Quiz: The Poverty of Philosophy

All 35 questions. A perfect score earns the gold medal; 80% earns silver.

1. 1. What happens to the labour of individual workers in the automatic workshop?

   It is performed almost entirely by children under ten It becomes artistic, as the machine frees the worker’s hands Each worker’s labour becomes highly skilled and specialised One worker’s labour is scarcely distinguishable from another’s
2. 2. Which economist does Marx quote to show that the opposition of use-value and exchange-value was already known before Proudhon?

   Sismondi Bastiat Say Malthus
3. 3. Which of Proudhon’s works does Marx call “very much his best”?

   The General Idea of the Revolution The Philosophy of Poverty The Federal Principle What is Property?
4. 4. In England, with which political party does Marx say the trade unions are linked?

   The Chartists The Tory Radicals The Anti-Corn Law League The Whigs of Lord John Russell
5. 5. What are economic categories, according to Marx?

   Eternal laws of nature, holding true independently of any historical society Arbitrary inventions of economists to justify the existing order of property Theoretical expressions, abstractions, of social relations of production Ideas existing in impersonal reason before society itself
6. 6. Which of Proudhon’s books does Marx condemn for coquetting with Louis Bonaparte?

   His book on the 1851 Coup d’Etat Economic Contradictions Justice in the Revolution What is Property?
7. 7. What does Marx say about the division of labour and the tools used?

   Tools have nothing to do with the division of labour in a society The windmill implies a different division of labour from the steam mill Division of labour was invented by Smith The division of labour has been the same in every age since antiquity
8. 8. When did Marx write the book, according to Engels’s 1884 preface?

   In the autumn of 1867 In the summer of 1871 In the winter of 1846–7 In the spring of 1859
9. 9. To what formula does Marx say Proudhon reduces Hegel’s dialectic?

   Quantity, quality and measure Being, nothing and becoming Subject, object and spirit Thesis, antithesis and synthesis
10. 10. How many observations on Proudhon’s method does Marx give in chapter II?

    Twelve Seven Fifteen Eleven
11. 11. With which words, from George Sand, does the book end?

    “La propriété, c’est le vol” “Le combat ou la mort; la lutte sanguinaire ou le néant” “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” “Après nous le déluge”
12. 12. By whom had the theory of labour money been systematically developed before Rodbertus, according to Engels?

    Proudhon Weitling Owen John Gray
13. 13. What “double end” does Marx say workers’ combination always has?

    Winning votes for workers’ candidates and seats in the national legislature Raising wages for the members and lowering the price of their necessities Training apprentices and insuring the members against sickness To end workers’ competition, so they can compete jointly against the capitalist
14. 14. What does the mass of workers become in the course of struggle, according to Marx?

    A class for itself A religious community A party of property A nation
15. 15. When, according to Marx, will social evolutions cease to be political revolutions?

    Only when there are no longer classes or class antagonism When universal suffrage is won and the democratic republic secured Never When the workers have won a majority in the national parliament
16. 16. What “double error” about Proudhon does Marx’s brief preface protest against?

    French think him a German philosopher; Germans think him a French economist He is thought both a devout Catholic and a militant atheist He is thought both rich and poor He is taken both for a socialist and for a Manchester liberal
17. 17. How does Marx say Proudhon’s book presents itself?

    Not as an ordinary book but as a Bible, full of mysteries As a political pamphlet addressed to the workers of Paris As a statistical report on the condition of French workers As a philosophical novel about the contradictions of society
18. 18. According to the passage Marx cites, what was the main difficulty of the automatic factory?

    Raising sufficient capital to build and equip the large mills Selling the products in markets already glutted by handicraft goods Finding enough coal and water-power to keep the machinery running Training men to factory discipline, not inventing the machinery
19. 19. Before which body did Marx deliver the speech on free trade printed as Appendix III?

    The Democratic Association of Brussels, 1848 The Communist League in 1847 The International in London, 1864 The Frankfurt Assembly in 1848
20. 20. Who made the first English translation of The Poverty of Philosophy (1900)?

    Ernest Untermann Samuel Moore Harry Quelch Daniel De Leon
21. 21. Complete Marx’s phrase about labour in modern industry: “Time is everything, man is …”

    a machine free everything too nothing
22. 22. How does Marx sum up Proudhon at the end of the section on method?

    A great revolutionary, the theorist of the proletariat’s emancipation A conservative aristocrat, longing for the feudal order He is only the petty bourgeois, tossed between capital and labour A proletarian thinker, speaking for the workers against all capital
23. 23. What does Quelch say Marx did not foresee about the great English trade unions?

    That they would disappear within a generation That they would become revolutionary bodies That they would become fossilised That they would be banned by Parliament
24. 24. When was Marx’s article “Proudhon Judged by Karl Marx” written?

    March 18, 1871 October 3, 1847 July 28, 1864 January 24, 1865
25. 25. What is the determination of value by labour-time, applied to labour itself, according to Marx?

    A purely utopian idea, borrowed from the English socialists The formula of justice, giving the worker his full product The formula of the worker’s modern slavery, not his emancipation The law of the future society, once exchange is made equal
26. 26. What does Marx call the latest phase of exchange, when even virtue, love and conscience are sold?

    The era of barter The time of general corruption, universal venality The golden age of trade The age of reason and enlightened self-interest
27. 27. What name does Proudhon give his personified society, as Marx mocks?

    Adam Prometheus Hercules Leviathan
28. 28. What does Marx say he did to Proudhon in their long discussions of 1844?

    Introduced him to Feuerbach’s philosophy, which he soon abandoned Converted him to communism, which he later abandoned in favour of mutualism Taught him English, so that he could read Ricardo and the English economists “Infected him with Hegelianism”, to his great harm, as he knew no German
29. 29. Complete: “The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill …”

    society with the state society without classes society with the free citizen society with the industrial capitalist
30. 30. Against whom, according to Proudhon as Marx quotes, must competition be defended?

    Against the state and its monopolies and privileges Against those who would replace it by emulation Against the trade unions Against the landlords
31. 31. Against which charge does Engels’s 1884 preface mostly defend Marx?

    That he misquoted Ricardo’s figures That he plagiarised Proudhon’s own ideas That he was a Hegelian That he plagiarised Rodbertus
32. 32. What does Marx say Proudhon does not know, when he claims that abolishing competition contradicts human nature?

    That human nature is fixed, and competition is only one of its expressions That history has no direction, and human nature remains the same in every age That competition is natural, and only its excesses need to be abolished That all history is but a continual transformation of human nature
33. 33. What were Proudhon’s last economic “discoveries”, according to Marx?

    “Free Credit” and the “People’s Bank” Labour money and the national workshops A single tax on ground-rent, collected by the state Compulsory arbitration of wages by the state
34. 34. What does Marx say about direct slavery in relation to bourgeois industry?

    It exists only in antiquity and has no place in modern economy It has no connection with it, being a relic of feudal agriculture It is the pivot of bourgeois industry, like machinery It was abolished by it, since free labour is always cheaper
35. 35. Which English communist’s book on labour does Engels cite as an earlier “socialist application” of Ricardo’s value theory?

    Hodgskin’s Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital Owen’s Book of the New Moral World Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice Bray’s Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy