Karl Marx

THE KARL MARX QUIZ

Try this beginners quiz on the life and works of Karl Marx. There is no monetary prize for answering all 10 questions correctly, such a prize would merely serve to uphold the forces of commodity fetishism!



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1. Marx once said that capitalist society would generate in individuals a 'fetishism' about:

Science

Commodities

Sex

2. What is the name for Marx's theory of human history?


Historical Materialism Hypothetical Materialism Historical Idealism

3. What is the title of Marx's book which explains the workings of the capitalist economy?


Communist Manifesto Private Property for Beginners Capital IdeasCapital

4. Marx differentiates two empirical conditions of a class: a class in-itself and a class for-itself. What does Marx mean by the latter?

This describes a class whose members cannot remember which class they are in fact members of.

This describes a class whose members have realised their potential for collective and possibility revolutionary action

This describes a class whose members who have no potential for collective action.

5. In 1848 Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto that there was a spectre haunting Europe. What was this spectre?


Communism Hegelian thought Religion

6. What is the proletarianization?

The process whereby anybody who claims to be somebody today (especially celebrities) uses a sense of 'inverted snobbery' to proclaim their origins in the working class.

A process by which capitalist society impoverishes all (including the middle classes) but the capitalist class.

A process by which capitalist society increases the wealth and quality of life of the working classes.

7. In their list of pre-capitalist modes of production, Marx & Engels suggested that there was a significant difference between the (first) so-called primitive mode and all the others. What was it that was different about this primitive mode?


We all carried clubs People were sexually rampant There were no classes

8. Why did Marx use a dialectical approach in his approach to the study of social relations?

The dialectic allows one to analysis social phenomena as parts of a social process

The dialectic provides one with an important insight into people's speech patterns

The dialectic allows one to perceive society as thing-like, sui-generis

9. Why did Marx reject the particular use made of the dialectic by the German philosopher Georg Hegel?


As a student of Hegel's, Marx took a personal dislike to his teacher

Marx suggested that Hegel's particular use of the dialectic was idealist. Marx sought to establish dialectical materialism.

Marx suggested that Hegel's particular use of the dialectic was written in inaccessible prose

10. Who said 'Everything that's  solid will melt into air'?


Fredereich Engels 

Karl Marx

William Shakespeare