The global left has suffered an irreparable loss with the December 2020 passing of Leo Panitch. Leo had recently been diagnosed with multiple myelomas and had contracted coronavirus, which developed into viral pneumonia while in the hospital receiving treatment.

Leo was born into a family of East European Jewish immigrants in Winnipeg, Canada, and completed his PhD at the London School of Economics under the supervision of Ralph Miliband. His dissertation on the economic strategy of the British Labour Party was published in 1976 as Social Democracy and Industrial Militancy: The Labour Party, the Trade Unions and Incomes Policy, 1945–1947. The thesis began a long intellectual partnership with Miliband, and in 1985, Leo joined him as coeditor of the Socialist Register, which Miliband had launched with John Saville in 1964.

Under Leo’s steady hand, the Register continued to grow through the decades to come, establishing itself as one of the most important journals of the global left. And while he steered the Register through the demoralization of the neoliberal era, he continued to publish a series of landmark works, the most important of which were The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour, which he cowrote with Colin Leys, and, more recently, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire, which brought to fruition a decade-long project with his dear friend and comrade Sam Gindin.