49 Fun Facts About Karl Marx

In the Communist Manifesto, which class owns the means of production and employs wage earners?

The bourgeoisie, the Manifesto argues, builds modern industry and so produces, above all, its own grave-diggers: the class of wage earners that will overthrow it.

What is the title of Marx's multi-volume critique of political economy, his magnum opus?

Das Kapital: after its first volume came out in 1867, Engels himself wrote reviews of the book in an effort to drum up publicity for it.

In which city was Marx born in 1818?

Trier, on the Moselle, was given a bronze statue of Marx by the Chinese government in 2018 to mark 200 years since his birth there.

Marx's mother came from a Dutch Jewish family that later founded which famous company?

Philips Electronics was founded in 1891 by the son and grandson of Marx's uncle Lion Philips, who in 1861 gave his hard-up nephew £160.

Why did Marx's father Heinrich convert from Judaism to Christianity?

To keep his career as a lawyer: Prussian law barred Jews from the profession, so Heinrich was baptised even though his own father and brother were both rabbis.

At which university did Marx co-lead a tavern drinking society and take part in a duel?

Bonn: after that rowdy year, Marx's father insisted he move to the more serious University of Berlin.

Which university awarded Marx his doctorate in 1841 for a thesis on Democritus and Epicurus?

Jena granted it in absentia on 15 April 1841: Marx sent his thesis to the more liberal Jena rather than Berlin, where conservative professors were hostile.

Whom did Marx marry in 1843, seven years after their engagement?

Jenny von Westphalen, whose elder half-brother Ferdinand went on to serve as Prussia's hardline conservative Interior Minister from 1850 to 1858.

In his early writings, what does Marx call the condition of workers cut off from what they produce?

Alienation, Marx argued, leaves the worker all the poorer the more wealth he produces, because what he makes confronts him as an alien, independent power.

Marx first made his name editing which radical Cologne newspaper?

The Rheinische Zeitung was banned by the Prussian government in 1843; Marx resigned as editor that March, but the paper was shut down at the end of the month anyway.

Which essay calls religion 'the opium of the people'?

Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: it ran in its journal's first and only issue, after which Prussia branded the journal high treason and ordered Marx arrested if he crossed the border.

In which Paris café did Marx and Engels begin their lifelong friendship on 28 August 1844?

The Café de la Régence, a famous chess café, hosted their second meeting; the first, in Cologne in 1842, had been cool, as Marx took Engels for an ally of his rivals.

Philosophers have only interpreted the world; what is the point, said Marx?

Change it: Marx never published his Theses on Feuerbach, where the line appears; they first saw print in 1888, when Engels added them as an appendix to a pamphlet of his own.

Marx's 1847 book The Poverty of Philosophy replied to which French thinker's The Philosophy of Poverty?

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Marx wrote his reply in French so it would hit its target more squarely.

Marx drafted a letter congratulating which US president on his re-election?

Abraham Lincoln: the president sent a reply through Charles Francis Adams, his minister to Britain, accepting the address's sentiments.

In January 1848, what did Marx's comrades send him over the still-unfinished Manifesto?

An ultimatum: hand the manuscript in by 1 February or face measures. The pressure spurred him on, and the pamphlet came off the press in late February 1848.

How does the Communist Manifesto famously open?

'A spectre is haunting Europe': because politicians everywhere branded their rivals communists, the preamble argues, it was high time communists openly published their own views.

What was Marx said to have spent part of a fresh inheritance on, just before Belgium expelled him in 1848?

Daggers and revolvers, his wife later recalled; days later Belgium ordered Marx out within 24 hours, and police held both him and his wife.

When Prussia ordered Marx out in May 1849, how was the final issue of his Cologne daily printed?

Entirely in red ink: that final 'red issue' of 19 May 1849 carried a defiant farewell article in which Marx laid into the government fiercely.

In which city did Marx settle in 1849 and live for the rest of his life?

London: the family lived in cramped Soho rooms on Dean Street until 1856, when money his wife inherited from her mother let them move to a house near Hampstead Heath.

Which American newspaper employed Marx as its European correspondent from 1852 to 1862?

The New-York Daily Tribune paid Marx as its correspondent, but Engels quietly wrote a share of the articles that the paper printed under Marx's name.

What does the 'Eighteenth Brumaire' in the title of Marx's 1852 essay refer to?

Bonaparte's seizure of power in 1799: Marx cast the nephew's 1851 coup as its repeat, history appearing the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Where did Marx do much of the research for his major economic work?

The reading room of the British Museum: its vast store of material on the history of economics was one reason, Marx wrote, that he started his studies again from the very beginning.

What name is given to Marx's seven economic notebooks of 1857–58, first published in Moscow in 1939–41?

Grundrisse: Marx wrote these notebooks at a frantic pace during the Panic of 1857, hoping the crisis would bring revolution; it passed without one.

