Version imprimableIn 1995, the Fourth International (FI), having survived the fall of the Soviet Union, renounced the claim of being the “revolutionary vanguard party” of the working class. This signaled not dissolution, but a strategic reorientation in response to the decline of workers’ movements across the world. In this endeavor, the FI would “welcome into our ranks revolutionary Marxist organizations which do not necessarily claim to be ‘Trotskyist’ nor identify with our history, but which join us on the basis of a real programmatic coming together.” Today, the FI has joined remnants of revolutionary currents in different countries, including former Communist and Socialist Party elements, as well as Maoist and other Trotskyist milieus, in building new, broad parties capable of reassembling working-class forces. [2]
The FI’s key leader and the renowned Marxist political economist, Ernest Mandel, had always been optimistic about revolutionary prospects. Nevertheless, by the end of his life, he spoke in favor of this shift at the 1995 World Congress, which ratified this position as a definitive strategic orientation for the FI as it moved into the new century. But Mandel’s change in attitude came after years of skepticism and reckoning. Among the first in the FI to not only support this orientation, but also help put it into practice, was a lesser-known revolutionary from the United States. In 1995, as Mandel left the podium after his remarks, he immediately turned to this friend and comrade of twenty years, Joanna Misnik, and said, “This is for you, Joanna.” Joanna mentioned to me that that was one of the important moments of her life.
Joanna Misnik passed away in September 2025, after spending nearly six decades on the revolutionary left. She was also one of my most important mentors in the socialist movement. Joanna’s independence of thought and political influence shone in all of the spaces she organized. Mandel’s hat-tip to Joanna was an acknowledgment for a revolutionary who had the foresight—earlier than some of the FI’s most visible and prominent leaders—to recognize the need for the left to seriously reckon with objective conditions that are not in our favor. This sense of openness emerged from a lifetime of revolutionary activity across many different roles in broad movements.
Born during World War II, she grew up in a Polish American family in Cleveland, Ohio. One of four children, she was first exposed to the left by a few Jewish high school peers who were children of Communist Party members. Against the backdrop of a burgeoning civil rights movement, her political awakening was spurred by witnessing other white students’ racism against their Black peers. This experience led to a lifelong belief that any viable militant politics must be firmly grounded in uplifting the right of oppressed peoples to struggle for their own liberation. Joanna attended college briefly, but after she was arrested for selling marijuana, she jumped bail and went to Berkeley. There she participated in the Stop the Draft marches to the Oakland Induction Center. Radicalized by the anti-Vietnam war movement, she returned home when receiving word that the charges were fortunately dropped.
Antiwar and Party Organizer
Cleveland hosted several antiwar conferences that called the major national demonstrations, so it was a perfect place for her to deepen her involvement in the antiwar movement. The three political forces that provided the movement’s infrastructure were the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and pacifist forces. Attracted to the SWP because of its “Bring the Troops Home Now” orientation, she was further inspired by its sister organization’s involvement in the May 1968 general strike in France.
At 25, she was dispatched by the SWP to New York to lead the New York City branch of the SWP’s youth wing, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA). A multi-ethnic group of hundreds of high schoolers and undergraduates, it played a leading role in the national anti-war movement. In New York, she was further inspired by the anti-colonial movements across the Third World around that time. In 1973, she moved to Europe, with the SWP’s permission, to assist with the editorial work of the Fourth International’s new publication, Inprecor [3] only returning at the end of the decade.
Seeking Unity
It was in Joanna’s New York days that first developed her core political values in the Trotskyist movement: fundamental faith in the power of workers’ self-activity and revolutionary organization; the need for cultivating united fronts with other movements of workers and the oppressed; principled opposition to forms of bureaucracy of all stripes, from Stalinism to trade union conservatism. These allowed her to be in the midst of many different struggles against oppression, from fighting for abortion rights, to supporting working-class Black G.I.s returning from the war, to challenging homophobia in the SWP.
