Interview by Alec Hudson

Rosa Luxemburg is an anomaly for the Marxist left. A revolutionary leader whose thought has been embraced by Marxist-Leninists, anarchists, and even anticommunist social democrats, her influence on political thought has increased in the era after the Cold War. Born in Zamość to a middle-class Jewish family, she rose through the ranks of the burgeoning social-democratic movement in Germany.

After witnessing the 1905–7 revolutionary upheavals in the Russian Empire (which Poland was a part of at the time), she developed a staunchly anti-parliamentarian view of socialism, arguing that only through mass revolutionary democratic self-organization of the working class could capitalism be transcended.

Her revolutionary anti-parliamentarian views led not only to her leaving the German Social Democratic Party to help found the Spartacist League, but to her murder at the hands of right-wing paramilitaries working in the service of the elected Social Democratic government in January 1919.

In death Luxemburg came to be one of the most iconic and revered figures of the European left, a revolutionary whose thought was ahead of her time and which continues to drive movements to abolish capitalism.

The new graphic biography Red Rosa, written by Kate Evans and edited by Paul Buhle, explores how Luxemburg developed her revolutionary ideals at the same time she struggled against a German Social Democratic Party leadership dismissive of her revolutionary zeal and rejection of the parliamentary path to socialism.

Chicago-based activist Alec Hudson spoke with Buhle for Jacobin to get a sense of Luxemburg’s background, how her work has spread around the globe, and why she remains one of the most important Marxists of the twentieth century.