Leo Panitch

Leo Victor Panitch (3 May 1945 – 19 December 2020) was a distinguished research professor of political science and a Canada Research Chair in comparative political economy at York University. From 1985 until the 2021 edition, he served as co-editor of the "Socialist Register", which describes itself as "an annual survey of movements and ideas from the standpoint of the independent new left". Panitch himself saw the "Register" as playing a major role in developing Marxism's conceptual framework for advancing a democratic, co-operative and egalitarian socialist alternative to capitalist competition, exploitation, and insecurity.
Since his appointment as a Canada Research Chair in 2002, Panitch focused his academic research and writing on the spread of global capitalism. He argued that this process of globalization is being led by the American state through agencies such as the US Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Panitch saw globalization as a form of imperialism, but argued that the American Empire is an "informal" one in which the US sets rules for trade and investment in partnership with other sovereign, but less powerful capitalist states. His book "The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire" (2012), written with his close friend and university colleague Sam Gindin, traces the development of American-led globalization over more than a century. In 2013, the book was awarded the Deutscher Memorial Prize in the United Kingdom for best and most creative work in or about the Marxist tradition and in 2014 it won the Rik Davidson/SPE Book Prize for the best book in political economy by a Canadian.
Panitch was the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and nine books including "Working-Class Politics in Crisis: Essays on Labour and the State" (1986), "The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour" (2001) and "Renewing Socialism: Transforming Democracy, Strategy and Imagination" (2008) in which he argued that capitalism is inherently unjust and undemocratic.
Early life and education.
Panitch was born on 3 May 1945, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He grew up in Winnipeg's North End, a working-class neighbourhood that, as he observed decades later, produced "many people of a radical left political disposition." His parents were Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. His father, Max Panitch, was born in the southern Ukraine town of Uscihtsa, but remained behind in Bucharest, Romania, with a fervently religious uncle when his family emigrated to Winnipeg in 1912. He was reunited with them in 1922 and by that time was well on his way to becoming a socialist and a supporter of Labor Zionism. As a sewer and cutter of fur coats (an 'aristocrat of the needle trade'), he was active in the Winnipeg labour movement and the Manitoba CCF and its successor, the New Democratic Party of Manitoba (NDP).
Panitch's mother, Sarah, was an orphan from Rivne in central Ukraine who had come to Winnipeg in 1921 at the age of 13 accompanied only by her older sister, Rose. Max and Sarah married in 1930. Panitch's older brother Hersh was born in 1934.
Panitch attended a secular Jewish school named after the radical Polish-Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz. During a conference on Jewish radicalism in Winnipeg held in 2001, Panitch said the school grew out of the socialist fraternal mutual aid societies that Jewish immigrants had established. These included the Arbeiter Ring also known as the Workmen's Circle. Panitch told the conference that its first declaration of principles, adopted in 1901, began with the words: "The spirit of the Workmen's Circle is freedom of thought and endeavour towards solidarity of the workers, faithfulness to the interests of its class in the struggle against oppression and exploitation." He added: "As such institutions multiplied and spread through the Jewish community, for a great many people and for a considerable number of decades to come, to be Jewish, especially in a city like Winnipeg, came to mean to be radical."
Panitch received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and political science in 1967 from the University of Manitoba. During his undergraduate years, he realized how much the writings of Karl Marx and the evolution of historical materialism helped him understand capitalism and its relation to the state. One of his teachers, Cy Gonick, introduced him to ideas about industrial democracy in which workers would control and manage their own workplaces. The 1960s generation of the New Left, Panitch writes, was impelled towards socialism by "our experience with and observation of the inequalities, irrationalities, intolerances and hierarchies of our own capitalist societies."
At age 22, Panitch left Winnipeg and moved to London, England, where he earned his Master of Science degree in 1968 at the London School of Economics (LSE) and his Doctor of Philosophy degree from LSE in 1974. His doctoral thesis was entitled "The Labour Party and the Trade Unions". It was published as "Social Democracy and Industrial Militancy" in 1976 by Cambridge University Press. British sociologist Ralph Miliband was his Thesis advisor.
Academic work, writing and activism.
Panitch taught at Carleton University between 1972 and 1984, was a Professor of Political Science at York University from 1984, and served as Carleton Chair of the Department of Political Science from 1988 to 1994. In 2002, he was appointed Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy at York. The appointment was renewed in 2009. His research involved examining the role of the American state and multinational corporations in the evolution of global capitalism.
After his text "The Canadian State: Political Economy and Political Power" was published in 1977 by the University of Toronto Press, Panitch became the General Co-editor of its "State and Economic Life" book series in 1979, serving in that role until 1995. He was also co-founded the Canadian academic journal "Studies in Political Economy" in 1979 and played a role in establishing Carleton's Institute for Political Economy in the 1980s.
He was politically active in the Movement for an Independent Socialist Canada and the Ottawa Committee for Labour Action, the two main organizational successors to The Waffle after it was expelled from the NDP in the early 1970s. In the 1980s, he was a regular columnist ("Panitch on Politics") for the independent socialist magazine, "Canadian Dimension", and remained active in socialist political circles, in particular the "Socialist Project" in Toronto. He was inducted as an Academic Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1995, and was also a member of the Marxist Institute and the Committee on Socialist Studies as well as the Canadian Political Science Association.
In addition to the 33 annual volumes of the "Socialist Register" he edited from 1985, he was the author of over 100 scholarly articles and nine books, including "From Consent to Coercion: The Assault on Trade Union Freedoms;" "A Different Kind of State: Popular Power and Democratic Administration"; "The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour"; "American Empire and the Political Economy of Global Finance"; and "In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives". Panitch saw the "Register" as a crucial link between the politics of the New Left and those of Raplph Miliband, his mentor and the 1946 founder of the journal. As editor, Panitch strove to produce works that were at once easily readable in prose and difficult to digest in content.
At the "Globalization, Justice and Democracy" symposium at Delhi University on 11 November 2010), Panitch drew on his book "In and Out of Crisis" (with Greg Albo and Sam Gindin). The book and symposium argued that the left's lack of ambition during the global economic crisis was more debilitating than its lack of capacity. He outlined immediate reforms that could lead to fundamental changes in class relations, including nationalizing banks to turn them into public utilities; demanding universal public pensions to replace private, employer-sponsored ones; and free health care, education and public transit to escape capitalism's drive to turn public needs into marketable, profit-generating commodities.
Personal life.
Panitch married Melanie Pollock of Winnipeg in 1967. She is a longtime activist and human rights advocate who teaches in the School of Disability Studies at Ryerson University in Toronto. In 2006, Melanie Panitch earned a doctorate in social welfare from the City University of New York. Her thesis, on the history of the Canadian Association for Community Living, focused on mothers' campaigns to close institutions and gain human rights for disabled Canadians. In 2007, it was published as "Disability, Mothers and Organization: Accidental Activists".
The Panitches had two children. Maxim is a photographer, writer, and Scrabble champion, while Vida is a philosophy professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario.
Panitch spoke three languages: English, French, and Yiddish. He and his wife lived in Toronto, Ontario.
Leo Panitch died on 19 December 2020 of viral pneumonia associated with COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, which he contracted in hospital while receiving treatment for multiple myeloma.