For Joanna, these values did not crystallize into dogma. Exposure to a variety of currents enabled her to think creatively about the conjunctural questions of tactics and strategies. Attuned to the objective conditions that molded political possibilities (and limitations) around her, she did not hesitate to act independently from the orders she was given from the men in power around her. Throughout her political life, she was alert to opportunities for different currents of the left to unify around common demands and political priorities. As an antiwar organizer she stood her ground with Victor Gotbaum, the head of AFSCME DC 37 (the biggest municipal union in the city at the time). He had demanded she “get rid of all the Stalinists in the labor movement” in order for his union’s participation in a citywide antiwar rally. She refused, telling him that it was “the time to unify.” (Gotbaum later acquiesced and joined as a speaker with “no strings attached.”)
She also found the SWP’s intransigent rivalry with the leading group of the New Left, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a sectarian mistake. In 1968, the SDS led a campus-wide campaign at Columbia University around opposing university research for the U.S. military and against building a gymnasium in Harlem that would be only open to Columbia students. Joanna sidestepped the national YSA leadership, who had instructed her to hold back the YSA branch from participating because the campaign was led by SDS, and led the branch to join the campus occupation. She recognized the need to be present in broader militant movements.
During this time she also witnessed her share of intra-left conflicts up close. This solidified her distaste for sectarianism that would shape the rest of her political life. LaRouchites (a formerly left grouping that became a far-right cult) violently disrupted one panel on which she spoke, although she was unharmed. At a mass anti-war rally she helped organize at Bryant Park, which featured Pete Seeger and Nina Simone, members of the Spartacist League sabotaged the sound system, momentarily throwing the event into disarray. She recalled Simone and others scrambling up on stage to help fix the sound system and restore order.
From New York to Paris
Joanna’s New York days were to be the most visible and public moments of her political life. The rest of her career on the left involved much more unglamorous, though essential, revolutionary work. In the mid-70s, she moved to Europe to join her partner, also a SWP cadre, to help with the Fourth International’s new publication Inprecor. She desired this transfer to Europe as she wanted to learn about the more open-minded, pluralistic milieu of the European left that she had glimpsed through their occasional visits to New York and read about their campaigns in The Militant, the party’s weekly. There she learned about the past disputes, such as the FI majority’s support for the leading force in the Algerian Revolution, the National Liberation Front (FLN), which the SWP opposed. She found herself drawn to the majority position. Learning about the SWP’s opposition in this debate was the first time, as she recalled, that she began to identify it as a tendency of many in the Trotskyist movement to be obsessed with building “The Party,” the notion that only one’s own group with the correct program can “cleanly, and without malice, run something.”
Over the next few years she worked nearly daily in small flats in Brussels and Paris, meticulously typesetting essays and reports from comrades around the world that filled the pages of Inprecor. Exposed to revolutionaries of all stripes who would pass by the headquarters, she cultivated her internationalist perspective. She quipped that she had always found herself working as “a typist for every major historical event.” This gave Joanna the space to “listen intently”—to the words she relayed on the page, and the fiery discussions among revolutionaries around her. Thus, she gained a unique perspective into the lives of the FI’s leading members. She did not simply relate to them as thinkers and writers, but often as someone in the background who observed their personalities up close, digesting their interventions. She drew her own conclusions as she witnessed the heated political debates that unfolded in meetings with global revolutionaries. For example, she found the Portuguese Revolution (1974-5) “glorious” and appreciated meeting the revolutionaries whom the FI supported. However, she was among the few to be skeptical that the uprising would directly turn into a socialist revolution. This sense of circumspection would later enable Joanna, earlier than most of her peers, to understand the adverse conditions that would confront the revolutionary left.
As the SWP left the FI’s international center in the early 80s (which presaged a more definitive split with the FI later in the decade), the party abruptly recalled Joanna. At this time, the SWP was dispatching its cadres into industrial jobs, claiming it was necessary to prepare for a working class soon to revolt. Back in Cleveland, Joanna took up a series of factory jobs in steel, garment, furniture, and other industries. This rank-and-file experience gave her invaluable insight into the American working class. In garment, she observed how there was rarely a union meeting called, and that their union representative would simply negotiate contracts for the workers without their input. She paid close attention to and supported any signs of militancy among her coworkers, particularly focused on racial dynamics. At a steel fabricating plant where she worked, she reported an exchange between her coworkers on the shop floor, who debated whether the U.S. should intervene in the Iran hostage crisis. Those who were Vietnam veterans, having witnessed the horrors of war, were more “conscious” about not recklessly sending U.S. troops abroad. She observed that it was a “Black veteran [who] clinched the argument” at the end—and “nobody said anything after that.” [4]
Another time, she and other white co-workers stood in solidarity with their Black counterparts who faced discrimination at a local bar. But moments of solidarity were snuffed out by the devastation of the industrial working class that she witnessed firsthand as neoliberalism intensified.
