50 Fun Facts About Marxism

Graffiti from France's May 1968 student revolt declared the writer a Marxist of which comedian's persuasion?

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.

Which English naturalist politely thanked Karl Marx in 1873 for a gift copy of Das Kapital?

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.

Which US president did Karl Marx congratulate on his re-election in an 1864 address from the First International?

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.

Which George Orwell novel features Old Major, a prize boar who stands partly for Karl Marx?

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.

According to the famous opening line of The Communist Manifesto, what kind of being is haunting Europe?

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.

Karl Marx called which institution the opium of the people and the sigh of the oppressed creature?

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.

Karl Marx wrote that great events in history occur twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as what?

Farce was his verdict on Napoleon III, the nephew who seized power in France in 1851 in imitation of his uncle, the first Napoleon.

Which painter, famous for her self-portraits, made the late work Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick?

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.

In which London cemetery does a giant bronze bust mark the grave of Karl Marx?

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.

In which London institution's famous reading room did Karl Marx spend years studying for his critique of capitalism?

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.

Which Marxist class name comes from the Latin for Romans who were counted by their offspring, not their property?

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.

Which French word did Karl Marx use for the class that owns the factories, land and machinery under capitalism?

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.

In Marxist economics, which term names the gap between what workers produce and the wages they are paid?

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.

Which condition, analysed in Karl Marx's unpublished 1844 manuscripts, cuts workers off from the things they make?

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.

Which theory, sketched by Marx in The German Ideology, holds that economic conditions, not ideas, shape society?

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.

In Karl Marx's account of history, which medieval social order did the rising merchant class sweep away?

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.

According to Marxist theory, which institution will wither away once society is no longer divided into classes?

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.

According to the closing lines of The Communist Manifesto, the working class has nothing to lose but what?

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.

In Marxist theory, law, politics and culture form which layer of society, resting on the economic base?

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.

Which German mill owner's son co-wrote The Communist Manifesto and supported the Marx family with money for decades?

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.

As a teenage student at the University of Bonn, Karl Marx was co-president of a society devoted to which pursuit?

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.

In which German city, given a statue of him by China in 2018, was Karl Marx born?

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.

For which American newspaper was Karl Marx the London-based European correspondent between 1852 and 1862?

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.

In which English city did Karl Marx's closest collaborator spend two decades working at his family's cotton firm?

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.

Into which language was Das Kapital first translated, in 1872, after censors judged it too complex to be subversive?

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.

Which German philosopher's dialectic did Karl Marx say was standing on its head and needed setting on its feet?

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.

Which French anarchist's book The Philosophy of Poverty did Karl Marx answer with The Poverty of Philosophy?

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.

Which anarchist rival of Karl Marx was expelled from the First International at its 1872 congress in The Hague?

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.

Karl Marx's remark that philosophers interpret the world when the point is to change it ends his theses on whom?

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.

Karl Marx's 1841 doctoral thesis compared the natural philosophy of Democritus with that of which later Greek thinker?

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.

Which revolutionary, embalmed for display in Moscow's Red Square, called imperialism the highest stage of capitalism?

Vladimir Lenin argued that capitalists pushed into new territories in search of lower wages and cheaper raw materials. He was embalmed against the protests of his widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya.

Which builder of the Red Army argued for a permanent revolution that had to spread abroad?

Leon Trotsky held that the revolution could survive only if it spread to more advanced capitalist countries. He was assassinated in 1940 after years of exile in Turkey, France and Norway.

Which Soviet leader championed building socialism in one country rather than waiting for revolution to spread worldwide?

Joseph Stalin took up the idea in late 1924, after communist risings in Germany and Hungary had failed. Earlier that year he had still written that revolution in a single country was not enough.

Which leader, after studying peasant uprisings in Hunan, based his Marxist revolution on the countryside, not cities?

Mao Zedong looked to the villages while most of China's communists focused on the cities and the industrial workers that orthodox Marxism expected to lead the way.

