Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was born in Zamość, in Russian-ruled Poland, into a Jewish family, and studied in Zürich before moving to Germany in 1898. She became a leading theorist of the left wing of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and of Polish social democracy. Her works include Reform or Revolution (1900), The Mass Strike (1906) and The Accumulation of Capital (1913). She opposed the First World War, spent much of it in prison, co-led the Spartacus League and helped found the Communist Party of Germany. In January 1919 she was murdered in Berlin by Freikorps soldiers.

Luxemburg is admired by democratic socialists, council communists and parts of the New Left as a Marxist who insisted on political freedom, and her sentence on freedom for those who think differently became widely quoted. The German Democratic Republic honored her officially, while dissidents there used the same quotation in protests in 1988. Lenin praised her as a revolutionary while criticizing her positions on the party and national self-determination. Liberal and conservative critics note that she supported revolutionary overthrow and the abolition of capitalism, and Polish nationalists objected to her opposition to Polish independence. A political foundation linked to Germany's Die Linke party bears her name, and her economic work on imperialism is still discussed by economists and historians of globalization.