[Reader-list] Taking Marx away

[Asit Das]

Taking Marx away

A British company is attempting to get works by Marx and Engels removed
from the Marxists Internet Archive, writes Scott McLemee in an article for
Crooked Timber<http://crookedtimber.org/2014/04/24/karlo-marx-and-fredrich-engels-came-to-the-checkout-at-the-7-11/>
.
 April 28, 2014

[image: The Marxists Internet Archive at marxists.org]The Marxists Internet
Archive at marxists.org

THE MARXISTS Internet Archive <http://www.marxists.org/> is a vast and
growing resource, run entirely by donated labor, and as poly-lingual as
circumstances permit. (Do they have Trotsky in Tagalog? Indeed they
do<https://www.marxists.org/tagalog/trotsky/index.htm>
.)

Recently, a notice appeared in the Archive's Facebook group, and also on
its home page, saying that Lawrence & Wishart's lawyers are demanding the
removal of material from the *Marx-Engels Collected Works* (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."

Responding to Lawrence & Wishart's demand in a suitable manner would
require someone with Marx's or Engels's knack for invective and scatology,
and I'm not even going to try. But the idea that most of their work is
going to be removed from the website on May Day is just grotesque.

Chances are the archive volunteers never contacted the press before putting
the material up because they assumed, reasonably enough, that an edition
prepared largely if not entirely with the support of old-fashioned,
Soviet-era Moscow gold was not anybody's private intellectual
property--that the works of Marx and Engels now belong to the commons. They
just want people to be able to read Marx and Engels.
  What you can do

Sign an online petition<http://www.change.org/petitions/lawrence-wishart-no-copyright-for-marx-engels-collected-works>asking
Lawrence & Wishart to take back its decision to demand the removal
of works by Marx and Engels from the Marxists Internet Archive.

Contact Lawrence & Wishart directly by e-mailing Managing Editor Sally
Davison <sally at lwbooks.co.uk>; Finance Director Avis
Greenaway<avis at lwbooks.co.uk>;
and Promotions Director Katharine Harris <Katharine at lwbooks.co.uk>. Convey
your opinion by phone by calling Lawrence & Wishart's offices in London at
44 020 8533 2506.

Somehow it has not occurred to Lawrence & Wishart that, by enlarging the
pool of people aware of and reading the *Collected Works*, the archive is
actually expanding the audience (and potential market) for Lawrence &
Wishart's books, including the somewhat pricey MECW volumes themselves,
available only in hardback at $25-50 per volume.

I'm stressing the bottom line here, given that the press's decision is
rational only on the narrowest conception of it. But a piece of
synchronicity involving another Crooked Timber author underscores just how
much the left can learn from, of all things, the sectarian right.

About the time the Marxists Internet Archive announced that it would be
taking down all the MECW material, Corey Robin and I both, by coincidence,
were availing ourselves of radically underpriced materials from the enemy's
publishing apparatus. He'd received an order containing dirt-cheap copies
of Bastiat from the Liberty Fund, while a day earlier, I had downloaded
free digital editions of the major Austrian School books on theory of value
and the socialist-calculation debate from the Mises Institute website.
There's more to neoliberal hegemony than loss-leader pricing, but as
ideological combatants those people know what they're doing.

Lawrence & Wishart is now a private publishing company, but it claims
historical connections with Britain's Communist Party. If it still
considers itself a socialist institution, its treatment of the Archive is
uncomradely at best, and arguably much worse--while if the press is now
purely a capitalist enterprise, its behavior is merely stupid. I hope some
of you will get in touch with the press to say that, or something else
appropriate.

*First published at Crooked Timber
<http://crookedtimber.org/2014/04/24/karlo-marx-and-fredrich-engels-came-to-the-checkout-at-the-7-11/>*
.