I was sorry to read today of the death of the Canadian marxist scholar Leo Panitch
Panitch wrote widely but he had a specific role in the British left and perhaps in particular the discussions about what an effective socialist politics might be and how that related to the Labour Party and to the various efforts down the decades to build and sustain movements independent of it.
He took over a key role in the annual Socialist Register which had been founded by Ralph Miliband and John Saville as part of the 1960s New Left.
In the Guardian letter below, remembering John Saville (24th June 2009) Panitch well sums up the role the Socialist Register played and plays and the political tradition that he stood in
Leo Panitch writes: Not long before I took over from John Saville (obituary, 16 June) as co-editor with Ralph Miliband of the Socialist Register, I heard him deliver an unforgettable keynote address at a conference held in Winnipeg in 1983 to celebrate the centenary of Marx’s death. Particularly vivid was his description of how the soldiers in his army unit in India cast their votes in the 1945 general election. Virtually all of them – officers included – voted Labour. When the news of the landslide victory arrived, the atmosphere was one of revolutionary excitement and enthusiasm. The next day, he added, “the counter-revolution began”. He would later chronicle it in his remarkable history of Ernest Bevin’s first two years as foreign secretary, The Politics of Continuity. The steely realism that always tempered his socialist commitment was always in evidence. When he and Miliband founded the Socialist Register in 1964, they committed themselves to a type of scholarship and politics that would, through a critique of communism and labourism, help steer the left in the direction of a new independent socialism. Their central guiding principle, as they put it in the first volume of the Register, was that “dogmatic reiteration cannot, any more than crass empiricism, provide answers to the problems of the present”.
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