Version imprimableInternational Viewpoint has never been read by so many people. The first three quarters of 2026 brought more visitors to the site than in 2022, 2023 and 2024 added together. This year we expect twice as many visits as in 2025. On 8 October 2026 we had more visitors in a single day (121,835) than in an average week in October 2023 (90,924) — a third more.
Where do these new readers come from? Overwhelmingly from search. Google alone has sent close to two million visits, and search rewards depth: the more of our history sits online, the more of it people find. Facebook brings a couple of hundred thousand more. Something newer is showing up in the logs as well, small for now but worth noticing: readers arriving by way of AI assistants, which increasingly point people towards us when they ask about the Fourth International, about Ernest Mandel, about the wars and revolutions we have covered for more than four decades.
International Viewpoint was founded in 1982, in Paris, as the English magazine of the Fourth International, returning after five years combined with Intercontinental Press to an independent magazine under the responsibility of the Fourth International leadership like Inprecor, our French-language sister. Forty-four years of reporting and argument have been documented: the first decades were in print and the last two are live on our site.
Reaching out to our readers
The current issue accounts for only about seven per cent of visits. Close to sixty per cent go to back issues of the magazine. The remaining thirty per cent go to everything else: the features, the reviews, the news, the resolutions of the Fourth International and its world congresses, the archives of Ernest Mandel and Daniel Bensaïd.
Since January 2026 we have been sending a monthly newsletter. It reaches just over two thousand people already, and above all: it pulls readers back to the contemporary articles they would otherwise have missed.
All of this has been built on very little, largely by volunteers on the editorial, translating and technical sides. This has limits, and they are starting to show. We are amateurs at the machinery, and sometimes it shows some monthly PDF editions, for instance, still will not display properly on the site, and readers can find them only because the Marxist Internet Archive hosts them for us.
Our systems need improvement: our financial appeal is straightforward, and your money has somewhere concrete to go.
Where will your money go?
The first call is hosting: more readers mean larger bills, every month. Beyond that we need to be able to call on professional technical help to keep the archive stable as it grows, to get the PDFs working.
There is an important thing we want to do and cannot yet manage. The first two decades of International Viewpoint, from before the online text archive begins, exist for the most part only on paper and in scans. Every one of those pages we bring online becomes something a reader somewhere can find, years from now, when they go looking. The same is true of the documents of the Fourth International. That is not nostalgia. These resources would mean readers could access historical and international experiences that help them better solve today’s challenges.
We cannot promise that everyone who lands on an old article through a search result will stay, or read on, or ever grasp the tradition they have stumbled into. That is not in our gift. But the repeated doubling of readership reflects the quality of our authors, their translators, and the rich political experience of the sections of the Fourth International and the activists we work alongside. What we promise is that the record will be there when it is wanted: as complete as we can make it, searchable, and free. Keeping that promise is what your donation pays for.
To donate simply follow this link: Donate then enter an amount of your choice.
