Leo Panitch
Leo Victor Panitch was a Canadian 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, 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, The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour, and Renewing Socialism: Transforming Democracy, Strategy and Imagination 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, he was active in the Winnipeg labour movement and the Manitoba CCF and its successor, the New Democratic Party of Manitoba. 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 a Master of Science degree in 1968 at the London School of Economics and a 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 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 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 Ralph Miliband, his mentor and the 1964 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''. 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.
Making of global capitalism
In 2012, Panitch, with his friend and colleague Sam Gindin, published The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. As its title suggests, the 456-page book is a comprehensive study of the growth of a global capitalist system over more than a century. Panitch and Gindin argue that the process known as globalization was not an inevitable outcome of expansionary capitalism but was consciously planned and managed by the US, the world's most powerful state. They dispute the idea that globalization was driven by multinational corporations that have become more powerful than nation states. For them, this claim ignores the intricate relationships between states and capitalism; for example, states maintain property rights, oversee contracts, and sign free trade agreements, while deriving tax revenues and popular legitimacy from the success of capitalist enterprises within their borders.Panitch and Gindin dismiss claims that the American Empire is in decline as shown, for example, by US trade deficits, industrial shutdowns, and layoffs. They argue that in fact the opposite is true. In recent decades, American firms "restructured key production processes, outsourced others to cheaper and more specialized suppliers and relocated to the US south – all as part of an accelerated general reallocation of capital within the American economy." They write that although it is always highly volatile, the robust and globally dominant US financial system facilitated this economic restructuring while making pools of venture capital available for investment in new, high-tech firms. As a result, the US share of global production remained stable at around one quarter of the total right into the 21st century.