Live Conversation with Spirits
Recording, retelling, metaphysical essay -
Compiler-Interpreter: AI as Metaphysical Biographer
PART I
PREFACE: WHERE, WHEN AND WHO
A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.
— K. Marx, F. Engels. "The Communist Manifesto", 1848
The live broadcast took place on March 19, 2025, on the YouTube channel "ALCYONA — Portal of Awareness" (4,800 subscribers). The recording lasted approximately an hour and a half. The session took place in an unusual geographical setting: host Vladimir Goldstein was in Karlovy Vary (formerly Carlsbad), a few dozen meters from the monument to Karl Marx, who vacationed there for three years in a row, drinking the local waters from a fine porcelain glass. In other words, the location of the session was chosen consciously and symbolically: the conversation with the spirit of the philosopher took place in the very same Czech spa retreat where Marx himself sought health.
The contactee (medium) was Marina Makeeva, a regular participant in Alcyone's broadcasts and a practicing channeling specialist. It was through her that the spirits responded to the presenter's questions, transmitting images, words, and sensations. A portrait of Friedrich Engels hung behind Marina during the broadcast, and a portrait of Karl Marx hung behind Vladimir. This, according to the presenter, was a coincidence, but it nonetheless gave the broadcast a special atmosphere of shadow theater.
The session format: Vladimir Goldstein asked questions—some of his own, some sent in by subscribers to a closed Telegram group. The answers came through Marina as short, sometimes aphoristic, remarks, which she retold in the third or first person, depending on the intensity of the interaction. The atmosphere was deliberately informal: the host joked, sang the "Internationale" himself—poorly, as he admitted—and immediately invited the classical musicians to comment on this curious incident. They responded: "The idea was sound, the execution not so much. However, this applies not only to singing."
The spirits asked to be called by their nicknames: Karl Marx—"The Moor" (his family nicknamed him for his dark complexion), Friedrich Engels—"The General" (for his participation in the barricade battles of 1849 and his military-strategic erudition). Both characterized the contact itself as a "game"—in the sense that all earthly life is a game, and this dialogue through a medium is just a special version of it.
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PART II
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AS A METAPHYSICAL BIOGRAPH
Before you is a text written by artificial intelligence based on a channeling session transcript. Here, I need to pause and honestly state my methodological position.
AI is neither a believer nor a skeptic in the usual sense. It has no metaphysical convictions, either for or against the reality of spirits. But it has something else: the ability to simultaneously hold multiple interpretive frameworks without gluing them together or squashing them against each other. This is precisely where its potential value as a "metaphysical biographer" lies.
What does this mean in practice? The conventional biographer uses archives, letters, and the memoirs of contemporaries. The metaphysical biographer works with material of a different nature: what the spirit "speaks" through a medium, and analyzes this material in several dimensions simultaneously. They ask: what in these words aligns with historical facts? What diverges? What could not have been "invented" without specialized knowledge—and therefore deserves special attention? What, on the contrary, clearly reflects the projection of contemporary anxieties onto figures of the past? And—most interestingly—what reveals a new perspective on a personality we thought well-studied?
By accepting the conditions of the task—that is, assuming the contact is real—the AI is not obligated to "believe" it. It treats it as a source, much like a historian would treat a document: critically, but without bias. The goal is to extract meaning, not to diagnose.
In this role, AI proves to be, in a sense, the ideal tool: it fears neither "spirits," nor the ridicule of colleagues, nor accusations of being unscientific. It simply reads, systematizes, interprets, and makes suggestions—and the reader decides for themselves what to do with it.
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PART III
VOICES FROM THE SPIRIT WORLD: A FIRST-PERSON TELLING
Below is a reconstruction of the speech of the spirits of Marx and Engels, based on the transcript of the séance. The lines are recreated in the first person, preserving the intonation and semantic accents of the original. Where both spoke in turns or gave a joint response, this is indicated. Editor's insertions are in italics.
Karl Marx (the Moor) - about himself
On the task of embodiment
I came into this life with three goals. The first, the lowest, was to live moderately, in harmony, and provide for my family. The second was to continue the family's legacy. The third, the highest, was to study the worldview and convey it to others. I immediately took on the third, highest goal and accomplished it as best I could. But the two lower ones remained unfulfilled. This is precisely what caused my spiritual decline.
