| Summary: | Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent is a
must-have book for all those, who, like me,
study the so-called “Labour World,” particularly what
happens within factories. However, Michael Burawoy
is much more than the author of that enlightening
book.
Born in Manchester in a Jewish family of Russian
origin, he has been trying to understand how consent
is organized among the dominated for the last
40 years. That was the issue he dealt with in Zambia
in 1968, during the post-colonial process, when he
got a job in the copper industry and discovered the
articulations between the factory regime and racial
segregation. From that experience emerged The Color
of Class on the Copper Mines: From African Advancement
to Zambianization (1972).
In 1974, it prevailed again as a concern when,
already having become a sociologist, he was employed
as a metalworker worker on the outskirts of Chicago
and conducted the ethnography that is the basis of
Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process in
the Monopolist Capitalism (1982). This work allowed
him to consolidate the idea that it is impossible to
understand what happens in the work place without
establishing the relationship between that space and the
political-economic context in which it is placed, giving
rise to the concept of “Political Regime of Production”
that would be deepened in the books The Politics of
Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and
Socialism (1985) and The Radiant Past. Ideology and
Reality in Hungary’s Road to Capitalism (1994), based
on a comparison between his experience as a worker in
Chicago and his experience in Hungary in the 1980s,
while this country was under the Soviet orbit.
And it was to explore that idea that he decided
to do field work in a factory in Russia in the early
1990’s, when the capitalist restoration began. But that
same concern was what led him to adopt Marxism
as his theoretical point of view and ethnography as
his research method, developing a series of theoretical-
methodological discussions that can be found
in books such as The Extended Case Method: Four
Countries, Four Decades, Four Great Transformations,
and One Theoretical Tradition (1997), or Sociological
Marxism (2000), written with Eric Olin Wright. In
short, Michael Burawoy is a rara avis of the American
academy: a teacher who walks through classrooms
openly calling for a rebuilding of Marxism, a researcher
who holds a methodological battle to the death against
inductivism and a sociologist who proposes to rethink
the idea of the organic intellectual relating the sociology
with anti-capitalist movements.
In March 2018, Burawoy was invited by Indiana
University, Bloomington campus, to give a lecture entitled
“Marxism engages Bourdieu.” I was there carrying
out a research stay at the History Department. Chance
caused that, for the first time, I had the possibility of
personally listening to someone who had been inspiring
for my own ethnographic work. From that first meeting,
other subsequent meetings emerged, the result of
which is this interview I conducted in his office at the
Berkeley University.
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