The death of Ellen Wood on January 14 represents an immense loss for socialists everywhere. As a frequent contributor to Socialist Register since her first essay in 1980, special co-editor of the 1995 volume Why Not Capitalism, and a member of the Register’s editorial collective from 1996 to 2009, her depth of socialist commitment, theoretical originality, and profound insight may best be gauged from this excerpt from her essay on “The uses and abuses of ‘civil society’” from Socialist Register 1990: The Retreat of the Intellectuals.

 — Leo Panitch

We live in curious times. Just when intellectuals of the Left in the West have a rare opportunity to do something useful, if not actually world-historic, they — or large sections of them — are in full retreat. Just when reformers in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are looking to Western capitalism for paradigms of economic and political success, many of us appear to be abdicating the traditional role of the Western left as critic of capitalism.