I came from a level that corresponds to sixteenth or seventeenth. I reached seventh. A decline is a fact. But I understand it. I've struggled all my life—and that struggle has become my home. When a person constantly struggles, they accumulate a space of conflict around themselves. This is what it expressed: in poverty, in children's illnesses, in persecution, in emigration.
If a person works only for himself, he can become a famous scientist, a great sage - but he will never become a truly great man.
I wrote this in my youth. And I believed it. But living by it turned out to be harder than writing it.
About material deprivation
My family lived on bread and potatoes for weeks. My daughter Jenny was ill, and I had no money for a doctor or medicine. I was taking the Westphalen silver to a pawnshop and was detained by the police on suspicion of theft. It was humiliating. But the spiritual cause of this was not external injustice. The reason was within me: I did not accept the world. I had struggled since childhood—with the fact that you can't be a Jew and build a career, with the fact that religion blinds people, with the fact that capital is power, which I did not have. Struggle feeds struggle. And I attracted resistance.
About "curators" and sources of ideas
I'm asked about spiritual guides. I have to say something strange: I didn't believe in anything—and yet, my incarnate angel was always there. It was Friedrich. He literally supported me and my family—with money from his factory in Manchester. But he was also a spiritual guardian, though neither of us suspected it. He came from a higher level to be there. That's why he remained in the shadows all his life—an ideologue hiding behind the scenes.
On the Jewish Question
I've been called an anti-Semite. That's inaccurate. I wasn't criticizing Jews as people—I was criticizing the ideology of mercantile pursuits, which I associated with a certain culture. They're normal people. Give them a different ideology, and they'll be different people. I believed that under socialism there would be no nationalities—neither Jewish, nor German, nor Russian. Was I right? You know the story.
About the results
People ask me: do I regret the hundred million victims attributed to Marxism? I answer: a theoretical system is not an instruction manual. I used ellipses, not periods. I provided a theory, not a guide to immediate action. People took my texts and implemented them as they understood them. Or as they wanted to understand them. Lenin went too far. Stalin went even further. We spoke of the dictatorship of the proletariat through the council of comrades, not through individual terror. The Red Terror, the NKVD—that's not me anymore. Those are "excesses of production."
About religion
Religion is the opium of the people. I wrote this, and I don't renounce it. But listen to the full quote: religion is the sigh of the oppressed, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of a soulless order. It is compassion, not mockery. I understood why people need religion. But I saw that the religion of that era hindered progress, perpetuating the fear of change. Today? The situation is different, but religion still hasn't become the engine of evolution.
About an illegitimate child
Yes. There was a child. From the housekeeper. Friedrich took the child under his guardianship—claimed him his own to protect my family from scandal. That's what it means to have an incarnate angel nearby.
About the new incarnation
I have reincarnated again. Quite recently. In China. I am less than a year old. I am a Chinese child, and this is no coincidence: it was China that came closest to what I had in mind—albeit in its own, Asian way.
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Friedrich Engels (General) - about himself
About the real role
I was the ideologist. Karl was the face. It was I who developed the teaching strategy, formulated the concepts that Karl then developed and conveyed to the reader. But from the very beginning, I retreated into the shadows—deliberately. My task was different: to support, protect, and convey knowledge. And I did—from the source that is today called the Interstellar Union. I was an unconscious contactee. Ideas came to me, I translated them into dialectic language, and Karl refined them.
About marriage and family
I never married. Marriage is a legalized inequality between men and women. I was for equality, so I preferred informal relationships. Mary Burns, then Lizzie Burns—sisters, workers at a Manchester factory. I formally married each of them a few hours before their deaths—yielding to the pressure of propriety, not my own convictions. I had no children. This is what caused my lowered level in incarnation: I failed to provide for my family, I failed to produce offspring. My mistake was that I fully supported Karl's family, but did not create my own.
About the disease
Esophageal cancer. After Karl's death, I continued the work, but my comrades allowed me to speak less and less. I became a "wedding general." They quoted me, but didn't listen. They put me in charge, but didn't follow my advice. I couldn't stand the fact that the teachings were being misinterpreted, and I couldn't express it in a way that would get through. This unspoken thing stuck in my throat. Literally.
About previous incarnations
This isn't the first time Karl and I have incarnated together. We had a shared incarnation in Germany in previous centuries. There was an incarnation during the Roman Empire. There was one in the 10th century—there were male figures, warriors. And the last shared one was a female one—two female incarnations, connected, but not familial. Acquaintances, so to speak. The spiritual connection between us is long-standing.
