German Marxists theorist, activist, and organizer of the first International Women's Day in 1911
Excerpt from “Rosa Luxemburg: Her Fight Against the German Betrayers of International Socialism (1911)
Imperialism, born of capitalistic development, confronts us as an international phenomenon in its radiations and influences, accomplishing with its brutal unscrupulousness of conscience, its gigantic, insatiable appetites, its tremendous means of power, very different wonders from “the construction of the Egyptian pyramids and Gothic cathedrals,” as expressed in the Communist Manifesto. It gives new and deepened content to the difference between Germany and France created by the war of 1870-71; it extinguishes old differences familiar to world-politics between the great powers of Europe and creates new fields of conflict between them; it is tearing the United States and Japan into its powerful current. Dripping with dirt and blood it traverses the earth, destroying ancient civilizations and converting entire despoiled nations into slaves of European capitalism.
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