Now in its fourth edition, From Consent to Coercion: The Continuing Assault on Labour remains an invaluable tool for understanding how the state and capital manage the subordination of labour. The new edition contains timely material that wrestles with the pressing issues of precarity and polarization and the dire need to rebuild and renew socialist politics. The following is excerpted from the book.

Sanjiv Gupta interviewed Leo Panitch in September 2020. They discussed two issues which Panitch has studied and written about for decades. First, whether the pandemic has fundamentally altered the geopolitical balance between the United States and other great powers. And second, how socialists in the US should approach the November elections. For Panitch, the two issues are intimately connected.

The vilification of the leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, as an antisemite has intensified in the run up to the December 12 election in Britain. What makes this especially troubling, not to say bizarre, is that since he first became a member of parliament in 1983 Corbyn has been the most consistent campaigner against all forms of racism.

Getting socialism seriously on the agenda requires addressing the question of political agency more broadly in terms that develop the agential capacity for state transformation, so that governments with a socialist project not be stymied by the inherited state apparatuses. In this respect, socialist parties in the 21st century cannot see themselves as a kind of omnipotent deus ex machina.

On the “Reality Asserts Itself” program of The Real News Network, Leo Panitch is interviewed by host Paul Jay. Panitch talks about the political culture of his family, shaped in Winnipeg’s radical Jewish community before and after World War Two; Labour Zionists, Social Democrats and Communists debated and organized within the Jewish working class movement.

The alliances that socialist parties would have to enter into, not least in face of the growing threat from the far right of the political spectrum, should not just be amongst elites but be directed at new working-class formation of the broadest possible kind, and aimed at developing its actual potential to become the transformative agent in a transition to socialism.

For those of us long enough in the tooth to recall what it was like ‘way back when’, there is sometimes a distinct whiff of something like the old sectarianism in the air these days. And it most often comes, oddly enough, from precisely those quarters which contrast their embrace of ecological and intersectional issues today with the alleged neglect of such by earlier socialist generations.

None of this can happen unless Syriza as a party develops the orientation and capacities to lead the Greek state and society in this direction. We have met with people in the party and social movements who are concerned that Syriza falls well short in this respect. Among the various reasons for being critical of Syriza, this is the most significant.

The position of Syriza is unenviable. It has taken power in a country in the grips of economic depression, riven by oligarchic networks and, for now, still at the mercy of international institutions. Nevertheless, it is the first European government of the radical left in living memory, and one whose actions can not only transform Greece, but will serve as a point of reference for the international left.

As we enter the eighth year of the long-lingering global economic crisis, it is sobering indeed that it is only in Greece that a political party putting forward a clear, radical democratic alternative to the perverse policies of neoliberal austerity stands on the doorstep of entering the state.