Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish-born Marxist theorist, economist, and revolutionary who became one of the most original Marxist thinkers of the early twentieth century and a martyr of the German left. Born Rozalia Luksenburg in Zamosc, Russian Poland in 1871, she was the youngest of five children in an assimilated Jewish merchant family and walked with a permanent limp from a misdiagnosed childhood hip ailment.

Active in clandestine socialist circles as a teenager, she fled to Zurich in 1889 to avoid arrest, completing a doctorate in 1897 with a thesis on the industrial development of Poland. She moved to Berlin in 1898, took German citizenship by marriage, and became a leading voice on the radical wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

Her 1913 book The Accumulation of Capital argued that capitalism required continual imperialist expansion to survive, an analysis that remains debated. With Karl Liebknecht she opposed the SPD's 1914 vote for war credits, and the two founded the Spartacus League in 1916. She spent most of the war in prison, writing the pamphlet later titled The Russian Revolution, which praised the Bolsheviks while criticising their suppression of dissent.

Released by the November 1918 revolution, she co-founded the Communist Party of Germany. During the failed Spartacist uprising of January 1919, right-wing Freikorps troops captured her in Berlin and murdered her on 15 January 1919, throwing her body into the Landwehr Canal.

The given name Rosa is the Latin word for "rose," used as a Christian name across Europe since the Middle Ages and associated with saints such as Rose of Lima. Bestowed at her birth in Zamosc, it carried her through underground presses and Berlin streets to a place among the twentieth century's secular saints.