A New Beginning
By the early 1980s, the SWP had completed its turn into a thoroughly insular and undemocratic sect under the leadership of Jack Barnes, who announced the SWP’s break with Trotskyism and purged those who did not toe Barnes’ new line. Expelled with more than 100 others, Joanna had to begin again. She joined a work brigade to Nicaragua, cooking for the Sandinistas in the kitchens as they fended off Contra attacks near the border with Honduras. In the kitchen with Sandinista women militants, she remembered having a better lesson in revolutionary politics than the formal political education and discussions the foreigners gathered for in the evenings. She observed these women organizing their own work, running their workplaces, reading to each other, and discussing how much they should receive for their labor. Her receptivity to the experiences and power of women in the global South to imaginatively and autonomously fight for a better world—which sometimes entailed struggling against their own leaders and parties—crucially shaped her politics for the rest of her life.
It was her experience with revolutionaries and militant workers across multiple continents that enabled Joanna to be particularly sensitive to the objective conditions of world revolution. By this point, she was already reaching the conclusion that the FI would later formally adopt: in this global downturn, class consciousness was fragmenting. As the left’s fortunes declined, she remained steadfast in her revolutionary politics, realistically calling on fellow revolutionaries to revise their strategies in the face of the new reality. This meant that revolutionaries must look toward dialogue, engagement, and regroupment (when appropriate) across different currents and traditions. After a brief stint in Socialist Action with other expelled SWP members, she helped form the short-lived Socialist Unity, which soon regrouped with militants from other Trotskyist and post-Trotskyist traditions. Workers’ Power, the International Socialists (IS), and a Madison-based socialist-feminist collective came together to form Solidarity.
In order to help craft principles of unity and build a founding conference for what became Solidarity, Joanna was part of a team that moved to Detroit, where the IS had an office. Contained in the principles was an understanding that there could be different analyses of the Soviet Union and Cuba, yet a firm commitment to opposing U.S. intervention. At first, Ernest Mandel had warned Joanna that no single revolutionary organization could accommodate revolutionaries with differing assessments of the class character of the Soviet Union, to which Joanna replied, “Watch us.”
Another challenge in bringing together militants from different traditions was how to allow those expelled from the SWP their right to maintain a relationship with the FI. The solution was to form an FI caucus that Solidarity members were free to join. Over the years members appreciated having that international relationship, and the group as a whole affiliated with the FI. Solidarity did not proclaim itself as a new revolutionary vanguard of the working class, but attempted to draw from the best of different traditions to help rebuild a broad current of militants in the American working class. This meant being open to a continuing process of regroupment or refoundation. “Look outward,” as Joanna liked to say.
Like other founders of Solidarity, Joanna believed that a new vision across different currents of the socialist left was not only made possible, but especially so with the fall of the Soviet Union. The key basis of Stalinism, that is, an uncritical commitment to the Soviet Union, was no longer relevant for the left. She continued to advocate for this orientation with other leaders in the international arena as a member of the FI’s United Secretariat in the 1990s. By this point, Joanna’s impulse was spurred not by revolutionary prospects, but, on the contrary, by increasingly harrowing global conditions. Her strategic recommendation begins from an honest acknowledgment of reality: by the end of the 20th century revolutionary socialism had suffered a world-historic setback. With some exceptions—as in the workers’ movements in South Africa, Poland, Brazil, and South Korea—there was no longer the consciousness of a “class-for-itself.” This didn’t mean that revolutionary principles have been thoroughly discredited, or that our movements will never revive—but that they need a new beginning that truthfully reckons with the political setbacks suffered at the hands of the ruling class. As Joanna wrote in 1992, “the working classes are in retreat, in terms of their ability to see an alternative vision of society and to organize for it.” [5]
The revolutionary socialist left had become an insignificant minority within the working class. The objective basis for revolutionary vanguards had ceased to exist in a meaningful sense. Any revival of the global communist movement must begin with an understanding of these conditions. To use Lenin’s terms, there are times when revolutionaries must know how to retreat in an orderly way, as he reflected on the problems of war communism and the counterrevolution against workers’ uprisings across Europe after World War I. But the scale of downturn and defeat of the left since the 1990s was much deeper and more vast than those times. This was the task that confronted Joanna and those revolutionaries that survived the wave of disillusionment that shattered what’s left of the ‘68 generation: how to find a strategic orientation to rebuild class power—the necessary conditions for revolutionaries to thrive—when essential elements of class consciousness and organization had fragmented all across the world.
