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.