At Berkeley, while in his mid-40s, Michael Burawoy would deliver his talks wearing the same red shirt. He would walk briskly across the podium full of passion for what he was about to discuss. On his office door, he proudly displayed the logo that marked the relaunching of the South African Communist Party in 1990, a testament to his unwavering commitment to social change.

As a revolutionary, Michael did not merely study workers; he became one, not for a conventional ethnography of participant observation and interviews, but to share work and life with other workers, embracing a universal socialist ethic. Born in Manchester, the first industrial working class city, it was as if he was destined for that life. After earning a BA in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1968, he soon traveled to Zambia to research working conditions in the copper mines. While pursuing his PhD at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, he worked on the shop floor as a machine operator, an experience that provided the basis for his groundbreaking book, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism.

Michael soon expanded his fieldwork to Hungary and Russia in the 1980s and early 1990s. In his interview with the Village Voice, Michael said that working as a furnaceman at Lenin Steel Works in Hungary in 1984, tending an 80-ton, 1,600-degree furnace, fulfilled his lifelong dream of getting a job in a steel mill in a socialist country. This story has become a legend. He has published books based on these experiences, including his magnum opus, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism. Though published 40 years ago, it remains a must-read for anyone interested in key questions in Marxism, including labour, surplus value, totality, crisis, and periodization.

I believe Michael also followed the thinking of Trotsky, who saw the revolution in the Soviet Union as having been betrayed rather than overthrown, with the future hinging on the actions of the workers. Where the Frankfurt School focused on the alienation and commodification of the masses to explain why revolution did not happen in developed Western capitalist countries, machine operator Burawoy was, by contrast, a productionist who ventured into the belly of the beast: the shop floor and actually existing socialist countries.

While various Marxist theorists debated the question of whether 20th-century socialism was a form of state capitalism, a mirror image of welfare capitalism, Burawoy focused on labour regimes across the two great divides of socialism and capitalism, and, long before the rise of postcolonial theory, of the West and the non-western world. He theorized hegemonic and despotic labour regimes across these divides, organizing them into 2x2 tables that produced four types of labour regimes: bureaucratic, market, colonial, and hegemonic despotisms. This theory itself remains a paradigm in labour studies.

In fact, his love for 2x2 tables that highlight comparisons was a secret formula in his revolutionary work in sociology. All of his students knew well that comparative analysis would help ensure the successful defense of their dissertations. Burawoy’s work has always been comparative, even in theory building; for instance, he compared Gramsci and Bourdieu on hegemony and domination, and Fanon and Du Bois on anti-imperialist Black Marxism.

He constantly revolutionized his own life. During his retirement gathering at Berkeley in April 2023, he summarized the last four decades of his life as a “24-hour sociologist.” For Burawoy, sociology meant teaching. As students, we knew that he sacrificed his hobby of watching Monday Night Football for the weekly dissertation workshop—the Smith Group—held at his home (I recently learned that his real passion had been what they call “soccer” in the US). To each workshop, he brought a chocolate cake on his bike from his office. We would start the meeting by sharing it, which created a sense of calm. At each meeting, one of us presented our thesis chapters, on which the others had provided written comments in advance, allowing us to begin the discussion by responding to these comments, including Burawoy’s. In these sessions, I learned the importance of constructive critique that offers solutions or at least proposes ways to rethink issues. It was the best intellectual training I ever had.

As is well known, Burawoy assumed the presidency of the American Sociological Association and the International Sociological Association as platforms to disseminate what he called Public Sociology. He wrestled with various theories and questions for decades, engaging deeply with pressing issues in politics and social movements. This engagement shaped his discussions with students, as teaching is also a site of his public sociology. Over the years, he engaged directly with the thought of such giants as Braverman, Bourdieu, Polanyi, and Gramsci. In recent years, he revolutionized theoretical canons once again by writing about W.E.B. Du Bois, positioning him in dialogue with foundational thinkers, including Karl Marx, with a view to decolonizing the discipline of sociology.

Michael Burawoy, our dearest comrade, professor, and furnaceman, will be greatly missed.

Hyun Ok Park is a Professor of Sociology at York University.