Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Ankica Čakardić holds the Chair of Social Philosophy and Philosophy of Gender and is Head of the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. Her books include Dionysian Socialism: Yugoslav Praxis School and Feminist Rewriting (forthcoming 2026), The Rebellious Mind: Essays in Radical Social Philosophy (2021), Like a Clap of Thunder: Three Essays on Rosa Luxemburg (2019), and Spectres of Transition: Social History of Capitalism (2019). She serves on the editorial boards of Historical Materialism: Journal of Critical Marxist Theory, The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg (Verso Books) and Transform: Review - European Review of Politics. In 2024, she received first prize for the best text on women philosophers from the Institute of Philosophy in Zagreb for her article “The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg: The Unity of the Concrete Totality and Historical Reality”, published in the Brazilian journal Dissonância: Critical Theory Journal. Her research encompasses Rosa Luxemburg, Marxist-feminism, social and political philosophy, Marxism, the history of women’s struggles in Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, and the Yugoslav Praxis School. She has edited several books and published over 100 articles, essays, and translations in journals and edited volumes internationally. She has been a guest lecturer at universities across Germany, England, Italy, Portugal, Latvia, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Serbia, Greece, Lithuania, and the United States, and has held research fellowships in Graz, Budapest, Warsaw, Sofia, and Ljubljana. She is a socialist activist and member of the feminist grassroots collective fAKTIV, which, among other activities, organises the annual night march on 8 March in Zagreb.
No Body Left Behind: Rosa Luxemburg on Gender, Labour, and Colonial Violence
When Rosa Luxemburg wrote that capital “fattens itself on the lifeblood it sucks from the worker,” she articulated a visceral truth about capitalism’s extractive relation to labouring bodies. Her early writings from the Polish socialist press (1892–1903) reveal this relation as fundamentally gendered, racialised, and colonial. Her labour protection series from these early newspapers exposes how protective legislation manages rather than liberates women workers’ bodies within the exploitative wage system—a critique that resonates with contemporary Marxist-feminist debates over reproductive labour, the devaluation of care work, and gendered precarity in the global proletariat. Luxemburg’s documentation of German colonial genocide in Namibia demonstrates how capital accumulation requires the simultaneous exploitation of racialised and gendered bodies in both periphery and centre. Her texts remain urgent for movements confronting racial capitalism, neoliberal feminism, and ongoing colonial expropriation, offering a revolutionary insight that insists on the unity of emancipatory struggles.
Ankica Čakardić holds the Chair of Social Philosophy and Philosophy of Gender and is Head of the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. Her books include Dionysian Socialism: Yugoslav Praxis School and Feminist Rewriting (forthcoming 2026), The Rebellious Mind: Essays in Radical Social Philosophy (2021), Like a Clap of Thunder: Three Essays on Rosa Luxemburg (2019), and Spectres of Transition: Social History of Capitalism (2019). She serves on the editorial boards of Historical Materialism: Journal of Critical Marxist Theory, The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg (Verso Books) and Transform: Review - European Review of Politics. In 2024, she received first prize for the best text on women philosophers from the Institute of Philosophy in Zagreb for her article “The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg: The Unity of the Concrete Totality and Historical Reality”, published in the Brazilian journal Dissonância: Critical Theory Journal. Her research encompasses Rosa Luxemburg, Marxist-feminism, social and political philosophy, Marxism, the history of women’s struggles in Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, and the Yugoslav Praxis School. She has edited several books and published over 100 articles, essays, and translations in journals and edited volumes internationally. She has been a guest lecturer at universities across Germany, England, Italy, Portugal, Latvia, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Serbia, Greece, Lithuania, and the United States, and has held research fellowships in Graz, Budapest, Warsaw, Sofia, and Ljubljana. She is a socialist activist and member of the feminist grassroots collective fAKTIV, which, among other activities, organises the annual night march on 8 March in Zagreb.
No Body Left Behind: Rosa Luxemburg on Gender, Labour, and Colonial Violence
When Rosa Luxemburg wrote that capital “fattens itself on the lifeblood it sucks from the worker,” she articulated a visceral truth about capitalism’s extractive relation to labouring bodies. Her early writings from the Polish socialist press (1892–1903) reveal this relation as fundamentally gendered, racialised, and colonial. Her labour protection series from these early newspapers exposes how protective legislation manages rather than liberates women workers’ bodies within the exploitative wage system—a critique that resonates with contemporary Marxist-feminist debates over reproductive labour, the devaluation of care work, and gendered precarity in the global proletariat. Luxemburg’s documentation of German colonial genocide in Namibia demonstrates how capital accumulation requires the simultaneous exploitation of racialised and gendered bodies in both periphery and centre. Her texts remain urgent for movements confronting racial capitalism, neoliberal feminism, and ongoing colonial expropriation, offering a revolutionary insight that insists on the unity of emancipatory struggles.
