Marxists Internet Archive

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.

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 Marx 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.

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 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. 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.



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 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.

Physical location and mirrors
The website is primarily served from a server in California, and five mirrors exist, two of them in the USA (Texas, and Virginia), two in Europe (France, and Germany), and one in Australia. In addition, there is a mirror of the MIA's Spanish-language Section in the US Southwest (Arizona).

Distribution
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, 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."

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 philosophy, social history, and Soviet psychology and pedagogy, which it distributes through Erythrós Press.

Archival structure
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.

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.