[The global left has suffered an irreparable loss with the passing
of Leo Panitch this weekend. He was incredibly warm, inviting, and
generous to others. And he remained committed to the end to the cause
of socialism and human emancipation.] [[link removed]]

LEO PANITCH (1945–2020)  
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Vivek Chibber
December 22, 2020
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ The global left has suffered an irreparable loss with the passing
of Leo Panitch this weekend. He was incredibly warm, inviting, and
generous to others. And he remained committed to the end to the cause
of socialism and human emancipation. _

Beloved teacher and public thinker Leo Panitch has died of COVID-19,
The star.com

 

The global left has suffered an irreparable loss with the passing of
Leo Panitch this weekend. Leo had recently been diagnosed with
multiple myelomas and had contracted coronavirus, which developed into
viral pneumonia while in the hospital receiving treatment.

Leo was born into a family of East European Jewish immigrants in
Winnipeg, Canada, and completed his PhD at the London School of
Economics under the supervision of Ralph Miliband. His dissertation on
the economic strategy of the British Labour Party was published in
1976 as _Social Democracy and Industrial Militancy: The Labour Party,
the Trade Unions and Incomes Policy, 1945–1947_
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The thesis began a long intellectual partnership with Miliband, and in
1985 Leo joined him as co-editor of the _Socialist Register_, which
Miliband had launched with John Saville in 1964.

Under Leo’s steady hand, the _Register_ continued to grow through
the decades to come, establishing itself as one of the most important
journals of the global left. Others joined him as co-editors through
these years, most notably Colin Leys and later, Greg Albo, but Leo
remained the fulcrum on which the project rested. And while he steered
the _Register_ through the demoralization of the neoliberal era, he
continued to publish a series of landmark works, the most important of
which were _The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New
Labour_
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which he cowrote with Leys, and more recently _The Making of Global
Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire_
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which brought to fruition a decade-long project with his dear friend
and comrade Sam Gindin.

Through all these years, there were several themes that remained
constant in his work. The first of these was undoubtedly Leo’s deep
study of the perils and promise of social democracy. Leo was fully
appreciative of the historic gains that the labor movement had been
able to acquire through the social-democratic project. But much as his
mentor Miliband, he was also an insightful critic of that project. The
fundamental argument of _Social Democracy and Industrial Militancy_
was that, as the Labour Party took over the management of the British
state, it not only had to tamp down on the unions and the Left, but
ended up prioritizing the interests of employers over those of the
party’s own constituency.
Leo saw this as a structural constraint, not a moral failure. Labour
simply never figured out how to marry the compulsions involved in
steering a bourgeois economy with its stated goals of advancing
working-class interests. And building on this argument, he went on to
examine how social-democratic parties across Europe were succumbing to
the same constraint through the 1970s and ’80s.  He published a
series of groundbreaking papers on the shift from class struggle to
class management, the early tranche collected in 1986’s
_Working-Class Politics in Crisis
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_These analyses hold great value today, when a revived left is once
again looking to resurrect the welfare state.

By the late 1980s, Leo had established himself as one of the leading
left-wing critics of European social democracy. Within his discipline
of political science, this meant a certain amount of derision from his
colleagues. In the scholarly work of that era, he is often cited by
American political scientists, only to be quickly brushed aside as
unduly pessimistic or simple-minded. Among heterodox and progressive
political scientists in the 1990s, the fashion was to point to the
continuing stability of the welfare state, its success in navigating
the pressures of globalization, and the practical wisdom of the Third
Way turn of Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder.

But, in fact, Leo was years ahead of the discipline. His deep analysis
of the conservatizing trend within social-democratic parties, the
increasing distance from the working class, the impending disaster
from the managerial takeover — all this is now standard fare within
mainstream circles, as they try to make sense of the crisis that
engulfs the Atlantic world. This is no doubt why Verso published a
second edition of his brilliant critique of the Blairite project
within Labour, _The End of Parliamentary Socialism, _which came out at
the peak of Third Way euphoria and today seems prophetic.

However, while Leo was an unsparing critic of “really existing”
social democracy, his alternative was to deepen and build on its
gains, not to propose a mythical “revolutionary” alternative. This
was the second stream of his scholarship. Because he recognized that
the era of revolutions had long passed, Leo was forced to keep his
feet on the ground, to think about practical strategy, a real road to
working-class revival — instead of only discussing in general terms
the need for a revolutionary rupture from capitalism.

