A librarian for Marxist texts · served over MCP

They argued by name.
This library keeps both sides.

A curated, provenance-tracked librarian over the Marxists Internet Archive. It answers with cited, bounded passages — and it tells you whose voice you are quoting, and whose translation.

25sources

8topics

4polemic edges

1847–1939coverage

What it is

A map, not a search box.

Bernstein said socialism would arrive by reform. Luxemburg answered him in 1900. Kautsky said the dictatorship of the proletariat meant democratic majority rule; Lenin replied in a book that named Kautsky in its title. This archive holds every one of those texts, and the arguments between them are dated, named, and traceable.

So this is not a semantic search over a pile of documents. Questions route to a curated topic map that states who disagreed with whom, what the charge was, and which passage carries it. Where a reply exists, the server hands it to you unprompted — including when you are mid-quotation of the other side.

Retrieval only. The server returns the map, the files, the search hits and the cited passages. Your assistant composes the answer, and everything it claims can be checked against a passage this server will resolve or refuse.

Why a general-purpose model gets this wrong

Three things this archive does to you.

The translator is part of the claim

“Marx said X”, where X is English, is a claim about a translator. This library’s Lenin was translated collectively by Soviet state publishers — so an argument about his wording is an argument about a state-produced translation. The translation record is never empty, and it distinguishes what the archive recorded from what this library supplied.

Four voices, identical typography

A page interleaves the author, later annotators — Engels writing inside Marx’s text forty years on — publisher apparatus, and the archive’s own transcribers, with nothing visual to separate them. Every citation carries a computed voice. Where the markup does not establish who wrote a note, it says so rather than guessing.

Archived is not endorsed

The archive keeps Stalin-era official history. This library holds it as an artifact: authoritative evidence of what that account asserted, and not evidence of what happened. It comes back in its own array, with different fields, so it cannot be read as one more side of the debate.

The shelves · eight topics, twenty-five sources

Curated question by question.

Each topic is a disagreement map with its gaps stated. A topic that holds only one side of an argument says so, in the response, before you read a word of it.

6 sourcesReform or revolution — Bernstein, Luxemburg, Kautsky
6 sourcesThe state — the 1918 Kautsky–Lenin exchange
5 sourcesMarxism and anarchism — one side only, and it says so
3 sourcesImperialism — policy, or a stage?
3 sourcesWhat went wrong in Russia — two critics, one artifact
3 sourcesWomen and Marxism — Engels, Zetkin, Kollontai
2 sourcesParty and class — Lenin 1901, Luxemburg 1904
2 sourcesValue and exploitation — expository, not contested

The reading desk · seven tools

What your assistant can do.

orient	The rules, the routes, the corpus counts — and which guarantees hold regardless of who is calling.
route_question	A question to its topic file, its sources, its artifacts, and the polemics between them.
sources	The annotated index: author, date, tier, tendency, topics.
search	Capped and explicitly non-exhaustive. A zero hit returns the coverage, not a void.
read	A whole topic map. Never a source text — those are reached only through citation.
cite	The verbatim passage, or an error. Returns a paste-ready citation with voice and translator attached.
check_answer	Resolves every quotation in a draft before it is sent. Deterministic, free, no model.

A citation that will not resolve is an error, never an invented passage — and when a locator misses, the server hands back the nearest real text, because a wording that “isn’t there” is usually a different translation of something that is.

Connect your assistant

Two transports, no dependencies.

Claude Code, over stdio — add to .mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "marxist": {
      "command": "python3",
      "args": ["/path/to/marxist-mcp/server/mcp_server.py"]
    }
  }
}

Or run the HTTP transport and connect by URL:

just serve-http 8080
curl -s localhost:8080/healthz

Full instructions, including Claude Desktop, are in docs/clients.md.

What it will not do

Stated, not buried.

It is small on purpose. Twenty-five curated works against an archive of many thousands. A miss here says nothing about what the archive holds, and the server says so rather than letting a failed search become an absence.
Coverage stops in 1939 and is overwhelmingly European. Nothing on decolonisation or dependency theory. Capital itself is not held.
One topic holds one side. The Marx–Bakunin material is Marx’s and Engels’s throughout, some of it written to win a live organisational fight. The route says so before it lists a source.
It cannot catch a misleading frame. A verbatim quotation inside a sentence that reverses its sense passes every check here. That one is yours.

They argued by name.This library keeps both sides.