Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish-born Marxist revolutionary, economist, and anti-war fighter whose life was devoted to the self-emancipation of the working class. Born in 1871 to a Jewish family in Russian-ruled Poland, she joined the underground socialist movement as a teenager and was forced into exile. She earned a doctorate in Switzerland and moved to Germany, where she became one of the leading voices of the left wing of the Social Democratic Party. In Reform or Revolution, she argued that capitalism could not be gradually reformed into socialism and had to be overthrown by the organized working class.

Luxemburg saw the mass strike, which she witnessed in the Russian Revolution of 1905, as the way workers learn their own power through struggle. In The Accumulation of Capital, she argued that capitalism survives by constantly expanding into the non-capitalist world, making colonialism and imperialist violence part of how the system works rather than accidents. When her own party voted to fund the First World War in 1914, she denounced the betrayal. She spent much of the war in prison for her opposition, and she warned that humanity faced a choice between socialism and barbarism.

With Karl Liebknecht she founded the Spartacus League and, at the end of 1918, the Communist Party of Germany, as revolution spread across the country. On January 15, 1919, both were seized and murdered by right-wing Freikorps troops acting under the authority of the Social Democratic government, and her body was thrown into a Berlin canal. Rosa Luxemburg's legacy endures in her fierce internationalism, her opposition to imperialist war, and her faith in the creative power of the working class to make its own revolution.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*