This sense of clarity, as Joanna herself recounts, only developed as she matured as a socialist. In an exchange in Bulletin In Defense of Marxism, she admits that she had “a somewhat mechanical vision” of how to build working-class politics toward a U.S. labor party when she was younger. However, as she puts it, “life and the passage of time and events should sensitize us to the sheer complexity of the process of breaking labor from class collaborationism. Partial, hesitant first steps, uneven in terms of region, sector, race, and gender, could well add up to what I now understand will be a process and not a conference. This does not deny the need to continue to pose the ‘if’—‘if the labor movement broke’, etc.” [6]
Joanna wrote these words in the aftermath of the defeat of the Rainbow Coalition’s second and final effort in supporting Jesse Jackson’s bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination (1988). Her contribution to the debate among revolutionaries of the ‘80s in a Solidarity pamphlet about the possibilities and limitations of Jackson’s campaign is perhaps the most cited of her written works. [7]
Her attitude toward the Rainbow Coalition was nuanced. She was absolutely clear about the historic importance of the Jackson campaign as a shining beacon for a class under siege by Reagan’s administration. His campaign, as she puts it, expressed “one of the few gauges of working-class sentiment and combativity around. The response of white workers and farmers to this Black-led revolt has struck a real blow against racial divisions in our society.” Yet there was a fatal contradiction that “both misdirected hopes with its strategy toward the Democratic Party and hedged its bets by encouraging independent, self-reliant protests, strikes and mobilizations on many fronts.” Ultimately, “though Solidarity is not a part of the Rainbow because of our opposition to working in the Democratic Party, we do not feel distanced from the thousands of activists who worked for Jackson thinking that this would hasten urgently needed social change. We look forward to continued discussion about the strategy for our empowerment, especially after the promised Rainbow post-Atlanta convention.”
She was serious about cultivating this alliance with the revolutionaries on the left rallying behind Jackson’s campaign, despite disagreements. She spoke as a critical voice at panels with Jackson supporters, including many from the New Communist Movement. Such a perspective was unpopular among the numerous activists rooted in communities of color on the campaign trail. But even in her disagreements, she acknowledged the passion and historic value of the campaign—that all of these activists here were doing something meaningful. She urged everyone to consider the limitations of fighting for the Democratic Party nomination and stressed using the momentum to cultivate an independent political vehicle.
After the Rainbow campaign faltered and the Soviet Union fell, Joanna did not hesitate to continue her efforts to find common ground with other revolutionary currents, and devise a new strategy to reorient the left. Along with those from other currents, from Max Elbaum to Ethan Young, she approached different organizations—Maoist, Trotskyist, New Communist, etc.—urging everyone to sit down “as fellow revolutionaries to plot out what’s important and what’s not for the 21st century … and pool our forces.”
To Joanna, in the face of the downturn of revolutionary prospects, such differences were secondary compared to the larger task of rebuilding a general movement of the working class. The surviving revolutionaries of the 20th century must draw from different experiences and traditions “to locate the possibilities, the pace and the form in which the class struggle may develop, in order for ourselves to reach strategic conclusions.” These conclusions might then be translated into concrete programmatic assessments and tasks, providing a new foundation for regroupment among revolutionary organizations, rather than remaining constrained and divided by 20th-century labels and frameworks (while also remembering their lessons).
