This past May marked the 205th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. This Marxist IQ is dedicated to his life and work.

1. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed the theory that would come to be called Marxism, they

a. sought to organize coups to impose their ideas on society.
b. were responding to both workers’ struggles and various groups advocating policies that were called socialism and communism.
c. sought to unite all classes around their theory.
d. sought to eradicate religion as the principle barrier to social progress.

2. Marx and Engels called their developing philosophy “scientific socialism” because

a. they saw capitalism as a developing mode of production to be analyzed in terms of its structure and function.
b. they were influenced by Charles Darwin’s use of the scientific method to develop evolutionary theory, and they sought to similarly apply the scientific method to the study of society in order to discover the laws of social development.
c. they rejected the idea that socialism could be established by building cooperative communities or settlements outside of the existing society that would serve as refuges from capitalism, calling this politics-free approach “Utopian Socialism.”
d. All of the above

3. Marx believed that a socialist movement would develop rapidly in the U.S. after the Civil War because

a. socialists would take over the Democratic Party.
b. the genocidal policy toward Native Americans would lead to major land reforms.
c. the U.S. had no feudal classes to retard industrial capitalist development after the slaveholders were destroyed as a class.
d. immigrants would bring socialist ideas to the United States.

4. In his optimism about the development of socialism in the U.S., Marx underestimated

a. the high level of equality that capitalism produced in the U.S.
b. the ruling class’ ability to divide the working class on the basis of religious, national, gender, and race differences, especially after more than two centuries of a brutal system of racialized chattel slavery.
c. the willingness of the capitalist class to advance economic and social reforms.
d. the belief among workers that they could and would become capitalists.

5. Marxism, and the Communist parties of the world today, remain more relevant than ever because

a. capitalism’s use of the advances in science and technology has greatly increased poverty and inequality all around the world.
b. capitalism’s use of the advances in science, technology, and mass production has globalized and increased mass destruction, especially the devastation produced by militarism and war.
c. capitalism’s use of advances in science and technology has created a global environmental crisis that threatens natural resources and human and animal life.
d. All of the above

Answers here.

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