Definitely Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya. She was an absolute workhouse and often overlooked lynchpin in the early Soviet Union.

I suppose one of the problems is that those five heads are kind of the well known ‘theory giants’. And because of the history (the latter three also led the biggest revolutions and succeeded), it’s hard to think of equivalents, regardless of gender. But that feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. By looking at these five, we don’t see the others.

Luxemburg wrote enough to join them, but when I think of other women radicals, I mainly think of activists like Pankhurst, Afeni Shakur, and Coretta Scott King. As for other kinds of writers, there’s e.g. Silvia Federici and Angela Davis and others, but they’re kind of academic, so it’s not the same as revolutionary ‘leaders’ who also wrote theory.

But that still seems like the wrong way to view it as there are people like Kolontai (first woman cabinet member in the world, iirc), and the ‘big’ revolutions happened at a time when patriarchy left little room for women to lead and write. Communists were better at this than their liberal contemporaries, but still not great. That might have changed now?

Idk, I feel like there must be others who I just don’t know about, but who I should know about. I’m kind of hoping that someone tells me I’m wrong and tells me to read some XYZ, articulating what I just can’t quite explain (or can’t explain without resorting to sexism, which I suspect might be in this comment).

Gonzalo, of course!

/s

I’d probably put someone like Kim-Il-Sung considering that he contributed so much to Marxist theory in the DPRK.

But as for women I do have to agree with the poster that no one deserves that spot more than Rosa Luxemburg.

Vilma Espín