When Michael Burawoy brought The Politics of Production to Verso–New Left Books in the 1980s, its distinction was clear. Not only did its theorization of production regimes provide a comparative and historical account of each of the three zones of the world economy—advanced-capitalist, state-socialist, post-colonial—but Michael himself had lived and worked in them all: overseeing pay chits on the Copperbelt in newly independent Zambia, grinding out diesel-engine parts on Chicago’s South Side, labouring at a machine shop in Hungary. His perceptive workplace ethnographies, minutely sensitive to the complex logistical requirements of any productive process, informed lucid economic postulates at the largest scale. Tall, genial, single-minded, he refused to countenance any qualification to the book’s thesis that specific factory regimes not only determine broader class consciousness but set the parameters of political possibility. An inveterate traveller, he was soon dispatching vivid, highly analytic reportage from the frontlines of Yeltsin’s privatization attempts in Vorkuta, near the Arctic Circle.footnote1 At the same time, he was renewing links with old friends in post-apartheid South Africa, energized by the close relations between social-science research and the work of national reconstruction.
From his base in Berkeley’s sociology department, Michael was appointed head of the American Sociological Association in 2004. His landmark address, calling for a more radical and engaged sociological practice, set the terms for a long-running debate about the aims of the discipline that drew responses from Alain Touraine, Patricia Hill Collins, Douglas Massey, Immanuel Wallerstein, Orlando Patterson and Barbara Ehrenreich.footnote2 From 2010–14, Michael headed the International Sociological Association, enthused by the chance to discover the specific knowledges that sociologies were generating about their own national contexts and to propose frameworks in which they could intelligibly be brought together. These forms of international sociological activism underpinned the work that Michael was doing in the realm of ideas in this period, through intense critical engagements with the work of Polanyi, Bourdieu and Du Bois. That work—and the travelling—only intensified after his official retirement in 2023. It was tragically cut short in February this year by a hit-and-run driver in Oakland.
Michael Burawoy was born in Manchester in 1947, the second child of two Jewish-émigré scientists. His parents—Ida, brought up between Riga and St Petersburg, and Abram, born in what was then Yekaterinoslav, today Dnipro or Dnipropetrovsk—met in the late 1920s as postgraduate students in the chemistry department of the University of Leipzig, then outstanding in its field. Both were sacked with the rise of the Nazis in 1933 and made their way to England, where Abram was eventually hired to teach chemistry at the University of Manchester, while Ida was obliged to stay at home. The household, in a lower-middle-class district of southern Manchester, was German-speaking, left-wing, full of books and classical music, and firmly anti-Zionist—‘It won’t end well’, Abram averred of Israel’s foundation.footnote3 A devoted teacher and workaholic, Abram was felled by a heart attack in 1959, when his son was just starting at Manchester Grammar School, while his daughter was reading medicine at Oxford. Mother and son were left alone together, and Michael became the man of the house. He dutifully complied with Abram’s advice that he should study maths at Cambridge, though he found the subject tedious.
But before he went up to Cambridge, there came a life-changing trip. Aged seventeen, he managed to secure a berth on a Norwegian cargo ship sailing to New York and, with help from an uncle, got a job with a bookseller, visiting stores across the United States. The effect was electrifying: ‘I had never witnessed such social energy’, he would recall of the unfolding civil-rights movement, anti-Vietnam War teach-ins, ghetto uprisings, ‘and, unbeknownst to me, the taste for sociology was germinated’.footnote4 Cambridge seemed ‘parochial and irrelevant’ by comparison. Michael used the long summer vacations for forays abroad: travelling the length and breadth of India on third-class trains to research the social meaning of the language question; hitch-hiking round Southern Africa with his tent on his back. He returned there after graduating in 1968, working first as a journalist in Johannesburg—alive to the ‘seething discontent’ beneath the harshly repressive regime—then hitching north to the Zambian capital, Lusaka. Michael’s formal ethnographical training began here, on the Copperbelt, where he was inducted into the Extended Case Method—linking relations at the field site to broader social forces—by the radical Dutch anthropologist Jaap van Velsen. Reading André Gunder Frank’s Development of Underdevelopment (1966), with its scathing critique of modernization theory, convinced him that he needed to tackle that body of capitalist social thinking on its home terrain; a certain nostalgia for America’s high-energy culture lingered from his schoolboy visit.footnote5 First Chicago—where the South Side factory would supply the ethnographic material for his PhD—and then Berkeley would be his home for the rest of his life.
What made Michael Burawoy so distinctive—even heroic—a scholar and thinker? Combined with the clarity and force of the theoretical mind he brought to all his empirical investigations, his participation in—not just observation of—the manual labour-forces he studied, and his macroscopic comparative focus, part of the answer must be that no previous ethnographic sociologist has been so explicitly and steadfastly political in their writing, from a position on the radical left. Michael sided instinctively with every struggle against oppression. In November 2024, he was in touch with nlr about publishing a talk he’d given on the Israeli onslaught against Gaza, bringing his analytical powers to bear on the question of why the Zionist settler-colonial state had doubled down on the expulsion and killing of Palestinians, when the equally brutal apartheid regime had instead conceded the ‘one-state solution’ of universal mass suffrage, however steep the inequalities that remained. The differential demographic balance—white South Africans far outnumbered by the black population, whereas Jews and Arabs are roughly proportionate—no doubt plays a role. But Michael’s paper brought to light the contrast of production relations in the two settler-colonial regimes: South Africa’s founded on labour exploitation, Israel’s on land expropriation. He was planning to develop the text for a subsequent number of nlr—and, not least, to footnote it, on the basis of his extensive reading in both fields. One work he singled out was by Mona Younis, a graduate student at Berkeley whose dissertation he supervised.footnote6 We deeply regret that Michael was never able to polish the paper as he proposed. We publish it here, followed by a reconstruction and interpretation of his work by Michael Levien, another former student.