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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How do Marx and Engels describe the proletariat?
(a) As an eternal principle of society.
(b) As the next usurpers.
(c) As the anti-thesis.
(d) As the emergent institution.

2. Who was ruler of Russia when Lenin was growing up?
(a) Tsar Alexander III.
(b) Peter the Great.
(c) Tsar Alexander II.
(d) Tsar Nicholas I.

3. What were the Soviets NOT calling for in 1905?
(a) Eight hour workday.
(b) Workers' rights.
(c) Women's suffrage.
(d) Freedom of the press.

4. Marx began to work with Proudhon, who had written _____________.
(a) Newspaper articles on the working poor.
(b) A series of essays on capital.
(c) Political prophecies.
(d) A book treating property as a form of theft.

5. What work did Engels have to finish when Marx died?
(a) Explaining Marx's theory to the socialists.
(b) "Das Kapital."
(c) Defining the master-slave dialectic.
(d) "The Condition of the Working Class in England."

6. What made Marx and Engels pioneers in their field?
(a) The prophecy of a workers' state.
(b) The combination of a theory of history and a theory of economics.
(c) The internationalism in their work.
(d) The inclusion of technological innovation in their predictions.

7. Where did Trotsky place his first political sympathies?
(a) With the Populists.
(b) With the Tsar.
(c) With the Communists.
(d) With the intellectuals.

8. How did Engels characterize classical economic theories?
(a) As mathematical abstractions out of touch with the finances of poverty.
(b) As mere meditations on capital, without grounds in reality.
(c) As rationalizations for capitalists' greed.
(d) As obsolete relative to new technologies for production.

9. How does Edmund Wilson describe Marx's study of economics?
(a) As a prediction of communism.
(b) As a study of capitalism.
(c) As a snapshot of Marx's moment.
(d) As a prophecy of socialism.

10. How did the "Communist Manifesto treat education?
(a) It should be political.
(b) It should proselytize for Communism.
(c) It should be apolitical.
(d) It should be free.

11. In what field was Lenin's training?
(a) Political science.
(b) Law.
(c) Literature.
(d) Military.

12. What in particular appalled Engels about the workers' conditions?
(a) Their cruelty to each other.
(b) Their accidents and illnesses.
(c) Their subservience to the masters.
(d) Their lack of education.

13. What does Marx say a society based on class destroys?
(a) A worker's individuality.
(b) Tradition.
(c) Working class heroes.
(d) The relationship between men.

14. Where was Engels working while he and Marx were writing articles together?
(a) In a factory in London.
(b) In a publisher's house in Berlin.
(c) In an exchange in Zurich.
(d) In a mill in Manchester.

15. When did Trotsky first study Marx and Lenin?
(a) At the university.
(b) In France.
(c) In Siberia.
(d) In high school.

Short Answer Questions

1. Where did Trotsky go after he escaped from Russia?

2. How did Lenin differ from the German Marxists?

3. What does Marx say a society based on class prevents?

4. How do Marx and Engels describe the bourgeoisie?

5. How does a dialectical system progress?

(see the answer keys)

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