BZU Department of Sociology and Anthropology sponsored a lecture on January 15, 2013 by renowned British sociologist Michael Burawoy.  The talk, entitled “Social Movements in the Age of Neoliberalism,” engaged new questions that recent social movements have put to social theory.  

 

 

 

Lecture Summary

 

The social movements of the last two years -- ranging from the Arab Spring to Indignados, from the land struggles in India, China and Latin America to the student movement against the privatization of higher education and the Occupy Movement (and we might include the Intifada as a prototype) -- present a challenge to social theory as well as to capitalism. They call for a new sociology that links social movements to the state-sponsored, unregulated commodification of labor, nature, money and knowledge that characterizes third-wave marketization. Such a new sociology, built on the shoulders of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, reconstructs his theory for the new century just as he reconstructed Karl Marx's theory of capitalism for the twentieth century. Do these recent social movements add up to a Polanyian “counter-movement” that might arrest and even reverse third-wave marketization?  Or are they a prolegomenon for the intensification of third-wave marketization and the destruction of our planet, a war declared by markets and states on society?

 

About Michael Burawoy

 

Michael Burawoy is the president of the International Sociological Association and professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a participant observer in industrial workplaces in four countries: Zambia, United States, Hungary and Russia. In his different projects he has tried to illuminate -- from the standpoint of the working class -- postcolonialism, the organization of consent to capitalism, the peculiar forms of class consciousness and work organization in state socialism, and, finally, the dilemmas of transition from socialism to capitalism. No longer able to work in factories, recently he turned to the study of his own factory -- the university -- to consider the way sociology itself is produced and then disseminated to diverse publics. Throughout his sociological career, he has engaged with Marxism, seeking to reconstruct it in the light of his research and more broadly in the light of historical challenges of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. 

 

For an amusing account of his research, see: "Tales of the Kefir Furnaceman". Other works include: "For Public Sociology" (in Arabic) http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/PS/Translations/Arabic/ASA.Arabic.pdf and ”From Polyani to Polyanna: the False Optimism of Global Labor Studies”
http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/Marxism/From%20Polanyi%20to%20Pollyanna.pdf