International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

Joanna Misnik: A Tribute and Political Biography

Promise Li — 2025-10-23T10:43:58Z

Joanna Misnik (6 September 1943-3 September 2025) was a leading Fourth Internationalist in the United States for many decades. International Viewpoint published a number of tributes earlier. This substantive essay traces Joanna's political life and underlines her important contribution.

- In Memoriam - Obituaries and appreciations / United States (USA), Obituary, Fourth International

On the 2025 German elections

Jakob Schaefer, Promise Li — 2025-03-23T06:33:12Z

Promise Li, a socialist from Hong Kong now based in Los Angeles, interviews Jakob Schäfer for Borderless. Jacob is a retired steelworker, having served on the steering committee of the Network for Fighting Trade Unions (VKG). He is also a member of the International Sozialistische Organization (ISO) and the editor of the magazine Die Internationale. Promise is is a member of Tempest Collective and Solidarity, and has been active in higher education rank-and-file union work, international solidarity and antiwar campaigns, and Chinatown tenant organizing.. The interview was conducted on 25 February 2025 and appeared in Borderless on February 2025.

- Features / Germany

After the Fire: Reconstructing Los Angeles Towards Abolition

Promise Li — 2025-01-29T21:01:23Z

When the Eaton Fire first began its retreat from Altadena, I was in one of many self-organized mutual aid teams scattered across the area, cleaning up debris. Around this time, I connected with some Black community members who had just lost their homes. They had returned from evacuation almost immediately to help coordinate mutual aid for their neighbors. But they were harassed by the police as they tried to return to their homes. Hundreds of armed California National Guard, summoned by Los Angeles police and sheriffs, had effectively begun occupying parts of Altadena. The fires already disproportionately affected Western Altadena, the historically Black area of the city where most of the deaths have been located so far and where residents were given notices to evacuate hours after those in majority-white areas of Altadena were informed. [1]

- Features / Ecology and the Environment, Racism and Islamophobia

Imperialism as Antagonistic Cooperation

Promise Li — 2024-11-20T20:20:25Z

In the months before US Secretary of State Antony Blinken's uneasy visit to Beijing last year, the CEOs of J.P. Morgan, Starbucks, Apple, General Motors, and Tesla had amiable meetings with former Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang. Reaffirming what Xi Jinping and other Chinese ministers have declared on an annual basis, Qin assured Elon Musk that China “remain[s] committed to fostering a better market-oriented, law-based and internationalized business environment.” [1]

- Features / United States (USA), Brazil, Marxism, Economy, China, Imperialism

Protesters in Bangladesh Want an End to State Repression

Lydia Silva, Promise Li — 2024-08-03T07:54:00Z

In recent weeks, Bangladesh has seen the development of a major protest movement against the Awami League government of Sheikh Hasina. The protests began in opposition to a quota system that restricts access to civil service jobs. The authorities responded with a crackdown that has claimed more than two hundred lives, with thousands more still being held in custody.

- IV595 - August 2024 / Youth and student movements, Bangladesh

China and Israel have a long history of cooperating in repression

Promise Li — 2023-10-28T10:02:20Z

Overshadowed by its relationship with the US, Israel has also long enjoyed fruitful ties with China, now its second-largest trading partner — including a military-tech exchange that has helped the Chinese state repress its own population.

- IV585 - October 2023 / Palestine, United States (USA), China, Israel

China's Unarmed Prophets

Promise Li — 2023-07-19T16:18:54Z

Prophets Unarmed: Chinese Trotskyists in Revolution, War, Jail, and the Return from Limbo. Greg Benton editor.

Brill Historical Materialism Series, 2015; Haymarket Books, 2017, xvii + 1289 pages, $55 paperback.

- Reviews section / Fourth International, China

Zero-COVID, reopening, and the proliferation of state capitalisms

Promise Li — 2023-01-12T12:31:00Z

Despite different approaches toward the pandemic, the US and China share a commitment to capital accumulation.

- IV576 - January 2023 / China, Covid-19 Pandemic

Against Multipolar Imperialism

Promise Li — 2023-01-08T14:22:01Z

“How does this exactly change our strategy around international solidarity as socialists? We must rethink what “the main enemy is at home” means in practice. Of course, this is not to abandon the struggle against imperialism in the West, but to expand our horizons to target sites where different states intersect with each other and international institutions.”

- Features / Imperialism

50 years after Baodiao: How Hong Kong struggled against all nationalisms

Au Loong-Yu, Law Wing-sang , Mok Chiu-yu, Promise Li — 2022-01-12T22:52:50Z

“But the “Baodiao” movement (保釣運動)—short-hand for “Protect Diaoyutai” (釣魚臺) in Chinese—represents the first movement led by a generation of people in the city imbued with some inchoate sense of local consciousness (to which today's “Hongkonger” identity can be traced back), born and raised in Hong Kong upon the wave of mass migration from mainland China in the 1950s.”

- Features / Japan, China, Hong Kong, Historical events and figures