Remembering Leo Panitch (1945–2020)

Late in December 2020, the socialist world lost an important member, Leo Panitch. Born into a North End Winnipeg Jewish immigrant subculture “in which working class institutions and socialist ideas were hegemonic,” Panitch developed left political affinities early in his life (Panitch 2002, 17; Panitch 2018). In his early adult life, he concretized and recast these affinities as the new left reoriented socialist politics to the twin imperatives of popular participation and self-management. Early in the 1960s, Panitch began his studies in his hometown, at the University of Manitoba with Cy Gonick, the founding editor of Canadian Dimension, one of the oldest English-language left-wing magazines on the continent to which Panitch would frequently contribute later in his life (see Gonick 2016). At the age of 22, Panitch moved to Britain and experienced the explosive period of 1968 there. At the London School of Economics, Panitch studied with Ralph Miliband, Marxist theorist of the state and co-editor of the Socialist Register, an annual publication that Panitch himself ended up co-editing from 1985 to the very end of his life in 2020, first with Miliband and John Saville, then with Colin Leys, Vivek Chibber and Greg Albo. Upon returning to Canada from Britain, Panitch worked in the Department of Political Science at Carlton University in Ottawa from 1972 to 1984. At that time, he moved to what is now called the Department of Politics at York University in Toronto, where he taught up to his retirement in 2016.

I came across Leo Panitch’s work within weeks of landing in Toronto in the fall of 1989. One of my teaching assistants in the introductory course on Canadian politics at York University, Jan Borowy, herself an important figure in the Canadian labour movement, told me in no uncertain terms: “You have to take a class with Leo Panitch.” Regrettably, I never did. Whenever I considered heeding Jan’s advice in the short years of course work I had at my disposal as a student in the Politics Department, Leo was on leave or teaching at another level. However, as with so many of my colleagues and comrades (whose views about Leo’s theoretical and political positions varied significantly – how could it be otherwise), I benefited greatly from his role in building institutions and creating spaces of debate and exchange so vital for socialist research, action, and culture. Considering his role in building the Departments of Political Science at Carleton University and York University into left-leaning program, pursuing a range of political initiatives (the latest one being the Socialist Project), and (co-)editing the journal Studies in Political Economy (of which he was a co-founder) and the annual Socialist Register, it is clear that Panitch left deep and lasting footprints on the Canadian political landscape, the English-speaking left, and, in fact, broader left-wing worlds.

One figurative place where one can see Leo Panitch’s organizational contributions to left culture was the Toronto editorial group of Capitalism Nature Socialism (which was also where our paths crossed a number of times in the 1990s and early 2000s). To a large extent the initiative of Roger Keil (who joined the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in 1992), CNS Toronto was active between 1993 and 2006. Thanks to the efforts of Keil and a range of others (including Greg Albo, Andrew Biro, Gene Desfor, Thomas Dunk, Peter Fargey, Harriet Friedmann, Kanishka Goonewardena, Liette Gilbert, Franz Hartmann, Christoph Hermann, Russ Janzen, Ute Lehrer, Sara Marino, Richard Milgrom, Frederick Peters, Ellie Perkins, Ray Rogers, Cate Sandilands, Keith Stewart), CNS-Toronto shaped the direction of CNS in various ways. Through ongoing editorial work, it infused the journal with doses of critical theory, environmental feminism, and urban social theory, for example. In fact, with a number of special issues on urban questions, the group helped forge the now-well-known field of urban political ecology. The CNS Toronto group’s work culminated in the international CNS conference titled “Ecology, Imperialism, and the Contradictions of Capitalism” held at York University in 2005.

While not a lead contributor to these debates, Panitch played an organizational role in the formation of CNS Toronto, which was in effect a left-green addition to the various “Toronto Schools of Marxism” that have been co-generated at York University (Solty 2020). He helped connect the labor organizers, environmentalists and academic researchers that created the Green Work Alliance, a Toronto-based labour-community group that immediately preceded the founding of CNS Toronto (Keil 1994). In his generous and convivial ways also remembered by Hilary Wainwright (2020), Panitch offered his house for meetings and hosted guests such as Jim O’Connor and Eric Mann, sustaining links to the CNS group in the process. As Chair of the Department of Politics in the early 1990s, he helped strengthen links between the Department of Politics and the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. One result of this cross-faculty collaboration was the International Political Economy and Ecology Summer School. An annual highlight of Toronto academic life since 1991, the Summer School overlapped with CNS networks. It has hosted a range of important figures in Marxist, socialist and feminist political ecology such as Elmar Altvater, Mike Davis, Alex Demirovic, Joel Kovel, Joan Martínez-Alier, Ariel Salleh and Vandana Shiva.

