Early in his career, Karl Marx addressed the central conundrum of the working writer: “The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.”A writer’s works, he declared, “are ends in themselves; so little are they a means either for himself or for others that, if necessary, he sacrifices his own existence to their existence.” As Marx grew older, though, his financial position became more fraught. In his struggle to support his growing family, he not only pawned the family’s linens and borrowed funds from his collaborator Friedrich Engels but also began writing for money, at the New-York Daily Tribune.

Marx died in 1883. Last month, the problem he described reappeared in digital form. The volunteers who manage the Marxists Internet Archive, a free online repository of Marxist writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, received a letter from Lawrence & Wishart, a London publishing house, asking them to remove several hundred early texts by Marx and Engels from their site. Lawrence & Wishart has partial ownership of the rights to the only complete English translation of the Marx & Engels Collected Works, a set of fifty volumes representing a thirty-year effort by translators. The copyright is shared with International Publishers, based in New York, and a long-defunct Soviet publishing house called Progress Press.

For nine years, Lawrence & Wishart allowed the Marxists Internet Archive to host the copyrighted material alongside thousands of other translated texts by Marx and Engels, many of which are in the public domain. But the company recently began preparing a digital edition of the fifty-volume set for university libraries. (The e-book price has yet to be determined; a print version costs about fifteen hundred dollars.)

After the Archive received the request from Lawrence & Wishart, volunteers posted it to their Facebook page. “That caused a huge shit storm, so to speak,” David Walters, one of the site’s co-founders, told me. “L. & W. kicked the hornet’s nest and sat on it.”

After the Facebook post, writers from all over the progressive Internet expressed outrage. The Center for a Stateless Society asked, “With ‘Socialists’ Like Lawrence and Wishart, Who Needs Capitalists?” A Change.org petition appeared, lamenting the irony of a private publishing house claiming ownership over “the collected works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the philosophers who wrote against the monopoly of capitalism and its origin, private property, all their lives.” As of Monday, the petition had more than five thousand signatures. Several sites unaffiliated with the Archive began hosting the digitized texts in defiance of the publisher’s copyright claims. On April 25th, Lawrence & Wishart posted a response of its own to this “campaign of online abuse,” arguing that the inflamed rhetoric was a perversion of Marx’s concept of the capitalist mode of production. The Archive responded with a missive of its own, written by Walters, which, in turn, prompted yet another response from Lawrence & Wishart.

The legality of these claims is not in question. Both sides agree that Lawrence & Wishart is within its legal rights, and the Archive has already removed the offending material. (It’s not the first time its volunteers have conceded to a takedown notice, Walters told me.) For committed leftists and bemused observers, what is at stake is whether the Marxist publishing house behaved in an “uncomradely” way.

When I asked Sally Davison, Lawrence & Wishart’s managing editor, what she thought of the kerfuffle, she gave an exasperated laugh and said, “It’s hard to say, since I’m so absolutely sure that I’m right!” In her view, Lawrence & Wishart is hardly the capitalist oppressor many writers have made it out to be; she describes the company as a small, radical house with just four workers (two full-time, two part-time) who deserve compensation for their labor. “We don’t actually live in a socialist utopia,” she told me. “We have to make a living. To expect people on the left to play by different rules to their own detriment is to ask us to commit institutional suicide.”

According to Davison, the removed works comprise early letters, articles, and other ephemera of no interest to general readers. “There’s so much Marx that’s available in the public domain,” she said. “The idea that the international revolutionary movement is deprived by not having complete access to an academic fifty-volume version of Marx and Engels is, well, daft.” A search through the updated Archives confirms that English versions of all of the most famous—and many less famous—works by Marx and Engels are still available. David Walters, the Archive’s co-founder, is unswayed by this argument. “If you want to learn about Marxism, you can’t just read the ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ ” he told me. “We want to have all the stuff up that went into their methodology.”

Walters and Davison agreed that, as long as we live in a capitalist society, intellectual-property law is an important tool for protecting workers from exploitation. (Walters cited Ray Charles, one of the first musicians to demand ownership of his master tapes.) Part of their disagreement arises over whether Davison and her co-workers should be counted among those laborers who have contributed value to the Collected Works (like Ray Charles’s strings arranger, for instance), or whether they should be considered owners (like a recording company) who are exploiting the labor of Marx, Engels, and their translators. Walters argued that “very few people at L. & W. were involved in 1970,” when the translation efforts began, and thus the new sales effort “is not about getting the money to the translators.” Davison countered that, contrary to Walters’s claims, Lawrence & Wishart has not yet recovered the cost of producing the series, the final edition of which appeared only in 2004. Besides, she said, much of the revenue they make from the Collected Works is spent on publishing new books, some of which are available for free on the Lawrence & Wishart Web site.

Still, in light of the criticism, Davison said her publishing house might try to grant access to the Collected Works to certain non-institutional libraries, under an agreement that would not interfere with its ability to sell the collection to universities. “Everything we produce, we have a little think about what we can give away for nothing,” Davison said. “If we gave away everything, we wouldn’t be here anymore.”

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