Not Laboring Under Illusions

In Zambia, he worked in the Personnel Research Unit of the Copper Industry Service Bureau as an office employee crafting job evaluation schemes, a position from which he sought to act as both a participant and observer of the labor process. Out of this study emerged The Colour of Class on the Copper Mines: From African Advancement to Zambianization, in which Burawoy pointed out that the color bar only shifted, but did not disappear after independence. Whenever blacks were promoted, their white supervisors would be promoted further upward, resulting in administrative overload.

Following Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon, Burawoy explained this postindependence persistence of racial hierarchy based on class interests. The postindependence reproduction of what we today call “racial capitalism” incited Burawoy to dig deeper into the hard-to-discern forces that render inequalities resilient.

After his stint in Africa, Burawoy decided to pursue a PhD at the University of Chicago. His doctoral studies and the field work that accompanied them would culminate in his classical book Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism. As a machine operator at agricultural and construction equipment company Allis-Chalmers in the 1970s, Burawoy participated in the games Chicago laborers played to make life enjoyable and bearable. Such games, concocted to pass time, ironically had the effect of making workers more productive because they had fun as they willfully submitted to capitalist discipline, which they augmented through their own acts.

Burawoy’s ideas about the American factory were an expansion of Antonio Gramsci’s on Fordism. The Sardinian wrote in open awe of how the bosses of the New World built consent within capitalism’s satanic mills. Burawoy’s findings, and their Marxist-Gramscian interpretation, transformed the sociological study of work. When he began his career, industrial sociology was myopic. It focused on the firm at the expense of broader historical and structural forces. It refused to speak of the capitalist system as a whole as the general matrix in which the firm was shaped. He rattled industrial sociology by adding to it a combination of Marxism and participant observation — a combination of macro-structural analysis and subjective viewpoint considered heresy until Burawoy, and those influenced by him, institutionalized it. But his heresy didn’t stop there.

Burawoy’s next steps set him apart from most Marxists, who had, in the face of deep criticism, withdrawn into intellectual silos. Rather than dismissing the criticisms advanced by Marxism’s enemies, he incorporated them. For instance, Robert Merton contended that Burawoy had not demonstrated his claims that the undemocratic nature of industrial bureaucracy in America emanated from the capitalist nature of the economy, rather than industrialism as such. A defense of the Marxist critique of exploitation would require comparison with industrial bureaucracy in a noncapitalist society. Burawoy appropriated Merton’s criticism and used it to fashion a heterodox Marxism based on his studies of labor in the communist world.

For Buroway, realism was absent in much of the thinking on the Left and the Right. “Both orthodox Marxists and neo-classical economists are guilty of a methodological error,” he argued in a paper he coauthored with the Hungarian sociologist János Lukács. This was the error of

comparing an empirical reality of one society with an ideal type of another. Marxists have tended to undertake a critical analysis of capitalism through a usually implicit comparison with a speculative socialism — a society without classes in which individuals are reconciled with the collectivity through their self-conscious making of history. This ideal type is usually left unexamined and is therefore utopian. At the same time [critical] Marxists avoid examining actually existing socialism . . . as a relevant contrast to capitalism. They have generally regarded such societies as in transition between capitalism and some “true” socialism . . ., a form of capitalism . . ., or a legacy of pre-capitalist “Asiatic” modes of production.”

This was not just heterodoxy, it was a heresy. In making these claims, Burawoy upset and disturbed both the critical and noncritical Marxists during the last decade of state socialism. Figures like G. A. Cohen, who built a Marxist theory in dialogue with liberalism precisely by dismissing actually existing socialism as well as unreconstructed Marxists who ignored the horrors of state socialism, fell afoul of Burawoy’s injunction to realism.

