Marxists Internet Archive
Screenshot of Marxists.org as of March 27, 2009
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Type of site
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Internet encyclopedia project |
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| Available in | Multi-lingual (45 languages) |
| Website | https://www.marxists.org/ |
| Alexa rank |
 30,742 (April 2014[update]) |
| Commercial | No |
| Launched | 1990 1993 (gopher site) |
Marxists Internet Archive (also known as MIA or Marxists.org) is a non-profit website that hosts a multilingual library (created in 1990) of the works of Marxist, communist, socialist, and anarchist writers, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Che Guevara, Mikhail Bakunin, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, as well as that of writers of related ideologies, and even unrelated ones (for instance, Sun Tzu and Adam Smith). 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 site in 1993. It contains over 53,000 documents from over 600 authors in 61 languages.
The archive was created in 1990 by a person—known only by his 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.
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.
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