50 Fun Facts About Karl Marx

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

Friedrich Engels, the mill-owner's son Marx had befriended in 1844, drafted the 'Principles of Communism' on which the 1848 Manifesto was built.

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

Das Kapital, subtitled 'Critique of Political Economy', had only its first volume published in Marx's lifetime; the second and third were edited posthumously by his closest collaborator from his manuscripts.

In which city was Marx born in 1818?

Trier, on the Moselle in the Rhineland, was Marx's birthplace on 5 May 1818; the house on Brückengasse is a museum.

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

Philips Electronics was founded in 1891 by Gerard Philips, whose grandmother Sophie was the sister of Marx's mother Henriette Pressburg; Marx often borrowed from her husband Lion Philips.

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

To keep his career as a lawyer: Prussia's rule after 1815 barred Jews from public office and the bar, so Heinrich Marx accepted Lutheran baptism, and Karl was baptised in 1824.

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

At Bonn in 1835–36 Marx co-led a students' tavern club, spent a night in the university lock-up for drunkenness and fought a duel, so his father moved him to Berlin.

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

Jena granted the doctorate in absentia in April 1841; Marx sent his thesis there rather than to Berlin, where his radical circle had fallen out of official favour.

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

Jenny von Westphalen, daughter of a government councillor and baron who had introduced the young Marx to Saint-Simon, married him at Kreuznach in June 1843 after a seven-year engagement.

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

Hegel had died in 1831, but his system dominated Berlin; Marx joined a radical circle that turned the dead master's dialectic against religion and the state of Prussia.

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

The Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal Cologne paper Marx edited from October 1842, was suppressed from 1 April 1843; he complained every issue had to go '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 'Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right', printed in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in February 1844, 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?

The Café de la Régence, the famous chess café near the Palais-Royal, hosted the meeting; a ten-day conversation followed and the pair were soon co-writing The Holy Family.

Which of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach says philosophers have only interpreted the world?

Eleven is the number of the last of the 1845 Theses on Feuerbach, jotted in a notebook and first published by his collaborator in 1888; the line is also carved on Marx's tomb.

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

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's 1846 System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty, drew Marx's reply in French in 1847; Marx had earlier tried and failed to recruit him.

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

The Communist League, formed in June 1847 when the secretive League of the Just reorganised, commissioned the Manifesto from Marx and the friend who had drafted its 'Principles of Communism'.

On what date was The Communist Manifesto first published?

21 February 1848 is the date usually given for the 23-page pamphlet's appearance from a German émigré press, a day before Paris rose in the February Revolution that toppled Louis Philippe.

How does the Communist Manifesto famously open?

The Manifesto's first sentence is 'A spectre is haunting Europe', continuing 'the spectre of communism'; the class-struggle line opens chapter one and the call to unite closes the text.

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

Arming Belgian workers was the charge: Marx was said to have spent part of a fresh advance on his inheritance on weapons, and Belgium deported him on 4 March 1848.

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

The Neue Rheinische Zeitung ran from June 1848 to May 1849, financed largely from Marx's own pocket; he was tried twice in February 1849 and acquitted before Prussia expelled him.

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

London took Marx in from August 1849; the family lived in poverty in Dean Street, Soho, and he stayed in the city until his death in 1883.

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

The New-York Daily Tribune, Horace Greeley's two-cent paper, printed almost 500 articles under Marx's name between 1852 and 1862, many of them actually drafted by his collaborator.

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

'Bonaparte's seizure of power in 1799' was the coup of 18 Brumaire, Year VIII; Marx's 1852 essay mocks Louis Napoleon's 1851 coup as history repeating itself '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 was Marx's workplace for years, often from ten in the morning until seven at night; the domed round room opened in 1857.

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

Grundrisse is short for Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 'Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy'; the seven notebooks first appeared in Moscow in 1939–41.

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

1867 was the year: Marx carried the manuscript to Otto Meissner in Hamburg in April, and volume one went on sale in September in a run of 1,000 copies.

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

Russian was the first language to get a translation, in 1872 in St Petersburg; the censor passed it on the grounds that few would read such a difficult, strictly scientific work.