For him, the only way out of capitalism was by building on social
democracy, not doing an end run around it. This compelled him to think
about how the defeats of the 1970s might have been avoided, how a
labor movement might be rebuilt, how the next generation of leaders
might better navigate the constraints of capitalism. This was a
dominant theme of his work throughout the Reagan-Thatcher era, and a
good sample of it was published in 2001 in his _Renewing Socialism:
Democracy, Strategy and Imagination_
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essays, even as Leo acknowledged the failures of the 1970s, he held
firmly to the centrality of the working class if the socialist project
was to have any future.

Far from being dogmatic, however, Leo was acutely sensitive to the
fact that we were living in a very different era of capitalism from
the one in which the Left had built up its own institutions. Central
to that difference was the profoundly more globalized character of the
system at the turn of this century. Analyzing its dynamics,
understanding its development, and above all, locating the role of the
state in its evolution, was the third theme that guided his work. It
culminated in _The Making of Global Capitalism_, cowritten with Sam
Gindin, in which Leo and Sam offered a sweeping account of not only
the global economy, but the political foundations on which it rested.

The internationalization of capital had not been driven by autonomous
economic forces or technological change, they argued, but had always
been a political project pushed by the US state. And the globalization
of capitalist accumulation was accompanied by the globalization of a
particular state form — the two went hand in hand. Hence, the spread
of capitalism went hand in hand with the power and influence of the
state form that had been incubated by the US ruling class — and
hence, a deepening of American hegemony. The implication was clear —
that if the juggernaut of global capitalism were a political creation,
then it might be vulnerable to changes in the political firmament.

Figuring out just how the fight against this capitalism would unfold
no doubt would have been the challenge Leo took on if he had lived to
continue his project. He was absolutely sure that if it had any chance
of succeeding, it would be through a revived, creative, and democratic
labor movement. Leo spent his whole life trying to build institutions
that would contribute to that movement. From the politics department
at York University, which he joined in 1984 and helped build into a
powerhouse of political economy, to the _Register_, to several
political initiatives in his beloved Toronto, to the annual Historical
Materialism conference — Leo was an indefatigable builder of
institutions.

He was enabled by an amazing generosity of spirit. Leo was one of the
most instinctively democratic people I have ever met. In 2010, I
helped organize a conference in Delhi on imperialism, in which Leo was
one of the invited speakers.  This was, I think, his first visit to
India. Over the several days of the conference, Leo was constantly
surrounded by local organizers, more so than any of the other
participants. I would often find him sitting on the lawn outside the
venue, his long legs folded uncomfortably under him, so engrossed in a
conversation with a labor activist or a party organizer that I’d
have to drag him away. And each time, he would take the number of the
person he was talking to, promise to send them materials and contacts
— and then he would follow through. He would always refer to them in
our conversations as “the comrade from . . . ,” never as
“that guy,” or some other such assignation.

When he and Colin invited me to join them as co-editors of the
_Register_, I was honored, but also somewhat trepidatious. I was
coming on along with Greg Albo.  Greg was a student of Leo’s and
had known him and Colin for years. I was the newcomer, parachuting
into a project that had been anchored in Toronto for two decades and
had built its own internal culture, deep and abiding friendships, and
shared political histories. Naturally, I had some misgivings about how
I would fit into this operation. Leo not only integrated me into the
journal’s culture, but insisted that it bear my own stamp. He
invited me to construct a New York editorial committee, to balance out
the committee in Toronto; he and Colin scrupulously ensured that any
significant discussion between the three editors in Toronto — Greg
being the third — were carried out only in my presence; and he
invited me to bring my own views and expertise into the journal with
as much enthusiasm as anyone can ever expect.

He did all this effortlessly. It didn’t come from a labored fidelity
to moral principles, or a grudging adjustment to circumstances. It was
natural to him.  Once, when I was in Toronto for a conference Leo
organized at York, he came to my hotel early in the morning to drive
us to the university, which is located outside the city. I was a bit
late coming down to the car, and Leo was visibly perturbed. I
flippantly observed that it was only a few minutes, and anyway, so
what if we are a little late? Leo replied, in some pain, that the
opening presentation was by someone who had traveled several hundred
miles, and he did not want to be disrespectful to them by walking in
late.

I do not remember who the person was. I know they were not one of the
stars on the left conference circuit. And there were going to be at
least a hundred people in the audience, so they probably would not
even have noticed his late arrival. But Leo was not concerned with
that. He was simply motivated by his obligation to them — as a
comrade, a human being.

That was Leo. I have met few people in my life so warm, so inviting to
others, soaking up every ounce of energy and knowledge that their
experiences grant them. He was a pillar of the international left. But
he was also a dear friend. And the world feels quite a bit colder
without him.

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