Joanna always felt that her political contributions were minimal in the grand scheme of history. But she was proud to claim this strategic template as Solidarity’s and her small but important contribution to the FI. When she first argued for the FI’s recognition of Solidarity, this experiment was welcome, but Mandel and some FI leaders initially greeted these efforts with some skepticism. But with the 1995 resolution the FI began to welcome pluralism and openness toward other revolutionary currents, which continues today across continents.
In the ensuing decades, Joanna continued to reach out to every opportunity that arose. In the 1990s, she supported and organized with the Committees of Correspondence [8], led by many Black leaders who were in the Communist Party. She collaborated with Solidarity members and other socialists to establish Revolutionary Work in Our Times (RWIOT) schools, where revolutionaries from different traditions could engage in discussions. She helped form and lead LeftElect, which gathered leaders from groups as diverse as the Black nationalist New Afrikan Independence Party and Cooperation Jackson, the post-Trotskyist International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Socialist Alternative, and broader efforts at independent politics like the Richmond Progressive Alliance and Vermont Progressive Party.
Reform and Revolution
These efforts didn’t develop momentum. Nonetheless, through Solidarity, she kept the flames of revolutionary socialism and workers’ power alive. In this period of downturn, Solidarity remained one of the few revolutionary organizations left that funneled radicals into unions, fighting for reforms in the workplace to rebuild class consciousness at the most granular level of the working class: the New Directions caucus among transit workers in New York, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, rank and file forces in the Chicago Teachers Union, etc. It did its best to maintain an infrastructure to bridge these efforts with larger struggles against oppression, from protesting further American imperial adventures, such as the Gulf War, to building feminist movements. One can find the legacy of these initiatives in institutions like Labor Notes, and the revival of rank-and-file labor organizing in DSA. That Solidarity never became the new “vanguard” for working-class movements did not bother Joanna. She once quipped that “the best thing to happen for Solidarity was for it to go out of business” by “blending in” with other currents as part of a “new beginning” in the form of a broader revival of mass socialist organization.
During this time, Joanna relocated to Chicago, where she worked at SEIU 73. For years, macular degeneration affected her ability to read and eventually she became legally blind. But initially, this did not hamper her involvement in politics. Her vision of socialist unity would come to fruition in the last decade of her life, as DSA grew to tens of thousands of members during Bernie Sanders’ first presidential run. I was radicalized around this time and met Joanna as one of the earliest and staunchest proponents of joining and building DSA in Solidarity. Joanna insisted that what we were doing was not “entryism.” In other words, it was not about trying to enter DSA as a small, organized core with a predetermined plan to take it over and win power for ourselves. We joined with the intention of seriously building it, organizing with, and learning from, the tens of thousands of people newly radicalized to socialism. On this point, she was unyielding: revolutionaries of all stripes have failed in the 20th century; so we should bring what we can to movements today, just as we are open to solutions from a new generation. For this reason, she was wary of the outgrowth of rivaling caucuses in DSA, or seeing new members joining these too early in their development, fearing that they would turn into the destructive factionalism she had witnessed most of her time on the left.
While debates raged on the socialist left about the potential or limitations of DSA, the reason for Joanna’s enthusiasm for the revived organization was straightforward. After attending branch and party meetings of eight or nine people for most of her political life, she was ecstatic about being regularly in a room of over a hundred people who identified as socialists in her Chicago chapter. That their politics may be undeveloped was of little importance. This was a whole new generation of young people calling themselves socialists, eager to hit the ground running to change the world around them in the name of socialism. Nonetheless, she was attuned to the lack of racial diversity in DSA early on. Thus, she championed efforts that would enable DSA members to consistently assist and win the trust of disenfranchised communities of color through action. In this vein, she saw DSA’s early mutual aid efforts as positive, like fixing brake lights for community members in poor neighborhoods to reduce police interactions. She also insisted that DSA must try to affiliate and build with Black organizations, both “cementing our common bond beyond a punctual coalitional meeting” while also “honoring that Black and Brown organizations [independently] exist.”
