Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and has in...

Friedrich Engels was a German social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observatio...

W.E.B. Du Bois was an early African-American civil rights leader and scholar and the first non-white person to receive a doctorate from Harvard University. He was an outspoken critic of the social inequalities that existed in the US during...

Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish-born German Marxist political theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary. She was a theorist of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland, later becoming involved in the German SPD, followed by...

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He served as the leader of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1917, and then concurrently as Premier of the Soviet Union from...

Became a revolutionary in 1896. Later worked with Lenin on Iskra in 1902. He broke with Lenin the next year over the nature of the revolutionary party and aligned himself with the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Par...

Chen Duxiu was a Chinese revolutionary socialist, educator, philosopher, and author, who co-founded the Chinese Communist Party (with Li Dazhao) in 1921, serving from 1921 to 1927 as its first General Secretary. Chen was a leading figure in...

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Georgian-born Soviet revolutionary and political leader. He governed the Soviet Union as dictator from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953, serving as Premier of the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1953 and as...

Li Dazhao was a Chinese intellectual who co-founded the Communist Party of China with Chen Duxiu and other early communists in 1921. Li was a nationalist and believed that the peasantry in China were to play an important role in China's...

Ho Chi Minh (meaning "Ho, Enlightened Will") was a Vietnamese revolutionary and statesman, who later became Prime Minister (1946 -1955) and President (1955 - 1969) of North Vietnam. He was a leading force in trying to re-unite North Vietna...

Josip Broz Tito was a Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman, serving in various roles from 1943 until his death in 1980. During World War II he was the leader of the Partisans, often regarded as the most effective resistance movement in occu...

Mao Zedong or Mao Tse-tung, also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary, poet, political theorist and founding father of the People's Republic of China, which he governed as the Chairman of the Communist Party of China...

Cornelis Gerard Anton de Kom was a Surinamese resistance fighter and anti-colonialist author. On May 10, De Kom was sent to The Netherlands without trial and exiled from his native country. He was unemployed and continued writing his boo...

One of the old guard of the Chinese Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping became the party's Secretary General in 1954, but was purged by Chairman Mao in 1966 for his strong objections to the excesses of the Great Leap Forward. By 1974 Deng had be...

Marinus (Rinus) van der Lubbe was a Dutch council communist convicted of, and executed for, setting fire to the German Reichstag building on 27 February 1933, an event known as the Reichstag fire. According to the Berlin police, van der...