Leo Panitch – författare

From Consent to Coercion examines the increasing assault against trade union rights and freedoms in Canada by federal and provincial governments. Centring the struggles of Canadian unionized workers, this book explores the diminution of the welfare state and the impacts that this erosion has had on broader working-class rights and standards of living.

The fourth edition witnesses the passing of an era of free collective bargaining in Canada – an era in which the state and capital relied on obtaining the consent of workers and unions to act as subordinates in Canada’s capitalist democracy. It looks at how the last twenty years have marked a return to a more open reliance of the state and capital on coercion – on force and on fear – to secure that subordination.

From Consent to Coercion considers this conjuncture in the Canadian political economy amid growing precarity, poverty, and polarization in an otherwise indeterminate period of austerity. This important edition calls attention to the urgent task of rebuilding and renewing socialist politics – of thinking ambitiously and meeting new challenges with unique solutions to the left of social democracy.

From Consent to Coercion examines the increasing assault against trade union rights and freedoms in Canada by federal and provincial governments. Centring the struggles of Canadian unionized workers, this book explores the diminution of the welfare state and the impacts that this erosion has had on broader working-class rights and standards of living.

The fourth edition witnesses the passing of an era of free collective bargaining in Canada – an era in which the state and capital relied on obtaining the consent of workers and unions to act as subordinates in Canada’s capitalist democracy. It looks at how the last twenty years have marked a return to a more open reliance of the state and capital on coercion – on force and on fear – to secure that subordination.

From Consent to Coercion considers this conjuncture in the Canadian political economy amid growing precarity, poverty, and polarization in an otherwise indeterminate period of austerity. This important edition calls attention to the urgent task of rebuilding and renewing socialist politics – of thinking ambitiously and meeting new challenges with unique solutions to the left of social democracy.

The Canadian State is a powerful collection of essays. Leo Panitch’s theme essay, dealing with the theories of recent neo-Marxist thinkers such as O’Connor, Miliband, and Poulantzas on the nature and role of the state and sketching their relevance to Canada, sets the tone and interpretation of the whole work, which thus has a rare unity and cohesion. Reg Whitaker and Garth Stevenson provide papers offering profound analyses of the history and functioning of the federalized state in Canada. The twelve further contributors develop this theme, dealing with such topics as the aspirations of those behind the governments of Alberta and Quebec, relations between the government elites and Canada’s classes and ethnic groups, the management of the economy through budgets and welfare state policies, and the management of culture through education, the arts, and citizen participation. Together they illuminate various aspects of the way the bourgeois state organizes our society above all, for the accumulation of capital and legitimation of capitalism and, at times, uses coercion to these ends.

The work as a whole brings together Canada’s economics and politics in a new and penetrating way.