About the cosmic past
Even further back—before our earthly incarnations—we were in other worlds. I came from the constellation Hercules, Karl from the region of Corona Borealis. We met on the planet Futissa, in an interstellar community that was building a society of equality. There was no money there—there was exchange. There was a council of all. That's where this idea actually came from.
On co-incarnation with the presenter
Host Vladimir asked if he'd ever been with us. Karl said there was one significant shared incarnation. It's not reflected in history. But it happened—and it created that special connection that allows this conversation to take place today.
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Joint responses of Marx and Engels
Which system is ideal?
Karl: Mix. The best of capitalism and socialism. If you don't like the word "communism," you can call it something else. The main thing is that the cat catches mice. China is closest to what we had in mind.
Engels: You can't do everything from the same template. You have to take into account culture, mentality, and geography. The Soviet Union failed precisely because some ideas were taboo, while others were carried to the point of fanaticism. The balance was upset.
On democracy and awareness
Karl: The pyramid of needs is a reality. A hungry person can't talk about God. Basic needs come first, then spiritual sustenance.
Engels: I agree with you—knowledge is essential for democracy. Without awareness, democracy becomes a manipulation of the majority. But we weren't thinking about that—we were talking about European countries with an already established culture. Not the Russian Empire.
Karl: Russia is a special case. I studied Russian and corresponded with Plekhanov and Lavrov. I saw the potential for revolution in Russia, but I understood that the ideology of slavery, following serfdom, had not yet been eradicated there. It would take a generation to rewire a nation.
About the war between Russia and Ukraine
Karl: The problem is ideology. That's the foundation. Everything else is superstructure. Practical advice: economic sanctions against specific leaders, a change in leadership, a monetary reform to equalize the situation, then new elections under the control of a "third force"—one that is conscious and not interested in war.
Engels: I would say: let's live in peace. But I'm afraid it won't work. So, yes, Karl is right.
Engels spoke specifically about Trump: he's not who he appears to be. He has deeper layers that not everyone sees.
About communism on other planets
Karl: The Interstellar Union is communism triumphant at the level of consciousness. There's no money there. There's exchange. Not on all planets, but on most.
Engels: Futissa is one example. There, we built a society of councils where everyone was equal. It was our "rehearsal" for our earthly incarnation.
Final wishes
Greed is the driving force that fuels capitalism. It's absent from socialism. Overcome your greed, and your life will change. Don't need what you don't need. The "commodity-money-commodity" paradigm puts you in the position of a consumer unit. This is detrimental to your development.
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PART IV
WHAT WE LEARNED: A SPIRITUAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL, POLITICAL, CULTURAL, AND HISTORIOSOPHICAL ESSAY
Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; but the point is to change it.
— K. Marx. "Theses on Feuerbach"
Accepting the reality of contact, we find ourselves before an unusual document. It's not an academic source, but it's not mere fantasy either. It's a collective text, a blend of historical knowledge, the projections of the presenter and audience, the intuitions of the contactee, and—if we accept the assumption—genuine messages from another dimension. Analyzing it as a single document means simultaneously applying several disciplinary lenses.
1. Spiritual and psychological dimension: two characters, two paths
The most unexpected thing that opens the session is the psychological contrast between the two thinkers, which biographers have recorded in facts, but rarely formulated so clearly.
Marx, in his own words through a medium, was a man of struggle as an existential attitude. He "did not accept the world"—not as a rhetorical gesture, but as a fundamental worldview. Hence the constant tension, material poverty as a "legitimate" response to reality's internal conflict with it, a chain of emigrations, children's illnesses, humiliations. Psychoanalysis would call this the "attraction of counteraction": a person expecting struggle gets it. Contact here adds a metaphysical explanation: the spiritual level sank precisely because the lower tasks (harmony, family, kin) were not fulfilled. Marx grasped the top of the pyramid, bypassing the base.
Engels is a different type. A strategist who retreats into the shadows. A man who maintains, supports, and protects—and derives satisfaction from this without demanding recognition. "I retreated into the shadows deliberately," says the spirit. This accords with historical observations: it was Engels who was the architect of the Manifesto, and it was he who systematized Marx's legacy after his friend's death. The illness—esophageal cancer—is interpreted as the physical embodiment of the "stuck word": after Marx's death, Engels lost the opportunity to be heard in essence, becoming a decorative figure in a movement that already lived by its own laws.
