Rosa Luxemburg

Born in Russian Poland in 1871 to a secular Jewish family, Luxemburg threw herself into revolutionary politics young, co-founding a party that scorned nationalism for class struggle. Moving to Germany in 1898, she became the sharpest voice against reform-as-endpoint, arguing in Social Reform or Revolution? that the fight for changes was only a means. The 1905 Russian Revolution convinced her the mass strike was the workers' real weapon. Her 1913 Accumulation of Capital laid out imperialism as capitalism's survival mechanism - expansion into new markets or death. When the SPD backed World War I, she condemned it as betrayal, spent most of the war in prison, and from her cell wrote the Junius Pamphlet, coining "socialism or barbarism" to frame the stakes. She celebrated 1917's Russian Revolution but critiqued the Bolsheviks' authoritarian turn in a manuscript that read, later, like a forecast of Stalin. Released during Germany's 1918 revolution, she co-founded the Communist Party and joined the January 1919 Berlin uprising. When it collapsed, Freikorps paramilitaries captured and killed her and Karl Liebknecht. Marxists made her a martyr; Stalinists called her ide