Memorial Day honors the fallen in the wars of the United States. Capitalists build monuments to the fallen and celebrate combat heroes, while they today reduce veterans benefits and expand a military budget that constitutes 40 percent of the military spending of the world. Marxists honor the fallen of the United States and all countries by struggling for what Martin Luther King Jr. called positive peace—peace with social justice.

1. At the time of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), the policy of Karl Marx and the First International was to

a. support Bismarck’s Prussia against Napoleon III’s evil empire.
b. support a pacifist policy against all wars.
c. call for immediate revolution by French and Prussian workers.
d. call for French and Prussian workers to fight to end the war and make a peace without annexations.

2. During the American Civil War, the policy of Karl Marx and the First International was to

a. call for Southern and Northern workers to rise up and overthrow their rulers.
b. say that there was no difference between Northern capitalists and Southern slaveholders.
c. support the Union and the Lincoln government advancing a democratic revolution that would promote the interests of the working class of the U.S. and the world.
d. refuse to support the Lincoln government until it demanded the abolition of slavery.

3. During World War I three important socialist parties among their respective warring powers opposed the war as against the interests of the working class. What were those parties?

a. Russian Mensheviks, British Laborites, Austrian Socialists
b. Russian Social Revolutionaries, German Social Democrats, Dutch Socialists
c. Russian Bolsheviks, Italian Socialists, Socialist Party of America (SPA)
d. Russian Kadets (Constitutional Democrats), French Socialists, Republican Party of the United States

4. In developing his theory of imperialism during and after World War I, how did Vladimir Lenin characterize the war?

a. The militarization of industrial countries brought about by the rise of monopoly capitalism led to military alliances and wars to either take away or protect colonial possession.
b. The export of capital to the non-industrial regions of the world, which became battlegrounds for raw materials, cheap labor, and markets, was leading to more and bigger wars.
c. The technologies of industrial capitalism, which enabled imperialist powers to turn the forces of mass production into forces of mass destruction, resulted in the most destructive war in human history.
d. All of the above

5. This year is the 70th anniversary of the Stockholm Appeal, which Communists and other peace activists throughout the world organized for, including members of the Communist Party USA at the height of McCarthyite repression when its leaders were imprisoned and its members threatened. What did the petition call for?

a. Support for the U.S. building of a hydrogen bomb to secure international peace
b. Support for the Soviet Union building a nuclear arsenal to deter U.S. imperialism
c. Support for the outlawing of all nuclear weapons, their destruction, and the holding of war crimes trials for the leaders of any nation that would use nuclear weapons as a first strike
d. Support for the proliferation of nuclear weapons to as many nations as possible so that no nation would use the weapons, since it would result in mutually assured destruction (MAD)

Answers here.

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