Marxists Internet Archive

• 1. Introduction

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  The Marxists Internet Archive began in 1990 with a single person typing the Communist Manifesto into plain text. Nobody knew who they were. They went only by an Internet handle, Zodiac, and their project started as little more than a personal effort to make radical political texts available on a medium that barely existed yet. Three decades later, the archive at marxists.org holds over 180,000 documents, spans 80 languages, and has been selected for preservation by the British Library and the US Library of Congress. How a solitary typist working under a pseudonym built one of the largest political libraries in the world, why it nearly collapsed twice in its first decade, and why a small British publisher's copyright claim in 2014 sparked an international petition with more than four thousand signatures are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Zodiac and the First Archive

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  Zodiac's method was simple and painstaking: take printed texts by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and key them into electronic form. By 1993 the accumulated files were posted on a gopher site at csf.Colorado.edu, one of the older Internet protocols for organizing and distributing text. Volunteers spotted the collection and began joining, mirroring the archive across academic servers so that copies existed in multiple places. That redundancy turned out to matter. By the end of 1995 nearly every academic host had shut down its copy, and the archive's survival was suddenly in question. A commercial Internet service provider stepped in to host Marx.org by 1996, which brought a new wave of volunteer energy. But the arrangement also sharpened a tension that had been building quietly inside the project.

• 3. The 1998 Split

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  Zodiac retained legal control of Marx.org and its domain name even as dozens of volunteers took on the actual work of transcribing and organizing texts. As the archive expanded to include writers beyond Marx and Engels, Zodiac grew alarmed. He described the broader scope as a "slippery slope" toward sectarianism, believing that pulling in diverse currents of Marxism would compromise the project's focus. The volunteers, who had contributed enormous labour with little say in how the archive was run, disagreed. In early 1998 Zodiac announced that Marx.org would return to its original purpose: all writers except Marx and Engels would be removed. The volunteers did not accept this. In July 1998 they transferred the files and archives to a new domain, marxists.org, and the Marxists Internet Archive was born in its present form. Zodiac closed Marx.org the following year, and in 2002 he gave up the domain name entirely; the MIA purchased it. The archive can now also be reached at two additional addresses, lenin.org and trotsky.org.

• 4. Denial-of-Service Attacks

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  Beginning in November 2006, a sustained wave of denial-of-service attacks hit the Marxists Internet Archive. The attackers exploited a misconfiguration in the archive's server operating system, hammering the site until, by January 2007, much of it had been crippled and volunteers were dealing with severe CPU overload. Investigators noticed that the majority of systems involved in the attack were based in China or belonged to Chinese institutions. That observation prompted speculation about political motivation, particularly given that the website had been blocked in China in 2005. The attacks were severe enough that the main server and several mirrors were forced offline for weeks in February and March 2007. The episode underlined how vulnerable a volunteer-run archive can be, and it pushed the MIA to rethink its hosting arrangements.

• 5. The Lawrence and Wishart Dispute

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  In late April 2014, the small British publishers Lawrence and Wishart wrote to the Marxists Internet Archive demanding that it delete their English-language edition of the Marx/Engels Collected Works from the site by the end of that month, or face litigation. L&W held copyright over that specific translation, and Andy Blunden, speaking for the MIA, acknowledged the legal position: the archive did not dispute the copyright. What Blunden contested was the practical consequence. He was quoted in the Washington D.C.-based Chronicle of Higher Education saying that while professors and historians could still write learned articles about what Marx said, ordinary readers would effectively be sent back to 1975, the year the Collected Works publication began. An online petition drafted by Ammar Aziz gathered more than 4,500 signatures before the month was out. Aziz was quoted in Vice magazine arguing that the writings were the collective property of the people Marx and Engels wrote for, and that claiming copyright over them was like trademarking the words socialism or communism. Lawrence and Wishart responded to the backlash by issuing a statement objecting to what they called a campaign of online abuse.

• 6. Structure and Governance

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  The MIA is incorporated in California and registered with the US tax service as a 501(c)(3) non-profit. No one is paid; administrators are volunteers who take on extra responsibilities for particular sections of the archive. A steering committee composed of all active volunteers makes collective decisions on categorization, bylaw changes (which require a three-quarters majority), and financial matters. The MIA's charter commits it to offering all material free of charge, while still observing copyright law. Material falls into one of three categories: public domain, GNU Free Documentation License, or works used with the permission of copyright holders. Anything created by MIA volunteers falls under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. The website is primarily served through an Internet service provider in Germany, with mirrors in France, Germany, and the United States.

• 7. Scale, Distribution, and Publishing

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  By 2014 the archive had grown to include 62 volunteers working across 33 countries, covering more than 600 authors in 54 languages and holding over 50,000 items. The collection is uneven across languages by design and by circumstance: some non-English sections contain only a handful of documents by Marx and Engels, while the Chinese section holds the complete collected works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. For years the archive sold a three-disc CD/DVD volume and distributed many copies free to individuals and groups in developing countries. By March 2014 the archive had grown to 138 gigabytes, at which point the DVD format was discontinued in favour of a portable USB hard drive. That too has since been discontinued. In 2008 the MIA launched Marxist Internet Archive Publications, which has published eight titles covering philosophy, social history, Soviet psychology and pedagogy, and a collection of writings by the Peruvian theorist Jose Carlos Mariategui, distributed through Erythros Press and Media, LLC. The archive is listed in the OCLC WorldCat catalog and has been selected for preservation by institutions including University College Cork in Ireland.