Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg (1871 to 1919) was a revolutionary theorist and one of the most original and influential thinkers in the history of Marxism. Born in Zamość in south-eastern Poland, then occupied by Tsarist Russia, the youngest child of an assimilated Jewish family of timber merchants, she was smuggled out of the country in 1889 to escape arrest and studied in Zurich. She is best known for her contributions to the economic and political debates of socialist thought, above all her sharp criticism of the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein inside the German Social Democratic Party. In 1907 she taught Introduction to Economics and Marx's Capital at the party school. After the Spartakist uprising of January 1919 she and Karl Liebknecht were discovered in their hiding place, and she was murdered by the far right Freikorps.