The intellectual legacy of Leo Panitch’s own writing is multi-sided. Here is a brief sketch. Following what was perhaps his longest-standing interest – the role of Labour parties in working-class politics – Panitch developed sharp analyses of Parliamentary socialism and its contradictions. With reference to the British Labour Party and the British trade union movement, the subject of his PhD research (published as Social Democracy and Industrial Militancy (1976)), Panitch directed our attention to the role Social Democratic parties played trying to manage the contradictions of capitalist development and integrate the working class politically. These efforts inevitably led to tensions, indeed, class struggles permeating the very internal life of these parties. Unearthing the contradictions of Labour parties (or bourgeois parties with sustained labor connections) pushed Panitch onto a life-long path of searching for ways to build democratic socialist organizations distinct from both Social Democratic and Communist traditions as they evolved across the twentieth century. Even so, Panitch, who maintained close connections to left-wing members of Social Democratic parties, remained open about new political spaces for anti-capitalists that might emerge from efforts to rejuvenate large left and progressive parties from within, as his recent writing about British Labour (Jeremy Corbyn), the U.S. American Democratic Socialists (Bernie Sanders) and, of course, Greece’s Syriza, indicates (Panitch, Gindin, and Maher 2020).

Returning to Canada from Britain in the early 1970s, Panitch participated actively in the formation of the New Canadian Political Economy (NCPE). His work on the Canadian State and working-class formation in Canada (Panitch 1977, 1981) pushed debates in this then-fledgling field into a qualitatively new direction from its initially pervasive emphasis on imperial exchange relations and their effects in generating a Canadian dependency on primary commodity exports (“staples”). Panitch was one among others who emphasized the importance of focusing political-economic analysis on the manifold and intricate socio-political class relations and conflicts that permeate the state itself. This led him to propose that we pay special attention to the ways in which Canadian ruling blocs have historically incorporated imperial imperatives and projects by appropriating them for their own purposes, visions and modalities of operation, first in relationship to Britain, then with reference to the U.S. Over the years, Panitch’s interventions became reference points for debate in the pages of Studies of Political Economy as well as the collected volumes published to highlight the state of the art in the field (Clement and Williams 1989; Clement 1997; Clement and Vosko 2004; Thomas et al. 2019).

One can say in hindsight that Panitch’s work on Canadian political economy turned out to be a crucial building block of the study for which he has become most widely known, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire, his analysis of American Empire co-authored with long-standing collaborator Sam Gindin (2012). Based on groundwork collected in a volume Panitch edited with Martijn Konings (Panitch and Konings 2008), Panitch and Gindin’s monograph is focused on what they considered the central aspect of American Empire, the capacity of the networks that lead in and out of its key institutions (the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department) to open the world to transnational capital flows by becoming an integral part of other states, particularly in Western Europe and Canada. Developed in close dialogue with the pioneering neo-Gramscian analyses of world order and the internationalization of the state by Robert Cox and Stephen Gill (both also prominent members of the Politics Department at York University), Panitch and Gindin highlighted the relative stability of American Empire and stressed lines of continuity between the postwar era and the new world order, between the Fordist-Keynesian period and the current era of neoliberalism. Looking at Panitch’s work as a whole, it is clear that The Making of Global Capitalism expanded, elaborated and concretized a point Panitch had been making for almost two decades already: that states represent not passive victims but active, if tension-ridden and frequently incoherent, contributors to the processes of capitalist globalization (Panitch 1994).

Panitch and Gindin’s emphasis on the role of an (increasingly internationalized) state in building the basis of globalizing capitalism – an informal American Empire – also generated the need to theorize alternatives to the capitalist states as we know them. A Different Kind of State, a collection Panitch co-edited with Greg Albo and David Langille in the early 1990s, tried to do just that. Through a double critique of bourgeois (Weberian and neoliberal) conceptions of the capitalist state, this volume urged socialists to take seriously the question of public administration. Referring in particular to British and North American initiatives, it suggested that the struggle for socialism (understood also in feminist and environmental ways) must in part be framed as a struggle to build capacities and institutions that might allow us to combine a radical decommodification of life with a radical democratization of decision-making (Albo, Langille, and Panitch 1993). Given the centrality of the organized labor movement in Panitch’s strategic vision of democratic socialism, it is clear that the search for a different kind of (non-)state requires a capacity to challenge and defeat the Assault on Trade Union Freedoms. In this updated and expanded book first published in the mid-1980s, Panitch and Donald Swartz carefully documented and analysed what is now a two-generations-old neoliberal attack on the Canadian labor movement (Panitch and Swartz 2003).

