Karl Marx Trivia
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49 free Karl Marx trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Karl Marx spent his life being expelled from countries and his afterlife being quoted, and this quiz covers both. It starts in Trier with a lawyer father who converted to keep his job and a mother whose family founded Philips, follows the student through the Trier Tavern Club, a duel, Hegel and a doctorate from Jena, and then through radical journalism in Cologne, exile in Paris and Brussels, the meeting with Engels and the pamphlet that opens with a spectre. From there it covers the London decades: poverty in Soho, articles for the New-York Daily Tribune, the British Museum reading room, the Grundrisse and Das Kapital, the First International and Bakunin, the Paris Commune, the Gotha Programme, the nicknames, the housekeeper, the daughters, and the death of a stateless man in 1883, plus the tomb the British communists paid for and the giant head in Chemnitz. Easy questions suit anyone who has heard of the Manifesto; the expert tier asks about his teenage novel and his early newspapers. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Marx, his works, family and monuments, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the Communist Manifesto, which class owns the means of production and employs wage earners?
The bourgeoisie
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.
Q 02What is the title of Marx's multi-volume critique of political economy, his magnum opus?
Das Kapital
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.
Q 03In which city was Marx born in 1818?
Trier
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.
Q 04Marx's mother came from a Dutch Jewish family that later founded which famous company?
Philips Electronics
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.
Q 05Why did Marx's father Heinrich convert from Judaism to Christianity?
To keep his career as a lawyer
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.
Q 06At which university did Marx co-lead a tavern drinking society and take part in a duel?
Bonn
Bonn: after that rowdy year, Marx's father insisted he move to the more serious University of Berlin.
Q 07Which university awarded Marx his doctorate in 1841 for a thesis on Democritus and Epicurus?
Jena
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.
Q 08Whom did Marx marry in 1843, seven years after their engagement?
Jenny von Westphalen
Jenny von Westphalen, whose elder half-brother Ferdinand went on to serve as Prussia's hardline conservative Interior Minister from 1850 to 1858.
Q 09In his early writings, what does Marx call the condition of workers cut off from what they produce?
Alienation
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.
Q 10Marx first made his name editing which radical Cologne newspaper?
Rheinische Zeitung
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.
Q 11Which essay calls religion 'the opium of the people'?
Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
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.
Q 12In which Paris café did Marx and Engels begin their lifelong friendship on 28 August 1844?
Café de la Régence
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.
Q 13Philosophers have only interpreted the world; what is the point, said Marx?
Q 21Which American newspaper employed Marx as its European correspondent from 1852 to 1862?
New-York Daily Tribune
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.
Q 22What does the 'Eighteenth Brumaire' in the title of Marx's 1852 essay refer to?
Bonaparte's seizure of power in 1799
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.
Q 23Where did Marx do much of the research for his major economic work?
Change it
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.
Q 14Marx's 1847 book The Poverty of Philosophy replied to which French thinker's The Philosophy of Poverty?
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Marx wrote his reply in French so it would hit its target more squarely.
Q 15Marx drafted a letter congratulating which US president on his re-election?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln: the president sent a reply through Charles Francis Adams, his minister to Britain, accepting the address's sentiments.
Q 16In January 1848, what did Marx's comrades send him over the still-unfinished Manifesto?
An ultimatum
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.
Q 17How does the Communist Manifesto famously open?
'A spectre is haunting Europe'
'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.
Q 18What was Marx said to have spent part of a fresh inheritance on, just before Belgium expelled him in 1848?
Daggers and revolvers
Daggers and revolvers, his wife later recalled; days later Belgium ordered Marx out within 24 hours, and police held both him and his wife.
Q 19When Prussia ordered Marx out in May 1849, how was the final issue of his Cologne daily printed?
Entirely in red ink
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.
Q 20In which city did Marx settle in 1849 and live for the rest of his life?
London
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.
The reading room of the British Museum
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.
Q 24What name is given to Marx's seven economic notebooks of 1857–58, first published in Moscow in 1939–41?
Grundrisse
Grundrisse: Marx wrote these notebooks at a frantic pace during the Panic of 1857, hoping the crisis would bring revolution; it passed without one.
Q 25In April 1867, Marx took his magnum opus's first volume to a publisher in which city?
Hamburg
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.
Q 26The first foreign translation of Marx's magnum opus appeared in 1872 in which language?
Russian
Russian: the censor ruled the book harmless and let it through, yet its 3,000-copy printing sold briskly.
Q 27According to Marx, what is the ultimate source of surplus value under capitalism?
The unpaid work of labour
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.
Q 28Marx sat on the General Council of which body from its founding in 1864?
The International Workingmen's Association
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.
Q 29Which anarchist did the 1872 Hague Congress expel after years of clashes with Marx?
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin had known Marx since 1844, but they split over the state, which Bakunin wanted swept away rather than taken over by workers.
Q 30Marx's pamphlet The Civil War in France defended which uprising?
The Paris Commune
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.