Quiz: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

10 questions drawn at random. Score 80% for a silver medal.

1. 1. By what is labour measured, as motion is measured by time?

   Money wages Physical effort Quantity of output Labour-time
2. 2. What did Gladstone remark in the debate on Peel’s Bank Act?

   The love of money is the root of all evil, in the City of London as in the Gospel Gold alone is true wealth, and paper is only a promise to pay it Paper money is a fraud upon the public, however well the Bank manages it Not even love has made so many fools of men as pondering over the nature of money
3. 3. Which American controversy does Stone say makes the book timely?

   Prohibition The federal income tax of 1894 The tariff on imported wool and woollens The recent silver agitation
4. 4. Whom does Marx call “the first Briton who elaborated the general system of bourgeois economics”?

   Thomas Mun Sir William Temple Sir James Steuart David Hume
5. 5. From which edition did N. I. Stone make his 1904 translation?

   A manuscript copy kept by Engels in London The first Berlin edition of 1859, with Engels’s later corrections The French translation, checked against the German The second German edition, edited by Karl Kautsky in 1897
6. 6. Which two writers does Marx name in connection with the quantity theory of money, Hume being the most important?

   Smith and Ricardo Berkeley and Mandeville Mill and Malthus Montesquieu and Hume
7. 7. What twofold aspect does every commodity have?

   Price and cost of production Use value and exchange value Quality and quantity only Supply and demand on the market
8. 8. Of which system does Marx call the mercantile system “but a variation”?

   The physiocratic system The modern credit system The old feudal system The monetary system
9. 9. In what order did Marx plan to examine bourgeois economy, according to the 1859 preface?

   Money, credit, banking, trade, crises and the national debt Capital, landed property, wage labour; state, foreign trade, world market Production, distribution, exchange and consumption, in that order Value, price, profit
10. 10. How does Marx explain the eternal charm of Greek art?

    It was religious art, and its charm comes from the gods it still makes us believe in The Greeks were “normal children”; mankind’s childhood charms as an age never to return It was produced by slave labour, which freed the citizens to devote their whole lives to beauty It used finer materials and techniques that modern industry can no longer reproduce