Which Polish-born Marxist theorist was murdered in Berlin after the Spartacist uprising of January 1919?

Rosa Luxemburg had helped to found the Communist Party of Germany at the turn of that year. She and Karl Liebknecht were captured and killed by the Freikorps, a government-sponsored paramilitary force.

Which Marxist faction, named from the word for majority, split from the Mensheviks at a 1903 party congress?

Bolsheviks wanted a small party of professional revolutionaries, while their rivals preferred a broad membership. The congress that divided them opened in Brussels and finished in London.

Which Caribbean revolutionary leader settled questions about his Marxism by declaring it openly in December 1961?

Fidel Castro went on to make Cuba a one-party communist country, the first in the Western Hemisphere. His brother Raúl and Che Guevara were already well known for their Marxist views.

In which South American country did Salvador Allende become the region's first elected Marxist president in 1970?

Chile's Congress chose Allende in a run-off because no candidate had won a majority at the polls. His government was overthrown by a military coup on 11 September 1973.

Which short-lived revolutionary government of 1871 did Karl Marx defend in his pamphlet The Civil War in France?

The Paris Commune was, for Marx, the prototype of a future workers' government. In private he was more critical, and Marxists later faulted it for leaving the national bank's reserves untouched.

Which industrial city in Saxony was officially called Karl-Marx-Stadt from 1953 until 1990?

Chemnitz was renamed by the East German government in a year of Marx anniversaries. Its giant bust of him by the sculptor Lev Kerbel is still a landmark, known to locals simply as the head.

Which Sardinian-born Marxist developed his theory of cultural hegemony in notebooks written in Mussolini's prisons?

Antonio Gramsci filled more than 30 notebooks and some 3,000 pages after his arrest in 1926. He argued that ruling classes keep their wealth and power through cultural institutions.

Which German city gave its name to the Marxist school of critical theory of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer?

Frankfurt was home to the Institute for Social Research, founded at the city's university in 1923. After Hitler took power the institute moved to Geneva and then across the Atlantic to Columbia University.

Which philosopher of science, briefly a Marxist in his teens, attacked Marx in The Open Society and Its Enemies?

Karl Popper argued that Marx's early predictions were testable and had failed, and that his followers then reinterpreted the theory to fit the evidence, so it had no claim to be a science.

Which Latin American Catholic movement of the 1960s drew on Marxist social analysis to side with the poor?

Liberation theology popularised the phrase 'preferential option for the poor'. Its leading voices included the theologians Gustavo Gutiérrez and Leonardo Boff.

Where in India did voters elect a communist government under the Marxist scholar E. M. S. Namboodiripad in 1957?

Kerala's 1957 ministry was among the earliest democratically elected communist governments in the world. The central government dismissed it in 1959 after mass protests against its land and school reforms.

Which economist, famous for the theory of comparative advantage, did Karl Marx study and critique alongside Adam Smith?

David Ricardo held that a commodity's worth depends on the labour needed to produce it. Marx's own economics grew out of a long critique of that classical tradition.

In Karl Marx's Das Kapital, which group forms the industrial reserve army that helps to hold wages down?

The unemployed serve employers, Marx argued, as a pool of spare labour: the more of them there are, the harder it is for those in work to push up their pay.

Which Marxist term for workers' mistaken view of their own interests was never actually used by Karl Marx?

False consciousness appears just once in the founders' writings, in an 1893 letter by Marx's co-author. Later Marxists built it into a full theory from the 1920s.

Which German revisionist argued socialism would come by gradual parliamentary reform, not the revolution Marx predicted?

Eduard Bernstein summed up his view in the aphorism that the goal is nothing and the movement everything. He doubted that capitalism would collapse or that the middle class would disappear.

Which philosopher, author of One-Dimensional Man, was hailed as the father of the New Left in the 1960s?

Herbert Marcuse blended Marx with Sigmund Freud in Eros and Civilization, and his readiness to speak at student protests made him a hero of the campus revolts.