Marxists Internet Archive

MARXISTS INTERNET ARCHIVE. An all-volunteer internet archive with a vast trove of information, Marxist.org links to the scans of a remarkable number of socialist and communist periodicals from the United States and abroad. This archive complements assorted archives of the Left emphasizing particular traditions, for example, Trotskyist history. The archive’s contents, largely international in character, have no special emphasis upon the United States.

The origins of the Marxists Internet Archive traces to the era of the East Bloc collapse, coinciding with the creation of a functioning, public-access Internet. Styling herself or himself “Zodiac,” a lone researcher devoted much of 1993 to scanning texts, above all the texts relating to Marx and Engels. Martha Gimenez, described as an “ascii-graphic artist,” memorably joined the effort, gathering materials at csf.colorado.edu.

Researcher David Walters assumed responsibility for leading the Leon Trotsky archive in 1996, and Mike Lepore took up a similar role in the Daniel De Leon archive around the same time, joined by Robert Bills, leader of the vanishing but not quite extinct Socialist Labor Party. Determined work on the marginal SLP and its maximum leader, De Leon, pointedly reminded scholars that interest in the pre-1910 history of American socialism had not entirely disappeared. Internal conflicts among the volunteer researchers, meanwhile, prompted the formal creation of the Marxists Internet Archive (marxist.org) in 1998. Four years later, in 2002, Zodiac gave up the domain name and what had come to be called the Marxist Internet Archive assumed its place.

The website has come to cover materials in eighty languages, thanks to the work of literally thousands of volunteers. A notable conflict ensued with Lawrence & Wishart, the historic British firm in control of the Marx and Engels archive but also deeply pressed financially and for that reason newly insistent on charging for the use of the archive. To settle the dispute, marxist.org removed the relevant materials from its website. Much of the public discussion around marxism.org dates to this controversy.

The actual scanning of Marxist periodicals, including those described or cited in the Encyclopedia of the American Left, has continued in a nearly random fashion, often according to which originals happen to be available to individual volunteers, and perhaps just as often as a matter of personal interest. Tim Davenport, a key figure in the ongoing, multivolume Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs, has been important in this effort. Libraries and other institutions have also joined, although a growing percentage of scanned materials demand institutional affiliations such as J-STOR for usage.