Michael Burawoy had three lifelong passions. The first was English football, specifically Manchester United, the team he supported from childhood and to which he remained loyal for the rest of his life. The other two were Marxism and sociology, into which he poured his prodigious energies for over half a century. I don’t know anything about football, but I was privileged to have firsthand exposure to Michael’s other two obsessions over five decades.
I can still remember when I was a naive, newly radicalized undergraduate floundering in search of a political and intellectual home and attended a meeting billed as “Marxism Without Dogma.” I was deeply disappointed to discover that this was merely false advertising for some left sectarian group. But a few years later, I stumbled onto the real thing in Michael, who soon became my dissertation advisor and later a beloved friend.
I had entered graduate school ambivalently, with a limited understanding of sociology and an even more limited self-confidence. At the time, I was deeply committed to Marxist feminism and to women’s labor history, which I thought, at least at the University of California, Berkeley, I might somehow be able to pursue within the discipline. That proved far more challenging than I’d expected, and I likely would have dropped out entirely if not for Michael. He arrived in the department a year after I did, and I was drawn to him immediately. I later came to believe this was partly because we both came from Russian-Jewish immigrant families from which we inherited a passion for social justice, but there were other affinities as well.
Mine was the very first dissertation Michael agreed to chair. He had not yet developed the legendary approach to mentorship that so many of his later students experienced. But he gave me everything I needed at the time: engaged and respectful critique of my ideas and writing and unwavering support. He once told me I was a “natural…
Auteur: Ruth Milkman
