On this day in 1871, Rozalia (Rosa) Luxemburg was born in Zamość, Poland, to a middle-class Jewish family living under Russian occupation. On January 15, 1919, she was murdered and dumped in a Berlin canal by members of the Freikorps, irregular armed gangs acting as paramilitary allies of her former comrades in the German Social Democratic Party. From modest beginnings to a targeted assassination by the state, Luxemburg’s path offers one of the most fascinating accounts of radical political agitation and economic theorizing in the history of (Jewish, female!) revolutionaries.

But did you ever come across her name in your high school history textbook? Perhaps it was mentioned in passing in a European history course? If Luxemburg’s name isn’t familiar to you, here’s a primer on the life and works of this thinker, writer, economist, activist, and revolutionary socialist.

During her 47 years, Luxemburg was indefatigable in her commitment to building an international proletarian movement and encouraging conditions for global socialism. Her critiques and expansions of Karl Marx’s Capital were seminal to the Marxist canon, updating and advancing Marx’s earlier theories. Her perpetual revolutionary agitation put a target on her back, but also led to such salient pieces as The Mass Strike (1906), which used her observations on radical labor strikes across Russia to clarify the conditions for spontaneous class struggle.

The prescience that gleams through Luxemburg’s pamphlets, articles, and polemics is remarkable. But there’s no need to assign a mystical quality to her work or see her as the Polish Nostradamus; Luxemburg simply applied the basic formulas of historical materialism to the world she saw developing around her. Historical materialism, a methodology fundamental to Marxist tradition, argues that, like an engine of history, class struggle and the pursuit of material interests have driven forth human society and all its cultural institutions. As a principled Marxist and brilliant economist, Luxemburg charted the local and global socioeconomic trends she observed to predict that the world would one day be overtaken by the ravages of militarized capitalism.

What did Luxemburg observe? Here, we dive into the arguments she made in one of her most famous works, The Accumulation of Capital, to help provide some insight.

Capitalist markets would expand through exploitation of Indigenous and oppressed populations

“Each new colonial expansion is accompanied by capital’s relentless war on the social and economic interrelations of the indigenous inhabitants and by the violent looting of their means of production and their labor-power...capitalism strives purposefully to annihilate them as independent social structures.”

Luxemburg saw how capitalism would spin out of local European markets through imperialism. She saw that process taking place around her through the enslavement of African peoples by European nations, French colonialism in Algeria, and British colonialism in India, to name a few. This process remains a fact of life more than a century after Luxemburg’s time, and that is no coincidence. Capitalism must constantly seek new markets to suck up surplus value, a process that often involves forcing indigenous, noncapitalist peoples to participate in market exchange. Today, according to History Is a Weapon author Michael Parenti, North American and European companies have control of more than 75% of the mineral resources scattered across the rest of the globe.

We can also point to how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was devastating to many small farmers in Mexico, forcing many to abandon their land and seek work in assembly plants known as maquiladoras. In South America, far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, with aid from the World Bank, has helped oversee the accelerated deforestation of the Amazon for agribusiness, dispossessing and disenfranchising Indigenous communities in favor of exploitative global agribusinesses with little regard for climate impact. Here in the U.S., in keeping with our long-standing tradition of settler colonialism, the Dakota Access Pipeline was routed through lands adjacent to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, threatening the community’s water supply and desecrating grave sites. Protests against the pipeline drilling were suppressed by police (think water cannons used to douse demonstrators in subzero temperatures) and key organizers with the cause were contacted by the FBI. Luxemburg’s prediction that a global "war" waged on Indigenous populations would soon "annihilate [them] as independent social structures" is something that still plays out every day.

We would live through endless imperial war

“Militarism plays the decisive role as a means of competitive struggle between capitalist countries over areas of noncapitalist civilization.”