Marxism
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Marxism trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Few sets of ideas have been argued over as fiercely as Marxism. It began as one exiled writer's account of how economies shape societies, and within a century governments ruling a large share of humanity claimed to follow it. It also changed how historians, economists, artists and critics do their work, including many who reject it. This quiz covers the ground a curious reader would expect. There are questions on Karl Marx himself, his family, his friends and his long years of study in London; on the vocabulary he left behind, from class and capital to the stages of history; and on the revolutionaries, philosophers, playwrights and painters who took the ideas in their own directions. A few questions go to the critics too. It suits politics, sociology and history students revising the basics, quiz hosts who want reliable answers, and anyone who has heard the word in an argument and wondered what it covers. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches you something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Graffiti from France's May 1968 student revolt declared the writer a Marxist of which comedian's persuasion?
Groucho
Groucho, the wisecracking star of Duck Soup, happens to share a surname with Karl Marx, so the joke wrote itself. The line was one of the slogans daubed on walls during the 1968 protests.
Q 02Which English naturalist politely thanked Karl Marx in 1873 for a gift copy of Das Kapital?
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin replied that he wished he understood more of political economy and so were more worthy of the gift. The copy Marx sent still survives in Darwin's library.
Q 03Which US president did Karl Marx congratulate on his re-election in an 1864 address from the First International?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln received the address through the American ambassador in London, who sent back a courteous reply. Marx's text praised the president's war on slavery.
Q 04Which George Orwell novel features Old Major, a prize boar who stands partly for Karl Marx?
Animal Farm
Animal Farm opens with Old Major urging the animals to overthrow their human masters. Like Marx, the old boar dies before the revolution he inspired takes place.
Q 05According to the famous opening line of The Communist Manifesto, what kind of being is haunting Europe?
A spectre
A spectre opens the pamphlet: the spectre of communism. The authors argued that rulers who branded every opponent a communist were admitting that communism was already a power.
Q 06Karl Marx called which institution the opium of the people and the sigh of the oppressed creature?
Religion
Religion, in Marx's phrase, was the opium of the people. In context he was describing it as a balm for real suffering, and the same passage calls it the heart of a heartless world.
Q 07Karl Marx wrote that great events in history occur twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as what?
Farce
Farce was his verdict on Napoleon III, the nephew who seized power in France in 1851 in imitation of his uncle, the first Napoleon.
Q 08Which painter, famous for her self-portraits, made the late work Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick?
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo painted it around 1954, the last year of her life. She had joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1927, and through it met the muralist Diego Rivera again, marrying him two years later.
Q 09In which London cemetery does a giant bronze bust mark the grave of Karl Marx?
Highgate
Highgate Cemetery in north London holds the tomb, which the Communist Party of Great Britain paid for in 1956. The monument has survived two bomb attacks.
Q 10In which London institution's famous reading room did Karl Marx spend years studying for his critique of capitalism?
The British Museum
The British Museum was where Marx studied economics after taking refuge in London in 1849. He stayed in the city for the rest of his life and died there, stateless, in 1883.
Q 11Which Marxist class name comes from the Latin for Romans who were counted by their offspring, not their property?
Proletariat
Proletariat comes from proletarius, the poorest Romans, whose census entry listed their children because they had no property worth recording. Marx applied it to workers who live by selling their labour.
Q 12Which French word did Karl Marx use for the class that owns the factories, land and machinery under capitalism?
Bourgeoisie
Bourgeoisie began as a word for the townsfolk who stood between peasants and landed nobles. By Marx's day, he argued, they had become the ruling class by owning the means of production.
Q 13In Marxist economics, which term names the gap between what workers produce and the wages they are paid?
Q 21As a teenage student at the University of Bonn, Karl Marx was co-president of a society devoted to which pursuit?
Drinking
Drinking was the whole point of the tavern club the young Marx helped to run. He also fought a duel, and his father, seeing his grades slip, moved him to the more serious University of Berlin.
Q 22In which German city, given a statue of him by China in 2018, was Karl Marx born?
