50 Fun Facts About Karl Marx

With whom did Karl Marx co-write The Communist Manifesto in 1848?

The two met in a Paris café in August 1844 and stayed collaborators for life.

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

Only the first volume appeared in his lifetime; Engels edited the other two from his manuscripts.

In which city was Marx born in 1818?

The house on Brückengasse is now a museum; the family also owned Moselle vineyards.

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

Her sister married Lion Philips, grandmother of Gerard and Anton Philips; Karl often borrowed money from Lion in his years of exile.

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

Prussia had abrogated Jewish emancipation after annexing the Rhineland in 1815; Karl was baptised a Lutheran in 1824.

At which university did young Marx co-lead a tavern drinking society and fight a duel?

His grades collapsed and his father transferred him to the more serious University of Berlin.

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

He submitted it there because it was more liberal than Berlin, where his conservative professors disliked the work.

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

She was a member of the petty nobility who broke off an engagement to an aristocrat to be with him; he dedicated his thesis to her father.

Which German philosopher's dialectical method most influenced Marx as a student in Berlin?

His radical young followers used the dialectic to attack established society, politics and religion from the left.

Marx first made his name at which radical Cologne newspaper, banned in 1843 after Tsar Nicholas I complained?

He complained that every issue had to be presented 'to the police to be sniffed at'.

Marx's famous line that religion is 'the opium of the people' comes from which 1844 essay?

The full sentence calls religion 'the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world'.

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

Engels showed him The Condition of the Working Class in England, convincing Marx the workers would be the agents of revolution.

Marx's most quoted thesis says 'philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it'. Which number is it?

The eleven Theses on Feuerbach of 1845 marked his break with Feuerbach's materialism.

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

The title was chosen partly to slip the manuscript past government censors.

The 1848 Manifesto was the programme of which newly reorganised political society?

The League had to drop its underground ways and appeal openly to the working class.

On what date was The Communist Manifesto first published?

Weeks later the Revolutions of 1848 swept Europe, and Marx was expelled from Belgium.

How does the Communist Manifesto famously open?

The other rallying cry closes it; the class-struggle line opens the first chapter.

What was Marx accused of doing with his inheritance in 1848, getting him expelled from Belgium?

The truth of the allegation is disputed, but the Belgian Ministry of Justice acted on it.

Which Cologne daily did Marx edit in 1848-49, 'a simple dictatorship by Marx' per Engels?

He financed it with his inheritance and was tried several times, always acquitted, before being expelled in May 1849.

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

The party headquarters moved there too; his family lived in deep poverty in Soho.

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

Founded by Horace Greeley, it cost two cents and had the widest circulation in the United States.

What earlier event does the 'Brumaire' in Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon allude to?

The essay explored class struggle, historical materialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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

By 1857 he had over 800 pages of notes that only appeared in print in 1939.

What is the name of Marx's 800 pages of economic notebooks from 1857-58, unpublished until 1939?

The full title translates as Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy.

In which year was the first volume of Marx's magnum opus on capital published?

Marx delivered the manuscript to Otto Meissner in Hamburg in April and it appeared in September.

The first foreign translation of Marx's magnum opus appeared in 1872 in which language, its censors deeming it harmless?

Most of the 3,000-copy print run sold out within a year.

Volumes II and III of Marx's magnum opus were published posthumously in which two years?

Engels did the editing; Theories of Surplus Value, drawn from the 1861-63 manuscripts, is often called the fourth volume.

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

He argued that the driving force of capital is the exploitation of labour.

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

Known as the First International, it declined after its seat moved to New York in 1872.

Which anarchist led the faction Marx battled inside the First International?

Marx won, but at the cost of the International's decline.

Marx's pamphlet The Civil War in France defended which 1871 uprising?

The citizens of Paris held the city for two months before a bloody suppression.

'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' appears in which late Marx work?

Written in 1875, it attacked his followers' compromise with the state socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle.

How many of Marx and Jenny's seven children survived to adulthood?

Poverty in exile took a heavy toll; the survivors were daughters Jenny, Laura and Eleanor.

What nickname did Marx's friends give him because of his dark complexion and black curly hair?

He called Engels 'General' and encouraged his children to call him 'Old Nick' and 'Charley'.

Marx's long-serving housekeeper, whom he nicknamed 'Lenchen', was called what?

A 1962 claim that Marx fathered her son Freddy remains disputed for lack of evidence.

Marx died on 14 March 1883 of what?

He died a stateless person aged 64, an abscess on his lung making things worse.

In which cemetery is Marx buried?

He was buried in the eastern section, in an area reserved for agnostics and atheists.

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

Designed by Laurence Bradshaw, it has been vandalised and twice bombed in the 1970s.

Which words, the last of the Communist Manifesto, are inscribed on the front of Marx's tomb?

The tomb is a Grade I listed building.

Marx's youngest daughter, known as Tussy, poisoned herself in 1898 after discovering what?

Eleanor Marx was 43 and was buried beside her father.

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

His wealthy industrialist father's money later kept the Marx family afloat in exile.

Marx's early Berlin circle, gathered around Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, was known as what?

Marx and Bauer once scandalised a town by getting drunk, laughing in church and galloping through the streets on donkeys.

Marx and Engels's The German Ideology was not published until which year?

Even its satirical form did not save it from the censors of the 1840s.

Marx says the sources of Marxism were British political economy, French utopian socialism and what?

All the major components were in place in his mind by the autumn of 1844.

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

Soviet sculptor Lev Kerbel's monument was unveiled before 250,000 people in 1971.

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

The 1727 baroque house went unnoticed until 1904.

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

He and Engels nonetheless rejected Darwin's Malthusian idea of competition as a mirror of bourgeois society.

Marx's wife Jenny died in December of which year, fifteen months before her husband?

Born in Salzwedel in 1814, she was a theatre critic and political activist in her own right.

What was the only piece of Marx's early fiction, a short novel written by 1837, called?

He also wrote a drama, Oulanem, and love poems to Jenny; none was published in his lifetime.

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

Later in life he was plagued by what he called 'the wretchedness of existence' of ill health.