive (containing the material on the website) is also sold, although many copies are distributed every year free of charge to individuals and groups in developing and underdeveloped countries. Also, local distribution networks for the CD version of the archives have been established in areas of India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, Nepal
Nepal
Nepal , officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, is a landlocked sovereign state located in South Asia. It is located in the Himalayas and bordered to the north by the People's Republic of China, and to the south, east, and west by the Republic of India...
, Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Known until 1972 as Ceylon , Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the...
, Pakistan
Pakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
, and South America
South America
South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...
in which Internet access is scarce or prohibitively expensive.
These measures are 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."
MIA as a book publisher
In addition to distribution of its CD/DVD archives, in 2008 the MIA launched Marxist Internet Archive Publications, which has, as of November 2010, published seven titles in philosophyPhilosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, social history
Social history
Social history, often called the new social history, is a branch of History that includes history of ordinary people and their strategies of coping with life. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments...
, and Soviet psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
and pedagogy
Pedagogy
Pedagogy is the study of being a teacher or the process of teaching. The term generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction....
, which it distributes through Erythrós Press.
Archival structure
Most of material on the website is formatted in HTMLHTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
, and the style of the documents is determined with CSS
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...
. PDF is sometimes used, especially for languages which don't yet have computer font
Font
In typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...
s or OCR software
Optical character recognition
Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...
available.
The markup
Markup language
A markup language is a modern system for annotating a text in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from that text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e. the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts...
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
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
and the Paris Commune
Paris Commune
The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...
as well as broader subject topics, such as philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
. 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 March 2011, the MIA website included content in 48 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 archives have only a few documents by Marx and Engels, while others are more extensive — for example, the Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
section has the complete collected works of Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
, Engels, and Lenin.
External links
- Marxists Internet Archive Internet frontpage of MIA.
- MIA Mirrors Links to mirrors of Marxists.org
- 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).