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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.
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Q 01With whom did Karl Marx co-write The Communist Manifesto in 1848?
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels, the mill-owner's son Marx had befriended in 1844, drafted the 'Principles of Communism' on which the 1848 Manifesto was built.
Q 02What is the title of Marx's multi-volume critique of political economy, his magnum opus?
Das Kapital
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.
Q 03In which city was Marx born in 1818?
Trier
Trier, on the Moselle in the Rhineland, was Marx's birthplace on 5 May 1818; the house on Brückengasse is a museum.
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 Gerard Philips, whose grandmother Sophie was the sister of Marx's mother Henriette Pressburg; Marx often borrowed from her husband Lion Philips.
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: 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.
Q 06At which university did young Marx co-lead a tavern drinking society and fight a duel?
Bonn
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.
Q 07Which university awarded Marx his doctorate in 1841 for a thesis on Democritus and Epicurus?
Jena
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.
Q 08Whom did Marx marry in 1843, seven years after their engagement?
Jenny von Westphalen
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.
Q 09Which German philosopher's dialectical method most influenced Marx as a student in Berlin?
Hegel
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.
Q 10Marx first made his name at which radical Cologne newspaper, banned in 1843 after Tsar Nicholas I complained?
Rheinische Zeitung
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'.
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 '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'.
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, 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.
Q 13Which of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach says philosophers have only interpreted the world?
Q 21Which American newspaper employed Marx as its European correspondent from 1852 to 1862?
New-York Daily Tribune
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.
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
'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'.
Q 23Where did Marx do much of the research for his major economic work?
Eleven
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.
Q 14Marx's 1847 book The Poverty of Philosophy replied to which French anarchist's The Philosophy of Poverty?
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
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.
Q 15The 1848 Manifesto was the programme of which newly reorganised political society?
The Communist League
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'.
Q 16On what date was The Communist Manifesto first published?
21 February 1848
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.
Q 17How does the Communist Manifesto famously open?
'A spectre is haunting Europe'
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.
Q 18What was Marx accused of doing with his inheritance in 1848, getting him expelled from Belgium?
Arming Belgian workers
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.
Q 19Which Cologne daily did Marx edit in 1848-49, 'a simple dictatorship by Marx' per Engels?
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
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.
Q 20In which city did Marx settle in 1849 and live for the rest of his life?
London
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.
The reading room of the British Museum
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.
Q 24What is the name of Marx's 800 pages of economic notebooks from 1857-58, unpublished until 1939?
Grundrisse
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.
Q 25In which year was the first volume of Marx's magnum opus on capital published?
1867
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.
Q 26The first foreign translation of Marx's magnum opus appeared in 1872 in which language, its censors deeming it harmless?
Russian
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.
Q 27Volumes II and III of Marx's magnum opus were published posthumously in which two years?
1885 and 1894
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.
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
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.
Q 30Which anarchist led the faction Marx battled inside the First International?
Mikhail Bakunin
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.