50 free Karl Marx trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01With whom did Karl Marx co-write The Communist Manifesto in 1848?
Friedrich Engels
The two met in a Paris café in August 1844 and stayed collaborators for life.
Q 02What is the title of Marx's multi-volume critique of political economy, his magnum opus?
Das Kapital
Only the first volume appeared in his lifetime; Engels edited the other two from his manuscripts.
Q 03In which city was Marx born in 1818?
Trier
The house on Brückengasse is now a museum; the family also owned Moselle vineyards.
Q 04Marx's mother came from a Dutch Jewish family that later founded which famous company?
Philips Electronics
Her sister married Lion Philips, grandmother of Gerard and Anton Philips; Karl often borrowed money from Lion in his years of exile.
Q 05Why did Marx's father Heinrich convert from Judaism to Christianity?
To keep his career as a lawyer
Prussia had abrogated Jewish emancipation after annexing the Rhineland in 1815; Karl was baptised a Lutheran in 1824.
Q 06At which university did young Marx co-lead a tavern drinking society and fight a duel?
Bonn
His grades collapsed and his father transferred him to the more serious University of Berlin.
Q 07Which university awarded Marx his doctorate in 1841 for a thesis on Democritus and Epicurus?
Jena
He submitted it there because it was more liberal than Berlin, where his conservative professors disliked the work.
Q 08Whom did Marx marry in 1843, seven years after their engagement?
Jenny von Westphalen
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.
Q 09Which German philosopher's dialectical method most influenced Marx as a student in Berlin?
Hegel
His radical young followers used the dialectic to attack established society, politics and religion from the left.
Q 10Marx first made his name at which radical Cologne newspaper, banned in 1843 after Tsar Nicholas I complained?
Rheinische Zeitung
He complained that every issue had to be presented 'to the police to be sniffed at'.
Q 11Marx's famous line that religion is 'the opium of the people' comes from which 1844 essay?
Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
The full sentence calls religion 'the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world'.
Q 12In which Paris café did Marx and Engels begin their lifelong friendship on 28 August 1844?
Café de la Régence
Engels showed him The Condition of the Working Class in England, convincing Marx the workers would be the agents of revolution.
Q 13Marx's most quoted thesis says 'philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it'. Which number is it?
Q 21Which American newspaper employed Marx as its European correspondent from 1852 to 1862?
New-York Daily Tribune
Founded by Horace Greeley, it cost two cents and had the widest circulation in the United States.
Q 22What earlier event does the 'Brumaire' in Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon allude to?
Bonaparte's seizure of power in 1799
The essay explored class struggle, historical materialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Q 23Where did Marx do much of the research for his major economic work?
The reading room of the British Museum
Eleven
The eleven Theses on Feuerbach of 1845 marked his break with Feuerbach's materialism.
Q 14Marx's 1847 book The Poverty of Philosophy replied to which French anarchist's The Philosophy of Poverty?
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
The title was chosen partly to slip the manuscript past government censors.
Q 15The 1848 Manifesto was the programme of which newly reorganised political society?
The Communist League
The League had to drop its underground ways and appeal openly to the working class.
Q 16On what date was The Communist Manifesto first published?
21 February 1848
Weeks later the Revolutions of 1848 swept Europe, and Marx was expelled from Belgium.
Q 17How does the Communist Manifesto famously open?
'A spectre is haunting Europe'
The other rallying cry closes it; the class-struggle line opens the first chapter.
Q 18What was Marx accused of doing with his inheritance in 1848, getting him expelled from Belgium?
Arming Belgian workers
The truth of the allegation is disputed, but the Belgian Ministry of Justice acted on it.
Q 19Which Cologne daily did Marx edit in 1848-49, 'a simple dictatorship by Marx' per Engels?
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
He financed it with his inheritance and was tried several times, always acquitted, before being expelled in May 1849.
Q 20In which city did Marx settle in 1849 and live for the rest of his life?
London
The party headquarters moved there too; his family lived in deep poverty in Soho.
By 1857 he had over 800 pages of notes that only appeared in print in 1939.
Q 24What is the name of Marx's 800 pages of economic notebooks from 1857-58, unpublished until 1939?
Grundrisse
The full title translates as Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy.
Q 25In which year was the first volume of Marx's magnum opus on capital published?
1867
Marx delivered the manuscript to Otto Meissner in Hamburg in April and it appeared in September.
Q 26The first foreign translation of Marx's magnum opus appeared in 1872 in which language, its censors deeming it harmless?
Russian
Most of the 3,000-copy print run sold out within a year.
Q 27Volumes II and III of Marx's magnum opus were published posthumously in which two years?
1885 and 1894
Engels did the editing; Theories of Surplus Value, drawn from the 1861-63 manuscripts, is often called the fourth volume.
Q 28According to Marx, what is the ultimate source of surplus value under capitalism?
The unpaid work of labour
He argued that the driving force of capital is the exploitation of labour.
Q 29Marx sat on the General Council of which body from its founding in 1864?
The International Workingmen's Association
Known as the First International, it declined after its seat moved to New York in 1872.
Q 30Which anarchist led the faction Marx battled inside the First International?
Mikhail Bakunin
Marx won, but at the cost of the International's decline.