20 Facts About 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.

Leo Panitch 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.

Leo 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.

Leo 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.

Leo Panitch was born on 3 May 1945, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

Leo Panitch 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".

Leo Panitch's 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.

Leo Panitch 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.

Leo 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.

Leo Panitch received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and political science in 1967 from the University of Manitoba.

At age 22, Leo 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.

Leo 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.

Leo Panitch's research involved examining the role of the American state and multinational corporations in the evolution of global capitalism.

Leo Panitch 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.

Leo Panitch 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.

Leo Panitch was inducted as an Academic Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1995, and was a member of the Marxist Institute and the Committee on Socialist Studies as well as the Canadian Political Science Association.

Leo 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.

Leo Panitch 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.

Leo Panitch is a longtime activist and human rights advocate who teaches in the School of Disability Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Leo Panitch died on 19 December 2020, of viral pneumonia associated with COVID-19 amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, which he contracted in hospital while receiving treatment for multiple myeloma.