Origins The archive was created in 1990 by a person known only by their 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
Internet service provider (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. 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. 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, Ireland's
University College Cork, and the US
Library of Congress.
2007 attacks MIA has had problems with malicious attacks from online sources. 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 since the website was shortly blocked in China in 2005. The severity 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.
Copyright issue on Marx/Engels collected works In late April 2014, the small British publishers
Lawrence & Wishart (L&W) chose to revoke their permission for their English language version of the
Marx/Engels Collected Works to be reprinted in part on MIA. In an email in late April 2014, L&W asked MIA to delete the contested material from their website by the end of April or face litigation. MIA chose to follow the request. An online petition was started against the L&W decision, and had the support of more than 4,500 people by the end of the month.
Andy Blunden, a representative of MIA, did not dispute that L&W has copyright over the material. He was quoted in the Washington D.C.–based
Chronicle of Higher Education: "The professors and the historians will be able to write learned articles about what Marx said, but the general population are going to be left back in 1975 [the year when the publication of the Collected Works began]". In response to widespread criticism, L&W issued a statement objecting to the "campaign of online abuse". == Structure ==