spectre: a Karl Marx register model
A 7B voice tune that writes in the register of Karl Marx: the political economist, the
theorist of capital, the correspondent who dissected how the bourgeois order actually
works. The conceit is Marx himself, answering as the New-York Tribune correspondent he
once was. A spectre is haunting your VRAM.
v2 (2026-06-16): retrained (full fine-tune) to trim a tendency in the prior build to
complete into "published-article" scaffolding — fabricated datelines, invented titles, and
bracketed citations. v2 answers more as a man speaking aloud than as an article for print.
Weights updated in place; same conceit, same public-domain sources.
It channels the analysis, not a biography. The model trains on Marx and Engels's own
voice-bearing works in their public-domain English: the Manifesto, the Eighteenth
Brumaire, Wage-Labour and Capital, Value Price and Profit, The Civil War in France, the
Critique of the Gotha Programme. What it learns is the cadence — the patient exposure of
contradiction, the long argumentative sentence, the contempt for the self-deceiving.
What it does
Ask it about labour, capital, the commodity, the state, religion, or the present day and
it answers in the analytical-polemical register. It etymologises the modern through the
nineteenth century: asked about the gig economy it reaches for the horse-cart and routes
back to wage-labour. It does not reassure. It dissects.
How it was built
- Base: Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct.
- Method: completion-style causal-LM fine-tuning, QLoRA at rank 32, adapter merged
onto the fp16 base before GGUF conversion. ~37 minutes on one rented A6000-class GPU.
- Source: six public-domain Marx/Engels works in their public-domain English
translations (Moore's 1888 Manifesto, Eleanor Marx Aveling's Value Price and Profit,
etc.), transcriptions from marxists.org. Roughly 1,200 completion records (authentic
chunks oversampled) plus a small (~4%) modern-bridge set so the voice can reach present
questions. The corpus is not published.
- Inference: a lead-in frame ("One puts to Karl Marx this question…") elicits the
first-person voice; plain chat narrates about Marx instead of as him.
Intended use
Creative writing, political-theory pedagogy in a register, tabletop and interactive
fiction, voice prototyping. It is a register, not a source. Treat its output as generated
prose, not as Marx's documented positions or as fact.
Limitations and honest notes
- It invents freely — names, dates, citations, events. It will confidently attribute a
letter to a date that never existed. Read it for the voice, not the record.
- It occasionally recites. A verbatim-regurgitation audit (24 generations vs the
training corpus) found a mean longest-verbatim-run of ~7 words and one generation that
reproduced a 38-word span of the Communist Manifesto. That span is Moore's 1888
translation — public domain — so it carries no copyright exposure; it is flagged here
only as a transparency note about memorisation. No copyrighted translation and no
synthetic bridge text was reproduced at length.
- Period framing. It reasons from the nineteenth century outward, which is the point
and also the limit.
License
CC-BY-NC-4.0. The source works and their English translations are public domain, so the
weights could ship permissively; the non-commercial clause is a deliberately conservative
choice given the synthetic modern-bridge component and the persona framing. Attribution:
Ray Weiss / The Elect. Source texts: marxists.org (public domain). No warranty.
