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I was radicalized over a decade ago but, sadly, spent most of my time down the dead-end of anarchism and cultural critique. Assessing Lenin's work on its own merits is what made me have a personal crisis of politics because I found that there there was no way for me to rebut the arguments he made, not for want of trying on my part. Then I spent a lot of time going back over the anarchist historiographical orthodoxy (Catalonia, Makhnovia, Stalin being a big power-hungry and purge-happy meanie etc.) and general dogma that I absorbed. I came to realize that I was fed bullshit and that, in many respects, actually-existing anarchism was *at least* as "authoritarian" as so-called "authoritarian socialism" if not more so, even going purely by authors who are sympathetic to anarchism (Voline, Bolloten, Michael Seidman etc.)
So I'm fairly new to studying MLism due to that reason and due to some really challenging personal circumstances that have made it really difficult for me to absorb theory. It's been about 2 years since the upheaval in my personal politics. I've also gotten involved in party work and organizing which has taken up a lot of my time and I can't say that it's regrettable, especially after spending a lot of time as an online anarchist who achieved virtually nothing to speak of.
Sadly I'm only fluent in English.
I am requesting an account because I would be interested in assessing the practical viability of scraping the Marxist Internet Archive to help stage a soft coup of their website that appears to be stuck in time and which is not only run by either Trots or LeftComs but which has a really hostile user experience.
One of the things that has motivated me to start on this is noticing that the MIA uses the edited, post-20th Congress revisionist versions of Georgi Dimitrov's speeches and articles. I found the original stuff which was only available to view on the Internet Archive and manually ripped each image then compiled it into an ebook and uploaded it to LibGen the other day to make it more widely available. (I'm still in the process of learning how to use OCR tools to create an epub of the work.) The book can be found here: https://www.libgen.is/search.php?req=dimitrov+selected+speeches+and+articles&open=0&res=25&view=simple&phrase=1&column=def
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I'm determined and I have a passion for archiving written works, especially ones that are inaccessible for whatever reason.