Trier
Trier was then part of the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Marx family had deep roots there: his father's line had supplied the town's rabbis since 1723.
Q 23For which American newspaper was Karl Marx the London-based European correspondent between 1852 and 1862?
New-York Tribune
Surplus value
Surplus value is, for Marx, where profit comes from: the employer keeps whatever workers create beyond the cost of their wages. The phrase itself was coined by William Thompson in 1824.
Q 14Which condition, analysed in Karl Marx's unpublished 1844 manuscripts, cuts workers off from the things they make?
Alienation
Alienation has four sides in the 1844 manuscripts: workers are estranged from what they make, from the act of working, from their own human nature and from one another.
Q 15Which theory, sketched by Marx in The German Ideology, holds that economic conditions, not ideas, shape society?
Historical materialism
Historical materialism turns the usual story upside down: in Marx's 1859 summary, the way people live together shapes the way they think, not the reverse.
Q 16In Karl Marx's account of history, which medieval social order did the rising merchant class sweep away?
Feudalism
Feudalism, with its peasant serfs tied to a lord's land, gave way to capitalism as towns and trade grew up inside it. Marx expected capitalism to be replaced in its turn.
Q 17According to Marxist theory, which institution will wither away once society is no longer divided into classes?
The state
The state, in this view, began as armed retainers hired to protect a ruling class's privileges, so it has nothing left to do once classes disappear.
Q 18According to the closing lines of The Communist Manifesto, the working class has nothing to lose but what?
Their chains
Their chains, the pamphlet says, and in return a world to win. It then ends with its famous call for working men of all countries to unite.
Q 19In Marxist theory, law, politics and culture form which layer of society, resting on the economic base?
Superstructure
Superstructure is the upper half of Marx's building metaphor. The economic base is said to shape it in the long run, though the influence can run both ways.
Q 20Which German mill owner's son co-wrote The Communist Manifesto and supported the Marx family with money for decades?
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels led a double life as a respectable cotton merchant while bankrolling his friend. After Marx died, he edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital for publication.
The New-York Tribune, founded by Horace Greeley, was his main source of earnings for a decade, though he grumbled about its edits and deadlines.
Q 24In which English city did Karl Marx's closest collaborator spend two decades working at his family's cotton firm?
Manchester
Manchester was the shock city of the Industrial Revolution, and what Marx's friend saw in its mills gave the pair first-hand evidence for their theories.
Q 25Into which language was Das Kapital first translated, in 1872, after censors judged it too complex to be subversive?
Russian
Russian readers bought most of the 3,000 copies within a year. Marx, who had spent 25 years fighting the tsarist empire's influence, called it an irony of fate.
Q 26Which German philosopher's dialectic did Karl Marx say was standing on its head and needed setting on its feet?
Georg Hegel
Georg Hegel gave Marx the dialectic, a way of understanding change through contradiction. Marx kept the method but broke with its idealism, rooting it in economic life instead.
Q 27Which French anarchist's book The Philosophy of Poverty did Karl Marx answer with The Poverty of Philosophy?
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had earlier declined to collaborate with Marx on a journal. Marx wrote his reply in French, the language of the book he was attacking.
Q 28Which anarchist rival of Karl Marx was expelled from the First International at its 1872 congress in The Hague?
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin warned that Marxist governments would become one-party dictatorships ruling over the workers. Once expelled, he founded a rival Anti-Authoritarian International the same year.
Q 29Karl Marx's remark that philosophers interpret the world when the point is to change it ends his theses on whom?
Ludwig Feuerbach
Ludwig Feuerbach had inspired the young Marx, who broke with him in 1845 while living in Brussels. The eleventh and last thesis is carved on Marx's tomb.
Q 30Karl Marx's 1841 doctoral thesis compared the natural philosophy of Democritus with that of which later Greek thinker?
Epicurus
Epicurus was the subject Marx chose, and the thesis proved too controversial for Berlin's conservative professors, so he sent it to the more liberal University of Jena instead.