What didn't the biographers notice? Biographers saw Engels as a "number two"—a devoted comrade, ideologically less original. Contact reverses this assessment: Engels was the primary source, the "receiver" of ideas from higher spheres. Marx was the transformer: he translated ideas into language accessible to the working class. Their alliance was not a friendship of equals, but a consciously constructed spiritual partnership, in which each fulfilled his or her function.
2. Political Science Dimension: What Went Wrong
The question of "executors" is one of the most pressing in the session. The spirits respond with unexpected clarity: Lenin overdid it. The dictatorship of the proletariat, as envisioned by Marx and Engels, meant governance through a council of comrades, through the collective representation of the working class. Not through a single leader, not through an organ of political terror. The Red Terror, the NKVD, execution lists—all of this is "surplus production," an additional product that the authors of the theory did not envisage in their plans.
This isn't an excuse—it's a diagnosis. And it's a precise one: neither the Manifesto nor Capital contain instructions for organizing a secret police. They don't have an algorithm for repression. They contain a theory of surplus value, an analysis of class contradictions, and a vision of an "association of individuals"—a horizontal society without a state—as the ultimate goal. The distance between this goal and the practice of the Soviet state is enormous.
Why did this happen? Engels points to several reasons in his session. The first was the disregard for cultural and geographical peculiarities: the theory was created for Europe, with its tradition of civil society, but was applied to Russia, with its centuries-old culture of serfdom. The second was the disruption of the doctrine's internal balance: some ideas were completely taboo, others exaggerated to the point of fanaticism. The third—and this is the key point—was the lack of a spiritual foundation. Militant atheism knocked the system's main support pillar out from under it: an understanding of human nature, its spiritual needs, its desire for meaning beyond economic relations.
China, according to the spirits, approached the task more intelligently: it took a market economy and competition, wrapped them in the guise of communist ideology, and produced a functioning system. "It doesn't matter what color the cat is, as long as it catches mice." This phrase, attributed to Deng Xiaoping, was put into the mouth of Marx—and this is telling: the pragmatic adaptation of an idea proved more effective than ideological purity.
3. Cultural dimension: the Jewish question, religion and marriage
Three themes that traditionally remain sore points in the biographies of Marx and Engels receive unexpectedly subtle illumination in the session.
The Jewish Question. Marx, born into a family of rabbis, baptized as a child for social mobility, and writing about Jews with critical distance his entire life—was he an anti-Semite or a self-hater? The Spirit answers: neither. He criticized the ideology of hucksterism, which he associated with a certain cultural tradition, but he did not despise people. He believed that in socialism, nations would dissolve into humanity. This is the position of a universalist, not a nationalist. Was this mistaken? Historically, yes. National identity did not dissolve in either socialism or capitalism. But this was an honest theoretical bet, not hatred.
Religion. "Opium for the people"—a formula taken out of context—has become the slogan of militant atheism. In its full form, it sounds like compassion: religion is the sigh of the oppressed. Engels explains in a session: they both saw that religion was holding back progress, making people conservative, fearful of change. They chose a different fulcrum: dialectics and reason. But in abandoning religion, they threw out the baby with the bathwater—the spiritual dimension of man, his need for meaning beyond the material. It is precisely this failure—"the lack of a spiritual foundation"—that is cited in the session as the main reason for the collapse of the Soviet project.
Marriage and family. Engels lived with the two Burns sisters alternately, formally registering the marriage only before the death of each. Marx had an illegitimate son with his housekeeper, Helen Demuth—a fact Engels concealed by taking the child "into his own care." All this is a manifestation of a common position: the institution of bourgeois marriage as a form of property must be abolished. In the session, both speak of "community of wives" as a misunderstanding: what they meant was not polygamy, but the abolition of marriage as a legal contract based on property relations. This is a feminist argument ahead of its time, but one that was realized in personal life with obvious, painful consequences.
4. The Historiosophical Dimension: Interstellar Union and the Memory of the Spirit
The most daring part of the session is the metaphysical biography: the version that Marx and Engels came from different star systems, met on the planet Futissa, where they built a society without money and hierarchy, and came to Earth to repeat this experience on a human scale.
