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.

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