As importantly, Burawoy argued against critical orthodox Marxists like Ernest Mandel and Tony Cliff, who maintained that the USSR and its satellites were either state capitalist or degenerate, i.e,. not worthy of sympathetic and analytical consideration as case studies of socialism. Unlike “Western” or other critical Marxists, he dove into state socialist factories, sweated there as a blue-collar worker, and looked for the promises of socialism in the lives of the laborers under these authoritarian states. His aim was not to offer an apology for state socialism, but to see if there was a path within it toward reform. This, he insisted, could offer more hope than abstract Western Marxist theories of revolution.

Burawoy’s quest for a democratic transition from within state socialism culminated in frustration. Critical Marxists who argued that “socialist” bureaucrats were in fact building capitalism turned out, to his dismay, to be partially right. Nevertheless, as his books and articles demonstrated, the transition from state socialism to capitalism was not a foregone conclusion. And as importantly, the fulfillment of critical Marxists’ prediction did not salvage “orthodoxy” in its entirety. As other heterodox Marxists in socialism studies also underline, bureaucratic tendencies similar to twentieth-century state socialist ones will most likely kick in during any attempt at socialist transformation. Marxists therefore need more analyses of what kinds of social dynamics, along with classical forms of class struggle, can secure the gains of labor and democratically expand them under such circumstances.

By the time he had reached his fifties, the labors of factory work had become impractical. This was one of the reasons why Burawoy turned his attention to the academy and intellectual labor. In collaboration with his graduate students, he studied the commodification of knowledge and the increasingly exploitative and extractive use of intellectual and manual labor at universities. He dedicated his last two-plus decades to transforming higher education from within, in solidarity with lecturers, students, and manual workers who had been waging the fight for a long time.

Reconstructing the Unfinished Heresy

As I talk with mourning students, friends, and colleagues, I am struck by a sentiment we all share: on top of the shock, unusual forms of denial, and sadness it induced, the unexpected suddenness of Burawoy’s loss has left many intellectual exchanges unfinished. There were so many conversations I meant to have and postponed because they either appeared too self-serving or too trivial.

An instance of the trivial: I have frequently wondered whether I ever rode one of the buses he helped produce while laboring in Hungarian factories. Burawoy contributed to producing the gearboxes of Ikarus, one of the few socialist-produced goods publicly used in Cold War–era capitalist Turkey. I will never get to tell him the hours I spent every day on Hungarian buses while going to college in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. I’d read critical urban sociology and fantasized about organizing commuters for stronger public transportation programs, so that millions wouldn’t suffer being pickled and piled up in a demeaning way. In my youthful naivete, I also imagined such urban self-organization to be a gateway to broader revolutionary struggle.

Much like Burawoy’s emotional investment in the Eastern European proletariat’s potential to build democratic socialism, my plans to organize Istanbul’s commuters never materialized. But failure, as the philosopher Alain Badiou has remarked, is a category in need of rethinking. The triumph of anti-utopian forces does not necessarily mean that we should abandon our core goals. It does, however, remind us that they should be continuously reconstructed.

On February 4, the day after he passed, I told my undergraduate class about how I learned to teach on picket lines from Burawoy, and how that fit into his research trajectory and into my pedagogy. At the end of last month, I took them to the joint strike of custodial and research workers, after a full hour discussing Max Weber’s anti-Marxist analysis of markets, class struggles, and unions. Afterward, I exposed them to a full month of Weber, with his dark view of the social world and piercing analyses of its anti-utopian forces. Following Gramsci’s and Burawoy’s lead, I encourage students to act as participant observers of political processes — but also instill in them a realism about what politics is, and what its limits are.

Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will, as Gramsci pointed out, can be developed only through honest engagement with the best of conservative thought, coupled with an engagement in transformative action. From Zambia’s copper mines through to American, Hungarian, and Russian factories and ultimately to his analysis of the university and the Palestine question, Burawoy’s work encapsulates the passionate yet sober social science we desperately need. As Burawoy reconstructed Marx, Gramsci, and Fanon for his times, a path toward a future heretic sociology lies in reconstructing Burawoy for the times ahead.