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In 1974 burawoy took a job as a machine operator in a South Chicago factory, a division of the multinational giant, Allis-Chalmers. Drilling holes and balancing pulleys to produce components for diesel engines, the 26-year-old grad student marvelled at how hard his fellow workers laboured to expand the surplus value of their employer. Industrial sociologists had explored the ‘restriction of output’ question, asking why workers didn’t work harder. To Burawoy, the real question was why they worked as hard as they did. Fighting off fatigue and boredom during the night shifts, he joined his fellow piece-rate workers in the game of ‘making out’: hitting the quota without exceeding it so much that the rate would be revised upward. This constitution of work as game, Burawoy came to argue, was a key mechanism by which surplus value was both ‘secured and obscured’ on the shop floor under advanced capitalism.
On the basis of this fieldwork, Burawoy would argue that consent to capitalism is produced at the point of production itself, which had to be understood as a political apparatus. This iconoclastic move drew its inspiration from Gramsci’s point that American industrialism had developed without the ‘parasitic sedimentations’ left by pre-capitalist class formations in Europe—and his intuition that, therefore, ‘hegemony here is born in the factory’.footnote3 But Burawoy was reconstructing both Gramsci’s theory that consent was produced within civil society and Althusser’s, that it flowed from the ideological apparatuses of the state. His insistence, in the seminal Manufacturing Consent, that working-class struggle was not guaranteed by the relations of production but hinged on relations in production, would launch a multi-decade research programme on ‘production regimes’ under advanced capitalism, state socialism and Third World postcolonial economies.footnote4
The defining features of Burawoy’s work were already to be seen: ambitious theoretical reconstruction, based on careful attention to the microprocesses of large social forces operating in small places. The upshot would be a deeply sociological Marxism, forged in the crucible of newly independent Zambia, deepened by readings in structural Marxism with a young Adam Przeworski at the University of Chicago, reconstructed through a globe-spanning research programme on production regimes, conducted from Berkeley, and extended through theoretical dialogues with Polanyi, Bourdieu and Du Bois. Although Burawoy applied the ‘sociological Marxism’ label specifically to his late-career fusion of Gramsci and Polanyi, I will argue that it is a fitting description of his entire oeuvre.footnote5 Its key premises would remain constants across his career.
Burawoy’s sociological Marxism developed in two distinct phases. The first, seemingly orthodox in form but radically heterodox in substance, privileged the point of production as the site for capitalism’s stabilization—or, indeed, its transcendence. This approach generated a multi-decade research programme on labour regimes across three continents and produced theoretical findings of enduring relevance. The second phase, from the mid-1990s on, looked beyond production to civil society. In thoroughly heterodox mode, Burawoy pushed Marxism to engage with the manifold social movements generated by capitalism’s depredations, as well as the imbrications of class, race and gender. Untethered from ethnographic research, these later interventions identified real theoretical problems for Marxism and offered imaginative directions for reconstruction.
Dialogue was a recurring motif throughout. Teaching was an exchange between professor and student; ethnography involved mutual interactions between participant-observers and those whose lifeworld they entered; sociology itself was founded on exchanges between its canonical theorists. Above all, Burawoy’s sociological Marxism evolved through two nested dialogues: on the one hand, between Marxism and the discipline of sociology; on the other, between Marxism and the working class.footnote6 The first produced an approach that was rigorously empirical yet unremittingly critical and emancipatory. Burawoy was never a dogmatist or an ideologue. While encouraging every mobilization against capitalism, oppression and despotism—including in his own department—he was distrustful of factions. With little patience for rhetorical posturing, he had an unwavering fidelity to discovering the world as it is, even as he insisted on identifying the unrealized possibilities of what it could be.footnote7
That rigour was also manifest in his painstaking—some might say mind-numbing—attention to the detail of factory regimes, from Africa to the us to the Soviet Bloc; he repeatedly returned to his own studies, decades later, to obsess over what he had got wrong and what subsequent comparisons had brought to light. From a socialist viewpoint, few of his findings offered much encouragement. Yet that did not extinguish the emancipatory thrust of his critical sociology. Burawoy’s historically informed ethnographies located the causes of social reproduction in concrete social relations, susceptible to challenge from below, rather than timeless laws. Through his rolling comparisons between workplaces across the world—an exceptionally coherent and dynamic research programme—he sought to reconstruct Marxism as a living theoretical tradition facing up to a continually changing capitalist reality, not as a body of inherited truths to be found in Capital.footnote8
If the dialogue with sociology kept Burawoy’s Marxism empirically grounded, his involvement with workers shaped not only his substantive focus but his method and style. His theoretical work remained disciplined by the experience of manual labour and the company of his fellow workers. Though dauntingly well-read across the social sciences, anthropology, theory and world history, he eschewed displays of erudition. His style was rigorously anti-pretentious. Sentences are conceptually rich, yet free of adornment; as in a Bauhaus apartment, form follows function. The prose is transparent, buoyed up by the social struggles that are its underlying subject matter.