SOURCE: "Red Rosa: Bread and Roses," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. XVI, No. 2, Spring, 1975, pp. 373-86.

Delany is an American-born Canadian author and educator. In the following essay, she comments on the revival of interest in Luxemburg's ideas and explores what made Luxemburg such a compelling and disturbing figure.

Now Red Rosa is also gone,
 Where she lies is quite unknown.
 Because she told the poor the truth,
 The rich have hunted her down.
            Bertolt Brecht, "Grabschrift 1919."

A woman, a Jew and a Pole—it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. Rosa Luxemburg was all three, but as a revolutionary communist she transcends definition by sex, religion or nationality.

Franz Mehring, the colleague and first biographer of Marx, called Luxemburg "the best brain after Marx." When Lenin paid homage to Luxemburg in 1922, three years after her death at the hands of German police, he told "a...