"The world described by Marx and Engels... is recognizably the world we live in 150 years later." - Eric Hobsbawm (author of The Age of Extremes) "Rosa Luxemburg was a brilliant, brave and independent woman, passionately internationalist and anti-war, a believer in the people's 'spontaneity' in the cause of freedom; a woman who saw herself as Marx's philosophical heir." - Adrienne Rich "I thank Che Guevara for his daring as a revolutionary and also his writings and speeches." - Alice Walker "If you are curious and open to the life around you, if you are troubled as to why, how and by whom political power is held and used, if you sense there must be good intellectual reasons for your unease, if your curiosity and openness drive you toward wishing to act with others, to 'do something,' you already have much in common with the writers of the three essays in this book." - Adrienne Rich (from her Introduction)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and founded the First International Workingmen's Association. Rosa Luxemburg was a leader of the German Social Democratic Federation and jailed for her opposition to WWI. She was assassinated in 1919. Ernesto Che Guevara was born in Argentina and became a central leader of the Cuban Revolution. He was killed on a guerrilla mission in Bolivia in 1967.