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

1885 and 1894 were the years his collaborator brought out Volumes II and III from the manuscripts; Theories of Surplus Value, edited by Kautsky in 1905–10, is often called the fourth.

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?

The International Workingmen's Association, founded at St Martin's Hall in September 1864 and known as the First International, had Marx write its inaugural address; it faded after moving to New York in 1872.

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

Mikhail Bakunin and his anarchist followers were expelled at the Hague Congress of 1872; Marx then had the General Council moved to New York, and the body dissolved in 1876.

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

The Paris Commune ruled the city from 18 March to 28 May 1871; Marx's address to the International hailed it as the first working-class government before the 'Bloody Week' crushed it.

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

The Critique of the Gotha Programme, written in 1875 and published by his collaborator in 1891, attacked the German party's merger programme with Ferdinand Lassalle's followers and sketched communism's two phases.

How many of Marx's children lived to adulthood?

Three daughters reached adulthood: Laura, Eleanor and their elder sister; Edgar, Guido, Franziska and an unnamed infant died young in the family's years of poverty.

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

Moor ('Mohr' in German) was the name his family and friends used for him; his own children called him 'Old Nick' or 'Charley', and he called his closest friend 'General'.

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

Helene Demuth was sent to the household by Marx's mother-in-law in 1845 and stayed until his death; her son Frederick, born in 1851, has been attributed to Marx on disputed evidence.

Marx died on 14 March 1883 of what?

Bronchitis and pleurisy, worsened by a lung abscess, killed Marx in his armchair at 41 Maitland Park Road; he was 64 and had been stateless since 1845.

In which cemetery is Marx buried?

Highgate Cemetery, on a hill north of the city, holds the grave; Marx was buried in its eastern section on 17 March 1883 before only about a dozen mourners.

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

The Communist Party of Great Britain paid for the 1956 memorial by Laurence Bradshaw, moving Marx's remains to a more prominent spot; the bronze head has since been attacked several times.

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

Workers of all lands unite, the Manifesto's closing call, is cut in gilt capitals across the tomb; the final Feuerbach thesis on changing the world appears lower down.

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

Her partner had secretly married someone else: Edward Aveling had wed a young actress under an assumed name in 1897; Eleanor, 43, took cyanide on 31 March 1898.

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

Manchester was home to the cotton-thread firm in which his father was a partner; what he saw in its slums became The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

Marx's radical Berlin student circle around Bruno Bauer was known as what?

The Young Hegelians, or Left Hegelians, met as Berlin's Doktorklub around Bruno Bauer; Marx joined in 1837, and the pair once scandalised a Rhineland town by riding donkeys drunk through the streets.

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

1932 saw the first full edition, from the Moscow institute that held the manuscripts; the 1845–46 text had found no publisher, and Marx said they abandoned it 'to the gnawing criticism of the mice'.

Which country expelled Marx at Prussia's request in 1845, sending him to Brussels?

France expelled Marx in February 1845 after Prussia complained about the radical Paris paper Vorwärts!, to which he contributed; he settled in Brussels until 1848.

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

Chemnitz bore the name Karl-Marx-Stadt from 1953 to 1990; the 7.1-metre head by the Soviet sculptor Lev Kerbel was unveiled there in October 1971 and weighs about 40 tonnes.

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

The SPD bought the baroque house on Brückengasse in 1928, after its identity as the birthplace had been rediscovered in 1904; the Nazis confiscated it in 1933, and the party-affiliated foundation that owns it runs the museum there today.

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

'With approval, for its challenge to teleology': Marx told Lassalle in 1861 that Darwin had dealt the 'death-blow' to teleology in natural science, though he mocked its Malthusian echo of English society.

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

1881 was the year: she died of liver cancer on 2 December at the family's Maitland Park home, and Marx, himself ill, was forbidden by his doctor to attend the funeral.

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

Scorpion and Felix, a comic novel in the manner of Sterne, survives only in fragments; the student Marx also left a verse drama, Oulanem, and volumes of love poems, none published in his lifetime.

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.