In April 1867, Marx took his magnum opus's first volume to a publisher in which city?

Hamburg, to the publisher Otto Meissner; Marx then spent a month as his friend Ludwig Kugelmann's guest in Hanover while he waited for the first proofs.

The first foreign translation of Marx's magnum opus appeared in 1872 in which language?

Russian: the censor ruled the book harmless and let it through, yet its 3,000-copy printing sold briskly.

According to Marx, what is the ultimate source of surplus value under capitalism?

The unpaid work of labour: even when a wage pays the full value of labour-power, Marx argued, the worker keeps working after earning it back, and those extra hours create surplus value.

Marx sat on the General Council of which body from its founding in 1864?

The International Workingmen's Association: Marx sat silent on the platform at its founding meeting, yet his drafts of its Inaugural Address and rules beat rival ones.

Which anarchist did the 1872 Hague Congress expel after years of clashes with Marx?

Mikhail Bakunin had known Marx since 1844, but they split over the state, which Bakunin wanted swept away rather than taken over by workers.

Marx's pamphlet The Civil War in France defended which uprising?

The Paris Commune proved, Marx argued, that workers cannot simply take over the ready-made machinery of the state, and he and Engels later wrote that lesson into a new preface to the Manifesto.

'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs' comes from which Marx work?

Critique of the Gotha Programme: Marx sent it privately to the party's leaders, yet the unity congress adopted the programme he savaged with only minor changes.

Laura Marx married which French socialist in 1868?

Paul Lafargue: the peculiar French 'Marxism' he championed drew Marx's remark to him that, if anything was certain, he himself was not a Marxist.

Which nickname did Marx's family and friends use for him?

Moor: when Marx's wife died, Engels remarked 'The Moor is dead too', and Marx outlived her by little more than a year.

Which housekeeper, sent by Marx's mother-in-law in 1845, stayed with the Marx household until his death?

Helene Demuth: Engels later declared that Marx had sought her counsel on tricky party matters and even on his economic writings.

Marx died on 14 March 1883 of what?

Bronchitis and pleurisy: in 1882 doctors sent Marx to Algeria for a rest cure, but his health never recovered.

In which cemetery is Marx buried?

Highgate Cemetery: in his graveside speech, Engels said the greatest living thinker had ceased to think after being left alone in his chair for barely two minutes.

The monumental tomb over Marx's grave, unveiled in 1956, was funded by whom?

The Communist Party of Great Britain paid for the tomb, which has since been bombed, painted with swastikas and, in 2019, attacked with a hammer.

In a Victorian parlour-game questionnaire, what did Marx give as his idea of happiness?

To fight, Marx answered in 1865; when Engels filled in the same questionnaire in 1868, his idea of happiness was 'Château Margaux 1848'.

Eleanor Marx took poison in 1898 after discovering what?

Her partner had secretly married someone else: Edward Aveling had wed an actress, and Eleanor sent her maid to the chemist for prussic acid.

Engels was sent by his father in 1842 to work in a cotton mill in which English city?

Manchester: Mary Burns, an Irish woman Engels began a relationship with there, is thought to have guided him through the city's slums.

How did Marx's jury trial in February 1849 end?

Acquitted: the jury's foreman even thanked Marx for the instructive speech he made in his own defence.

Marx left the unpublished German Ideology to the 'gnawing criticism' of what?

Mice: Marx said he and Engels gave the manuscript up all the more willingly because it had already served its main purpose, self-clarification; it was published in full only in 1932.

With Prussia pressing Belgium to expel him, what did Marx do on 1 December 1845?

Renounced his Prussian citizenship: Marx never took up any other nationality, and he died a stateless person in 1883.

Which East German city, once Karl-Marx-Stadt, has a 7-metre bronze Marx head, the 'Nischel'?

Chemnitz: when the city took back its old name in 1990, proposals to pull down the giant Marx head set off a heated civic debate, and the Nischel stayed.

Which German political party acquired Marx's birthplace in 1928 and turned it into a museum?

The SPD: it bought the house after it was identified as Marx's birthplace in 1904, but the Nazis confiscated the building in 1933.

How did Marx react to Darwin's On the Origin of Species?

With approval, for its challenge to teleology, though Marx also remarked wryly that Darwin had found, among beasts and plants, his own English society with its competition.

Marx's wife died in December 1881 after years of pain from which illness?

Liver cancer: in summer 1881, though already ill with it, she still made the journey to France to visit family.

What was the short comic novel that Marx wrote as a Berlin student by 1837 called?

Scorpion and Felix: Marx soon decided that poetry and fiction could be no more than a sideline, and turned to law and, above all, philosophy.

Marx was excused from Prussian military service at 18 because of what?

A 'weak chest' was the finding of the 1836 medical board that excused the 18-year-old from service; carbuncles, liver trouble and insomnia dogged him for the rest of his life.