archive.marxists.xyz Anonymous 21-09-21 21:37:10 No. 7066
Hello /edu/! /read/ (
>>5912 ) here to announce a new project to you. It's
https://archive.marxists.xyz . It's a new public archive of Marxist texts and books, where anyone can edit and format texts.
We're running what is essentially the Marxist counterpart to The Anarchist Library, same software and all. There are a few advantages this software provides us over a traditional site like marxists.org:
>uses a database for storing data, easier to maintain over time >texts are formatted in a simple markup language, adding new texts is incredibly easy >site automatically generates various formats of ebooks for use on different devices or even printing >advanced search and browsing function and best of all, it's public, so anyone can contribute! Whether adding new translations or just fixing a typo on an already published piece, anyone can help!
The goal of the archive is to be a public place anyone can use to publish Marxist literature in a general sense, whether republished content from other sources, or new translations and original writings. We try to be non-sectarian, as our community itself is diverse. We'll let most classic works be published right away, but original pieces will require a closer look by moderation.
We've already published a few different pieces so you can see for yourself how it all works. For example this one: archive.marxists.xyz/library/friedrich-engels-principles-of-communism
We'd love to have contributions from you! We also invite the translation team at
>>2085 to publish their work on our site.
That is all for now, thank you.
Anonymous 21-09-21 23:00:30 No. 7073
Oh, something else I should mention. If you would like to get in contact with us, the easiest way is through the /read/ Matrix rooms. The link to our main chat room is:
https://matrix.to/#/#leftyread:matrix.org . Alternatively, you can join our Matrix Space to see all rooms:
https://matrix.to/#/#leftyreadmain:matrix.org Anonymous 22-09-21 12:19:12 No. 7086
>>7083 Because marxists.org is a hot mess of a website. Have you looked through the site's source? I have (I once downloaded about 70Gb from a total of ~270Gb) and it's a real mess. Each section of the website adheres to slightly different formatting standards, and the website as a whole relies on 90s-style plain HTML for navigation. There is no easy way to browse texts by tags, authors or other advanced means, because the site is static and that means some poor guy has to manually write out every single navigation page. Another issue with MIA is its lack of good ebooks. Every ebook added needs to be manually compiled. You can't even write scripts to convert the HTML books into epubs because each book is formatted slightly differently from the next, and thus you would have to manually convert all of them. This lack of standardization is also the reasons MIA hasn't moved on from its 90s style despite all the requests: it's not (as they claim) that the old style doesn't affect usability, but simply that at this point the site is too large for a complete rewrite (perhaps using some modern website engine) to be doable.
Consider the process of adding a text to MIA. First, you go to the Contact section, in order to find the right email address you should talk to in regards to your text. You need to go through language and author sections until you find the right guy. Then you email this person, and hope they reply in time (they likely won't). Then they'll give you guidelines to format a text for their section. Then you format the text in archaic 90s style HTML that isn't nearly as readable as a modern website. Wanna add an ebook you've generated too? Do it all over, this time contacting the guy responsible for ebooks. It's just too bureaucratic. This is why even the most popular texts on MIA have typos and translation errors: nobody wants to contribute to something so difficult.
On marxists.xyz, however, none of this applies. The contribution process goes like this: you click the Add Text button, format the text in a simple, modern markup language, and wait for a janny to revise it. Once the text has been let through, the site will automatically generate ebooks for it, and let it be accessible from the archive where you can browse by tags, categories, etc. All this in a modern and easy to use site. We made the site precisely because relying on marxists.org for our reading groups was getting tiresome. It's why, for now, we've mostly only republished texts already available on MIA; on marxists.xyz texts are much more readable and you get high quality ebooks as a bonus.
That said, if we get contributions of new translations and rare works, we might be sending them upstream to marxists.org simply because that's a website likely to last much longer than ours.
>>7084 >What about stuff that marxists.org doesn't host? Yes! That's our ultimate goal, really. Become a platform to which anyone can easily add texts not easily available anywhere else. As of right now we've mostly just republished content from MIA, but I'm working on adding some academic papers and blog articles as well. We're not limited to being a "slightly more useable clone of marxists.org"
If you can typeset it, sure. We'll take anything.
Anonymous 22-09-21 14:56:05 No. 7235
>>7087 >Lawrence & Wishart, who hold the copyright for the Marx Engels Collected Works, have directed Marxists Internet Archive to delete all texts originating from MECW. Accordingly, from 30th April 2014, no material from MECW is available from marxists.org. English translations of Marx and Engels from other sources will continue to be available.
>>7088 This is for reading books online, like on marxists.org and theanarchistlibrary.org, I am well aware that libgen exists…
Anonymous 22-09-21 15:24:10 No. 7242
>>7066 What texts do you think we should prioritise uploading? I think we should upload the texts that are most often shared, so stuff like the communist manifesto, State and Rev etc. The stuff most people link to when they're sending a Marxists.org link to a beginner.
Having the important works up first would help adoption of marxists.xyz in my opinion.
Anonymous 22-09-21 15:48:23 No. 7244
>>7090 Downloading what exactly? You can download the texts in various formats, yes. Open any one of them and you'll see the options you have, from PDF to epub to XeLaTeX or Amuse format. I believe it is also possible for third parties to clone the site's entire archive (since it's just a git repo in the background) but I do not fully understand how that would work yet. Hope that answers your question.
>>7235 The copyright did not affect mirrors of marxists.org such as marxists.architexturez.net. Still, most people are unaware of these mirrors, so maybe a new site could help adoption.