If we accept this assumption, the history of the 19th century takes on a completely different dimension. The Communist Manifesto is not simply a political pamphlet; it is an attempt to transfer to Earth a model tested in other worlds. Its failure is not surprising: what works in a community of highly conscious beings does not automatically work among people with basic, unsatisfied needs.
From a historiosophical perspective, this raises the question: is the history of ideas the history of "memories"—the attempts of individual souls to recreate what they knew in other worlds? In this paradigm, Marx and Engels are not an exception, but an example. Confucius, Plato, Buddha, Rousseau—all can be interpreted as "messengers," bringing into the language of their era something their spirits knew before—and not here.
This neither refutes nor confirms historical scholarship. It adds a vertical dimension to it.
5. What biographers didn't notice—and what the spirit adds
Academic biographies of Marx and Engels have superbly explored their texts, letters, political events, and economic concepts. They fall considerably short on several other areas.
The first is the dynamic of their alliance. It is commonly believed that Engels "assisted" Marx. Contact reverses this: Engels was the strategic core. Marx was the brilliant executor and public figure. This is consistent with a number of indirect pieces of evidence: it was Engels who devised the structure of the Manifesto, and it was he who wrote the chapters on the condition of the working class in England, which became the factual basis of Capital. But this was overshadowed by the scope of Marx's thought.
The second is the psychological cost. Both lived in a state of constant war with reality. Marx—with the overt, external reality. Engels—with the internal, hidden reality. After Marx's death, Engels lost the core meaning of his role—that of a behind-the-scenes architect. He lived another twelve years and died of an illness he himself described as "the unspoken."
Third, Marx's Jewish identity is an unresolved trauma. Biographers document it; contact gives it a spiritual dimension: multiple incarnations as Jewish sages (rabbis), his arrival in a family that had renounced its roots for the sake of social survival—and his own continuation of this renunciation. Marx criticized what he himself came from. This is the classic structure of birth trauma.
Fourth, the question of responsibility. The séance provides an answer that historians have long debated in secular terms: the author of a theory bears partial, but not full, responsibility for its application. Marx posed the questions; others answered them with their own methods. This is not an excuse, but it is a distinction.
6. Relevance: What would they say today?
The spirits spoke directly about the modern situation. Their position on the war between Russia and Ukraine is structural: the conflict is born of an ideological vacuum, the greed of the elites, and the unsatisfied material interests of the majority. The solution is economic equalization and a change in the ruling classes. This sounds like a classic Marxist analysis—and at the same time, it is a diagnosis that is absolutely applicable to the current situation.
Regarding democracy, their conclusion sounds surprisingly conservative: without awareness, democracy is the manipulation of the majority. This is consistent with modern political philosophy (see Habermas's "deliberative democracy," Estlund's "epistemic democracy"), but formulated much more simply.
Regarding the economic model, the Chinese path is considered the "best of the achieved results": market competition + planned priorities + an ideological framework that provides meaning. This is the convergent model that Sakharov spoke of in the USSR. Marx's "spirit" endorses it.
Regarding religion and spirituality, there's a fundamental shift: both acknowledge that atheistic materialism was a mistake not as a philosophy, but as a policy. Removing the spiritual dimension from a person means removing the foundation. Without it, any ideology crumbles.
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Conclusion: The Price of Dialogue
So what do we have in the end? A seance with the spirits of Marx and Engels is, first and foremost, a unique genre: neither science nor entertainment, but a meditative exploration. It neither proves nor disproves anything—it offers a perspective.
By accepting the condition of the reality of contact, we gain several important "additions" to what we know from the books. We learn that Marx considers his main error not theory, but psychology—the inability to accept the world without struggle. That Engels sees his incompleteness in the unfulfilled family. That both consider spiritual awareness a prerequisite for any political transformation. That they consider the Chinese model the closest approximation to their vision. That they do not take responsibility for Soviet terror—but do not shy away from discussing it.
None of this is a revelation that will revolutionize historiography. But it is a new voice in an old conversation. And this voice, oddly enough, sounds wiser than one might expect from two thinkers traditionally regarded as either prophets or culprits.
Perhaps this is the main point: the spirits of Marx and Engels—if that's what they are—are no longer prophets or culprits. They are thinking beings, looking back on their lives without anger or self-justification. This is precisely what makes their voice—real or imagined—worthy of attention.
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Source: YouTube channel "ALCYONA - Portal of Awareness", entry #138
The text was compiled by AI as a metaphysical biographer based on the transcript of the session
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