Marxists Internet Archive

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Screenshot of Marxists.org as on March 27, 2009
URL http://www.marxists.org/
Commercial? No
Type of site Internet encyclopedia project
Available language(s) Multi-lingual

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.).

Contents

[edit] Early beginnings

MEA, September 1996

The archive was created in 1990 when a worker - known only by his Internet nickname, Zodiac - started archiving Marxism by transcribing the works of Marx and Engels into E-Text. 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 on academic servers and by 1995 almost every university closed down the mirrors.

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, a conflict developed between the volunteers working on the website and Zodiac, who retained control of the project. This resulted in a split.

In July 1998 the present form of the Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) was created. This led to a further increase in activity and an enlargement of the scope of the archive.[1]

[edit] 2007 Denial of Service attacks

Beginning in November 2006, the Marxists Internet Archive faced a number of serious Denial-of-service attacks, attempting to exploit a misconfiguration in server's operating system. By January 2007 the attacks had crippled much of the archive, and left volunteers with CPU issues.[2] 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.[3] 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.

[edit] Organization

Volunteers international

The website, and the group of volunteers working on it, has dramatically changed since its early beginnings. Now the Marxists Internet Archive is a recognized repository for both Marxist and non-Marxist writers.

[edit] Management

The MIA is controlled by a steering committee. 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 volunteers who assume additional responsibilities over certain section(s) of MIA.[4]

[edit] Legal status

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.[5]

[edit] Copyright

Creative Commons

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.[6]

[edit] Continuity of the archive and mirrors

Marxists Internet Archive is mirrored in the USA, France, the UK, Germany, Russia, and Australia[7]
The primary site of the Marxists Internet Archive is in California, and other US mirrors include Utah, Texas, and Virginia[7]

The website is primarily served from a server in California, and eight mirrors exist, three of them in the USA (Utah, Texas, and Virginia), four in Europe (UK, France, Germany, and Russia), and a further one in Australia[7]. A CD/DVD 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, and Pakistan in which Internet access is scarce or prohibitively expensive.

The complete archive can be downloaded (to mirror; or to back up to local storage such as Hard Drive, DVD, etc) using Rsync or similar tools.[8]

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."[9]

[edit] Archive style

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.

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.

[edit] Division of the archive

Although the website is called the Marxists Internet Archive, it has outgrown the limits of that name and now has several sections:

[edit] Marxist writers

This section contains many Marxist writers from Marx and Engels onward. Featured prominently besides Marx and Engels are Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Che Guevara, whose images are displayed on the mainpage.

The archive plans to contain all deceased Marxist writers' works, which includes fiction and non-fiction work, regardless of whether it was written on Marxism or not.

[edit] History archive

This section contains documents on historical subjects that have relevance to Marxism. Most notable are the sub-sections about the Soviet Union and the Paris Commune. There are documents on 9 historical subjects in total.

[edit] Subject archive

This section is for Special Subject Collections; Most notable is the Philosophy subject archive, which contains a massive collection of over 120 thinkers, from 1600 to 2000. About 24 subjects are available.

[edit] Reference writers

This section is a guide to writers relevant to understanding the concepts of Marxism. Divided into two main parts:

[edit] Encyclopedia of Marxism

The Encyclopedia of Marxism is a reference guide to Marxism, the working class, and proletarian revolution in the world. It contains definitions of Marxist terms, short biographies and historical material. The encyclopedia provides the following elements to the whole archive:

  • Glossary of terms.
  • Brief biographies.
  • Events and organizations.

The "Encyclopedia of Marxism Bylaws" states that regarding definitions, "Marxist analysis is used to put together and present the facts in a way which allows the reader to surmise the significance of the facts, without imposing interpretation."

[edit] Multi-lingual archives

The MIA aims to provide an archive of Marxist works in many languages. As of mid-January, 2006, the MIA provides content in 45 languages. 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.

[edit] References

  1. ^ History of MIA
  2. ^ Attack Log
  3. ^ Noam Cohen, "Online Marxist archive blames China for electronic attacks", International Herald Tribune, February 5, 2007.
  4. ^ Bylaws of MIA
  5. ^ Correspondence with IRS
  6. ^ MIA Charter
  7. ^ a b c Mirrors page
  8. ^ How to set up a mirror of marxists.org
  9. ^ Marxists.org on DVD

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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