You can recognize a mentor by how often certain arguments or ways of thinking flash up in contemporary discussions; by the gratitude you feel towards those who affected your own intellectual, political, and moral journey. And by how their behavior served as a role model. For me, Leo Panitch was all these things.

I’d first been consciously exposed to his work by Frank Deppe during my studies at Marburg University. I paid my way through university translating Panitch’s texts into German, and I soon decided that I wanted to continue my education at York’s political science department, where Leo was Distinguished Research Professor and Canada Chair.

At that university outside Toronto, he had helped build the most influential training ground of Marxist scholars in any capitalist state. He’d done so amid the anticommunism of the Cold War, with the blacklisting even of socialists (like him) sympathetic to the Russian Revolution but critical of what the USSR became. And, vitally for today, he’d kept socialist politics alive — even when many others did not — during the high point of neoliberal hegemony, between 1989 and the 2008 crisis.