>>7242 Agree. I've been meaning to put the Manifesto up but works like Capital would take some serious effort. Not to mention the public domain translations are really not that good (and that's compared to Penguin, which is still pretty rough) so I'm not sure if its worth it. Join us in the Matrix chat, maybe we can organize an effort to divide the tasks of publishing these basic works. Right now we've received an influx of maoist works but I'd like to streamline things a bit at least for now.
Anonymous 24-09-21 03:33:04 No. 7269
>>7066 Ay, you should make the logo image smaller. Shit takes ages to load. 256px height should be more than enough.
Nice project btw
Anonymous 24-09-21 15:27:52 No. 7274
Hey. We see the mods have added a link to this thread in the announcement header. Thanks for the help!
That said, we are having a slight technical issue with the site, regarding multi-language support. After enabling multi-language support, the text listing now includes what's supposed to be a language tag after each title, but the problem is that the tags are empty regardless of how we set up languages. Picrel. This is probably caused by some janky ass programming in the software. We'll be fixing that shortly, and once fixed we can resume adding basic texts.
I thank everyone who's made a submission; we'll be revising and posting those as soon as the issue is fixed.
>>7269 Thanks for pointing that out. I will fix it as soon as possible.
>>7258 Sorry, I didn't mean to say the translation was crap. They're very valuable, just not perfect. A lot of inconsistencies in translation and so on. Maybe I'm just spoiled from reading MEGA-2 editions. I believe I've seen Michael Heinrich discuss this, specifically in regards to the Penguin edition, which seems to be considered the better english translation. Not sure about Aveling, I just get a general idea that academics prefer Fowkes to Aveling for a reason. We can organize an effort to include it once we've finished adding other basic works, that'd be cool.
Anonymous 28-09-21 17:30:44 No. 7510
Our edition of the Communist Manifesto is out!
Took the text and notes from the Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW), the prefaces from marxists.org + a notes, corrections and formatting queues from other physical editions.
Check it out, it's looking pretty good:
https://archive.marxists.xyz/library/karl-marx-and-friedrich-engels-manifesto-of-the-communist-party-en Anonymous 01-10-21 00:21:25 No. 7805
>>7066 Added Engels' On Authority to the archive
https://archive.marxists.xyz/library/friedrich-engels-on-authority-en since I had some free time
Gothakritik and Socialism: U&S are still being worked on
Anonymous 12-11-21 14:37:01 No. 8645
Critique of the Gotha Programme is out!
https://archive.marxists.xyz/library/karl-marx-critique-of-the-gotha-programme-en For this edition we made an appendix containing letters in which Engels discusses the text and its publication (some old editions, like the ones by Progress Publishers and Foreign Languages Press used to include this). All taken from the Marx-Engels Collected Works for the best quality.
Anonymous 12-11-21 17:07:56 No. 8652
>>8645 To accompany the reading of Marx's Critique, we have added the Gotha Program itself:
https://archive.marxists.xyz/library/socialist-workers-party-of-germany-the-gotha-programme-en That's the program as it was published after the Gotha Congress. Right now we have someone looking through german sources to see if they can find the original draft of the programme, which is the version Marx was responding to in his critique. Hope that turns out well and then we can add both versions, allowing for critical/comparative readings.
Anonymous 17-11-21 11:52:42 No. 8683
Added Marx's "Political Indifferentism", a companion piece to Engels's "On Authority".
https://archive.marxists.xyz/library/karl-marx-political-indifferentism-en We're currently working on Marx's "Wage Labour and Capital", "Value, Price and Profit" and "The Civil War in France".
Anonymous 20-11-21 01:07:22 No. 8709
>>8705 No problem. You can leave an email address in the text submission page if that would be a better medium for you. Or we can use this thread.
>>8707 Looks good but I would rather trust the MECW translation over any other. Attached is Volume 26, which contains "Origin of the Family…"
Anonymous 29-11-21 23:54:02 No. 8819
Added a couple more articles:
- Lenin's "The Youth International - A Review", in which he briefly discusses youth leagues and the role of the state in revolution. He would later return to this article when preparing to write State and Revolution.
- Lafargue's "Socialism and Nationalisation"
https://archive.marxists.xyz/library/vladimir-ilyich-lenin-the-youth-international-en https://archive.marxists.xyz/library/paul-lafargue-socialism-and-nationalisation-en Anonymous 27-12-21 01:13:16 No. 9094
>>9089 Well gosh look at you who just found something to do on their christmas break!
I expect the formatted work by wednesday.
Anonymous 04-01-22 13:51:19 No. 9242
First publications of 2022 are out:
>"The British Road to Revisionism", maoist article discussing the old CPGB programmes we published not too long ago and British communism in general >Joseph Ball's "Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward?", an article originally published in Monthly Review which for some reason has been wiped off their website. https://archive.marxists.xyz/library/pao-ching-ming-fifty-three-years-of-revolutionary-struggle-for-peace-land-and-bread-en https://archive.marxists.xyz/library/red-voice-media-the-british-road-to-revisionism-en https://archive.marxists.xyz/library/joseph-ball-did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward-en Thank you to the anons who submitted these!
Anonymous 25-04-22 11:51:40 No. 10457
>>10438 Typo fixed, thanks for pointing it out. That said, if you ever find a mistake in a text like this, you can edit it yourself. There's a button for that on the top header where the different file downloads are, simply click it, edit the text and submit it for moderation.
>>10439 Nothing very formal, just a quick look through texts as they get edited. We should probably get a proper spellchecking set up.
Glad you're making good use of the site anon.
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