  Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas are still relevant today because they belong to a tradition of socialist thinking whose main concern is with freedom, its development in the course of global history, the obstacles to its realisation, and the different types of oppression that capitalist society entrenches, enables or fails to abolish. Luxemburg’s analysis of freedom as a philosophical concept is never explicitly brought out in her writings, but often appears embedded in a notion of historical agency – both individual and collective – which shares the humanism of classical Marxism. Socialism, Luxemburg argued, “is the first popular movement in the world that has set itself a goal and has established in the social life of a human being a conscious thought, a definite plan, the free will of mankind” (Luxemburg 1915 [RLR: 320]).