Joanna’s dedication to unity and pluralism did not preclude her from taking strong and even uncompromising positions. She could be polemical, well known among her comrades for the intensity of her wit and the sharpness of her interventions. I witnessed her fiercely and incisively defend unpopular positions in Solidarity conventions, including ones with which I disagreed. She rarely minced words, always making the most penetrating political remarks with brevity, clarity, and grit. She could also be capable of much care and mirth, with her hearty welcomes to comrades, many of whom she would share quite a few pints of beer or cigarettes with after political meetings well past her mid-70s.
Though I never had the pleasure of living in the same city as her, for a while personal and political commitments over the years have brought me to Chicago multiple times a year. Each time I processed my recent political activities with her and listened to her assessments and suggestions for hours at a time. These would continue over phone calls, especially during my time on staff in Solidarity and when she was on the NC, when she also advised me. I once told her that she played a foundational role not only in my own political upbringing, but also in many new generations of activists in Solidarity. She found this amusing, claiming that all she did was hang out with young comrades. The most she claimed to do was out-drinking and staying up later than all of us.
In any case, Joanna was sure that no vision of revolutionary politics would be meaningful without masses of people, from longtime revolutionaries to new ones, coming together to figure out how to rebuild a class for itself together. She remarked in 2016, while socialists must still commit to a horizon of building a mass party independent from the two-party system, we must also understand that “the small and splintered revolutionary left cannot bring this party into being by patiently explaining it. Real social forces must converge in action to create such a party.” [9]
This sentiment echoes that of the Chilean Marxist Marta Harnecker, for whom Joanna and I both share an admiration. Harnecker once said that a vanguard is “not something a party bestows upon itself but something that is earned through struggle and that there can’t be a vanguard without a rearguard.” [10]
No Vanguard Without “Rearguard”
How to rebuild this rearguard is not a question that can be answered with past dogmas. It demands a socialism that isn’t “biblical,” and “not holding on to one single model of revolution.” It cannot be built on “fetishizing 20th-century trends”—the Soviet Union, an orthodox conception of the “Leninist” party, etc. Nevertheless, it rests on the necessity of socialist organization that can foster genuine “social weight” in the working classes. This endeavor requires the efforts of old and new revolutionaries alike. Joanna’s final years were also marked by the rise of authoritarian and far-right movements on a scale never before seen in nearly a century. The global class struggle has now been squarely on the defensive. Once again, unifying movements (this time against the rising threat of fascism) was Joanna’s instinct. In this spirit, she wrote in 2020 that “unique and urgent circumstances may just require that we break with our old strategy of crying out for an independent electoral alternative when no significant one is there for us to hold up and champion. [11]
This was not a call for a political endorsement of Joe Biden’s campaign, but to prioritize a message of “Dump Trump, Fight Biden” at the ballot box as one among many tactics to fight the far right. While some of Joanna’s longtime comrades and I disagreed with this position, feeling that it bent the stick too far toward popular frontism, few of us questioned that her openness to update her positions and analyses was always grounded in doing whatever she believed would be best for the working classes to fortify themselves and live to fight another day—and eventually, to build offensive power.
This commitment meant being open to re-evaluating objective conditions and revising organizational and programmatic tasks—even modifying some of her own strategic positions and even articles of faith—while boldly and honestly defending these shifts and their consequences in the judgment of comrades. This courage to admit error and change course also meant opening yourself to the risk of new differences with others. But that risk is precisely the gambit of revolutionary politics, which should always be informed by a willingness to confront a world of class struggle always shrouded by the fog of war, and has little room for dogmas and guarantees. To try to change this world is to accept this risk. And to change the world demands understanding that no vision of unity would be politically valid without fellow revolutionaries openly struggling through their differences together in plain view. This is what Joanna Misnik never shied away from—which is what makes her among the most vital American revolutionary socialists of our time.
20 October 2025
Postscript: I am indebted to other close comrades of Joanna for also contributing to the archiving of her words and life. All uncited quotations refer to either one of two sources: oral history recordings with Joanna conducted by Simon Swartzman, Robin Peterson, and Isaac Silver in 2021; or Joanna’s Chicago talk about her political life in 2018 [12], moderated by Jacobin editor Micah Uetricht. In particular, I would like to thank Alex De Jong, Penelope Duggan, Dianne Feeley, David Finkel, Anne Krantz, Isaac Silver, and Alan Wald, for the editorial and other support in making this essay possible.
