“When this night slowly begins to recede, how many will still be alive of all those for whom the spring had seemed to bloom so gloriously?”
~Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation
Michael Burawoy’s passing marks a rather unusual sense of loss because of his stature as an academic who refused to be reduced to an ivory tower intellectual, hopelessly restricted to an otherwise well-defined academic field. Though he was a prolific writer and penned down some of the most insightful works on labour in late capitalism, corporate takeover and excesses of the state, academic inquiry and the publics and so forth, his legacy remains distinctly beyond his academic works.
His commitment to classroom teaching (the idea of public for him always began with the students), his principled activism both on and off campus, unconditional commitment to a politics that was pro social justice, freedom, and equal rights, and his deep conviction vis-à-vis margins as the ultimate site of authentic knowledge and insights pertaining to the ins and outs of social and political life of a society, accounted for his uncommonly inspiring stature as a first-rate public intellectual.
Given his allegiance to the significance of ‘perspective from below’ in developing a credible understanding of the dark underbelly of social life and its dynamics, Burawoy was not after facts served in a prose acceptable across academia. He consciously trod upon the road far less travelled and earnestly pursued the realities of lives lived on the forgotten margins of our imagination.
It is important to note that he had embarked upon this pursuit right at the beginning of his academic career. Think of his 10-month long stint at an engine shop in Chicago as a machine operator for his doctoral research, a rather rare variant of participant observation that led to Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (1979), an uncontested classic in industrial sociology. Burawoy does not stop there. He would go on to work at a copper mine, champagne factory, rubber factory, steel plant and so forth.
These markedly uncommon stints were due to his deep conviction that a decisively authentic knowledge of the nuances of inner folds of production and labour in advanced capitalism cannot be merely cognitive. It had to be acquired first-hand, not simply through the workers, but by being a worker. It was Burawoy’s insistence on the foundational linkages between being and knowing that made him who he was, a furnaceman-academic if you will.
Given the dystopian times we live in, Burawoy’s enchanting preoccupation with public sociology – something that officially began with his 2004 American Sociological Association (ASA) presidential address but remains unmistakably present right from the days of his doctoral research – merits a special mention. As an academic of uncommon repute he principally believed in stepping out of the citadels of academia to arrive at an assuringly insightful reading of public issues. His lifelong commitment towards facilitating sociology’s much needed leap from remaining merely critical to becoming markedly public in its operations remains admirable beyond words.
In his celebrated work The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills underlines a foundational distinction between personal troubles and public issues and tables the significance of sociological imagination in getting that distinction right. Burawoy’s appeal for public sociology was essentially a plea for attending to issues that had a bearing on public life. His push for public sociology can also be appreciated with respect to the worrying degeneration of public into a mass society, a pressing concern raised by Mills in another seminal work of his, The Power Elite.
Also read: On Michael Burawoy and the Promise of Sociology
In a mass society, Mills argues, people will be deprived of questioning, organising themselves, and turning their ideas into actions. It will be a society characterised by a total delegitimisation of genuine debates and discussions. Burawoy’s public sociology is to be looked at as an important antidote to that degeneration, a spirited attempt towards massification of the public in its tracks.
Burawoy was an unequivocal supporter of social justice and the underdog of society. If Howard Becker’s maxim for sociologist “whose side are you on?” needed a torchbearer within the discipline, it would be Burawoy. He carried with him what Max Weber called the ethics of conviction and an ethics of responsibility in whatever he participated in, making him an ideal-type sociologist that we all need and should desire to become in our own ways. It was recently manifested in his resolute support for a Resolution on the question of Palestine at the ASA, highlighting the moral need to come together against the occupation of Gaza by the ‘apartheid state” of Israel. He believed that as sociologists we have a responsibility – moral and political, to care for the social underclass and minimise their suffering.
While his contribution to Marxist sociology can hardly be overstated, we are particularly interested in highlighting his solidarity for Palestine and the pertinent questions he raised in relation to the atrocities committed against the Palestatnians. His first attack is rightly about fence sitters and propagators of the idea of neutrality, particularly when we talk of the monstrosities of settler colonialism unleashed by the US and its allies rallying around the rationale of ‘proportionate response’. He turns to method and reminds us sociologists the value of comparing the incomparable – the proverbial apples and oranges.
He writes, “Sociology is the art of converting ‘apples’ and ‘oranges’ into two species of fruit, thereby comparing the apparently incomparable.” Doing so, he makes a case of comparing the apartheid South African state with the ethos of the state of Israel, albeit reminding us that we ought to be politically committed and theoretically grounded.
Perhaps an ideal way to remember him and his work is to think about the political present and his efforts to make Gaza and her suffering visible. Caring for Gaza is to care for the world we inhabit, even for the vocation of sociology. Palestine’s defence has to be “global”, Burawoy reminds us, if we are to think of a future where we take a stand against inhumanity, and not become indifferent to violence. He taught us to never be “inwardly dead”, to borrow an expression from Max Weber, and continue our pursuit of sociology beyond the academy.
His passion for politics reminds us of the Palestinian poet in exile Mourid Barghouti. Barghouti wrote, politics “is the family at breakfast. Who is there? Who is absent and why?” Burawoy is that kind of sociologist, whose invocation for public sociology called for upholding that spirit to look for the absences and silences in society. He was a secular intellectual-par-excellence.
Death is inevitable and to expect otherwise is to demonstrate utmost foolishness. That said, human engagement with this inevitability is invariably premised on the way one departs. We think of tragic deaths by invoking the sentiment ‘this is not how it should have happened’. Burawoy died in a hit and run case. He was walking on a marked crosswalk, an identified stretch that invokes the public claim vis-a-vis the road, when he was fatally hit by a speeding SUV. This is not the way he should have departed this world.
Irfanullah Farooqi and Suraj Gogoi teach at Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode.
