Quiz: Karl Marx

All 30 questions. A perfect score earns the gold medal; 80% earns silver.

1. 1. What does the education of the future combine, according to Marx as quoted by Lenin?

   Military drill with civic instruction Religious and secular instruction Classical languages with the natural sciences Productive labour with instruction and gymnastics
2. 2. In the 1859 preface, what determines men’s consciousness?

   Their social being Their individual will Their religion The ideas of great men
3. 3. How, according to Engels as quoted by Lenin, should socialists bring small peasants to co-operative production?

   By expropriating them with fair compensation from the state By example and social assistance, not by force By expropriating them at once, without compensation By taxing private farming gradually out of existence
4. 4. Where will society put the machinery of state, in the words of Engels that Lenin quotes?

   Into the Museum of Antiquities, by the spinning wheel and the bronze axe Into the hands of an elected parliament answerable to the whole nation Under the control of the trade unions and the workers’ co-operatives Into a federation of free communes, each administering its own affairs
5. 5. Which three intellectual currents did Marx continue and complete, according to Lenin?

   French philosophy, German political economy and English socialism Darwinism, positivism and anarchism Greek philosophy, Roman law and Christian ethics German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism
6. 6. According to Lenin’s preface, what did the encyclopaedia’s editors cut from the article?

   The section on dialectics The summary of the third volume of Capital on rent The biography of Marx The end, setting out Marx’s revolutionary tactics
7. 7. What does Lenin say is impossible without taking account of all Engels’s works?

   To refute the marginalist economists of Austria To translate Marx’s works correctly into Russian To understand Marxism as a whole To publish a complete edition of Marx’s works
8. 8. What, according to Lenin, does the democratic republic do to the class character of the state?

   It reverses it in favour of the workers It abolishes it entirely It only changes its form It makes the state neutral between classes
9. 9. What did Marx’s work on the Rheinische Zeitung show him, according to Lenin?

   That the Prussian government could be reformed That philosophy was useless That he did not know enough political economy That he should return to the law, like his father
10. 10. How did Engels describe the effect of Feuerbach’s books on the Left Hegelians?

    “We read them only years later, in exile” “We thought them a step back towards Kant” “We rejected them at once as idealism” “We all became at once Feuerbachians”
11. 11. What does Engels call “the great basic question of all philosophy”?

    The limits of language The existence of God and the soul’s immortality The nature of the good life and of happiness The relation of thinking to being
12. 12. What does Lenin call the chief material foundation for the coming of socialism?

    The socialisation of labour The spread of universal suffrage The education of the workers by socialist parties The growth of consumer co-operatives
13. 13. Where did Marx settle after being expelled from Paris in 1849?

    Geneva New York London Brussels
14. 14. How did Marx describe the Paris Communards in his letter to Kugelmann?

    As Bonapartist provocateurs As “storming heaven” As followers of Proudhon As petty-bourgeois dreamers
15. 15. What did Marx write to Engels about twenty years in great historical developments?

    That a revolution needs twenty years of preparation That they are as a day, yet some days hold twenty years That a generation must pass before workers can rule That no real change is possible in so short a time
16. 16. Which party did Marx support in Poland in 1848?

    The party of the agrarian revolution The party seeking Polish autonomy under the Tsar and his viceroy The party of the great Polish landowners and the nobility No Polish party at all, since Poland lacked a proletariat
17. 17. On what subject was Marx’s university dissertation?

    The economics of Adam Smith The philosophy of Epicurus Hegel’s logic The history of Roman law
18. 18. What did Marx write in 1856 that the German proletarian revolution would need?

    A victory in parliament first Backing by some second edition of the Peasant War An alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie of the towns Support from the Russian peasantry
19. 19. Which work of Marx does Lenin quote on the economic struggle and the workers’ combinations?

    The Critique of the Gotha Programme The Poverty of Philosophy The Civil War in France The Eighteenth Brumaire
20. 20. What, in the passage from Capital that Lenin quotes, does modern industry create by drawing women and children into production?

    The final dissolution of all family ties and duties A permanent and natural division of labour between the sexes A return to the old patriarchal household and its ways A basis for a higher form of the family
21. 21. To measure the degree of exploitation, with what does Marx compare surplus value?

    The price of the product The constant capital only The whole capital advanced The variable capital
22. 22. How does Lenin define the state in the section on socialism?

    As organised violence born of irreconcilable classes As a natural institution as old as humanity As the expression of the general will of the whole nation As a neutral arbiter standing above all classes
23. 23. How does Lenin picture development as dialectics understands it?

    As pure chance As an endless cycle returning to the same point In spirals, not in a straight line As a straight line of steady progress
24. 24. For which organisation did Marx and Engels draw up the Communist Manifesto?

    The Communist League The League of the Just’s Paris section The International Working Men’s Association The German Social-Democratic Party
25. 25. What did Marx arrange after the Hague Congress of 1872?

    The transfer of the General Council to New York The founding of a Second International in London A new congress in Paris The readmission of Bakunin and the expelled anarchists
26. 26. Which of these was not among the shortcomings of the “old” materialism listed by Lenin?

    That it understood the human essence abstractly That it denied the existence of matter That it was unhistorical and undialectical That it was predominantly mechanical
27. 27. Which historians of the French Restoration, according to Lenin, recognised the class struggle as the key to French history?

    Michelet, Taine, Renan and Lamartine Ranke, Mommsen and Treitschke Thierry, Guizot, Mignet and Thiers Gibbon, Hume and Macaulay
28. 28. Which kind of rent, according to Marx as summarised by Lenin, could be abolished under capitalism by nationalising the land?

    Rent paid in kind Differential rent Absolute rent Feudal labour rent
29. 29. Which nation did Engels call the most bourgeois of all, aiming at a bourgeois proletariat beside the bourgeoisie?

    The Germans The English nation The Americans The French
30. 30. From what, according to Lenin, does Marx deduce the inevitability of socialism?

    The moral demands of justice and human equality The example of the utopian communities in America The economic law of motion of society The teachings of the French Revolution and Rousseau