Needless to say, Panitch’s major interventions have generated debate. Here are a few examples¹: Panitch’s take on Canadian Political Economy has raised questions about the role of gender, racialization and colonialism in the formation of class and state in Canada and beyond. His analysis of the processes through which American Empire has been internalized by other extended states, Canada included, has become contested by scholars who have both insisted on the continued importance of imperialism as a politico-economic and military process and highlighted the active imperial role played by Canadian ruling blocs centered on finance capital (Carroll 1986; Gordon 2010; Shipley 2020). Finally, given that Panitch’s strategic vision of the labor movement, political organization and the state was developed as an alternative not only to Social Democracy and Soviet-aligned Communism but also to anarchism and autonomism, it has faced criticism from all those who put the primary political and theoretical emphasis on one or more of the following: revolution understood not only as protracted structural transformation (war of position) but also as a temporal rupture (war of movement); the agency of social movements outside the labor movement (and the organized fractions of the working class); and, finally, dynamics of collective mobilization and projects of autonomous self-organization not in but against, and at a distance from, the extended state.

These remarks bring us to questions of nature and ecology. In his editorial roles, Panitch participated in the processes by which ecological Marxism and ecological socialism developed into major intellectual currents of the left. Since the early 1990s, authors like Elmar Altvater, John Bellamy Foster and David Harvey have contributed repeatedly to the Socialist Register. In 2007 the journal devoted a superb special issue to the topic (Panitch and Leys 2007). However, Panitch’s own writing was not centrally concerned with nature and ecology. The implication of his work for political ecology is indirect; it must be made explicit, and I think it can. For example, one can draw links between Panitch and Gindin’s take on American Empire and regulationist and neo-Gramscian ecological Marxism of Christoph Görg and Ulrich Brand (Brand and Görg 2001). More, Brand and another collaborator, Markus Wissen, focus on the ways in which the environmentally degrading aspects of the U.S.-led capitalist world order have become embedded in “imperial modes of living.” Most pronounced in North America, these modes have long taken root in other parts of the world (2017). Also stressing lines of continuity between Fordist and neoliberal periods of capitalist development, Brand and Wissen emphasize how fractions of metropolitan working classes have been drawn into at least some aspects of these fossil-dependent material cultures. Clearly, these modes of living push us to consider “new ways of living,” as the last two Socialist Register volumes propose in their sub-titles (Panitch and Albo 2020, 2021). They pose a mortal threat to the planet as well as the kind of socialist sub-cultures Panitch encountered in his own childhood.

Imperial modes of life explain some of the difficulties organizers face whenever they try to reorient working class politics in a red-green direction. From the Green Work Alliance and the Leap Manifesto to Free Transit Toronto and Green Jobs Oshawa, Panitch himself has supported a series of political initiatives that have tried to promote working-class environmentalisms, either by building linkages between union organizers and environmentalists, or, by pursing strategies of converting manufacturing sites for socially and ecologically useful productive purposes in part defined by workers and communities themselves (Socialist Project 2020). Harboring responses to global and national crises of capitalism (Albo, Gindin, and Panitch 2010), these initiatives highlight the pertinence of Albo and Panitch’s work on democratic administration for all those who understand eco-socialism as a type of ecological-economic planning, among other things (Löwy 2015). Almost three decades after its publication, A Different Kind of State still begs the question of “What organizational and institutional capacities are necessary to de-commodify as well as reorient (re)production by coordinating investment decisions with labor- and community-based forms of self-management?” The question is daunting. One legacy of Leo Panitch’s life work is to leave us with the urgent task of finding answers to it.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Greg Albo, Liette Gilbert, Roger Keil, Karen Wirsig and Alan Zuege for sharing comments, references and memories.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There are too many reference points to list here. Good places to start are the aforementioned four collected volumes on the New Canadian Political Economy following The Canadian State as well as commentaries in the pages of Studies in Political Economy.