I have this one funny interaction with Michael emblazoned in my memory. I wasn’t yet his student, and we didn’t know each other well—honestly, I wasn’t even sure he knew who I was at that point. I was taking a seminar with his late friend Erik Olin Wright, who was then workshopping the manuscript that would become Envisioning Real Utopias. I was chatting with Erik in the hallway just before colloquium when I noticed Michael approaching. When he got to us, he stopped suddenly, patted my belly, and turned to Erik with a big smile: “Be careful with this one,” he joked. “He’s not one of your sociological Marxists; he’s a real Marxist.” The two of them chuckled, and I just stood there, wondering what the hell he meant. 

These days, I care less about what he actually meant at the time and more about his own Marxism. Why was he so invested in Marxism as an identity? I tended to think of myself as a Marxist first and a sociologist second, whereas he seemed intensely devoted to sociology as a vocation, to professional sociology, and to the university. I sought out every opportunity to take my politics off campus, prioritizing struggles in nearby Oakland and national-level campaigns. I cared deeply about something called “the left,” and I found my primary intellectual community beyond the academy, even if that included sociologists. But Michael never seemed particularly interested in the organized left, and for many years, I couldn’t quite figure it out. Maybe I still can’t. 

During my fourth year in grad school, I was a TA for his social theory sequence, which was a truly formative experience for me. This was the year I asked him if he’d chair my dissertation committee, and he put me through it. I’ll never forget having to write him a weekly memo—and by “memo,” he really meant ten to twenty-page papers—about some aspect of my project. To be clear, I already had my dissertation prospectus approved, and I’d already carried out six months of fieldwork in South Africa. But this was under the tutelage of a different advisor, and for Michael, it was insufficient. After about 8 months of these memos—it was actually probably closer to a year—he turned to me one day, as we sat in his office. These were incredibly tense meetings. He turned to me, looked me right in the eye, and said matter-of-factly, “Okay, I’ll be your chair.” 

I had assumed he already was my chair! But in Michael’s mind, he first needed to mold me into one of his students. He hated my dissertation proposal, which he dismissed as too concerned with urban space. “The answer isn’t space but labor,” he told me at the time. “Now figure out the question.” I ended up writing a second prospectus—an entirely new project based on informal labor rather than informal housing—and then finally, once I had his blessing, I went back into the field. Six months of fieldwork later, in response to one of my weekly memos—and yes, he commented on them every single week, often within an hour of me sending them to him—he casually admitted that my project wasn’t about labor after all and suggested I return to my initial proposal. But I didn’t blame him. This is what an urban sociologist got for working with an avowed sociologist of the labor process. 

At the end of that class I TAed for him, we held a giant party in my backyard for the entire class of over 200 students. At the time, I lived in a quadplex with a bunch of Oakland Marxists, none of them academics. Watching them interact with Michael was amusing. I still remember one of my housemates walking up to him in awe. He knew that Michael was one of the more prominent academic Marxists, and this was just a couple of years after the 2008 crisis. “So,” my housemate asked him, “who has the best account of the crisis? Do you prefer Harvey, McNally, or Brenner?” It was a pretty forward way to begin a conversation, but we were talking among Marxists here. Michael blew off the question entirely, seemingly uninterested in what he viewed as merely academic debates—funny, given that he was the academic.

When I think about it, Michael probably viewed the political approach of most Marxists on “the left” as spreading themselves too thin. If I had a solid foot in the university, why in the world would I also try to organize in a half dozen additional sites at once? Why not build real power in the places I knew best? I used to be really skeptical, and even dismissive, of this approach, which I viewed as too narrowly academic. But looking back, I actually think Michael thought a bit differently about his strategy—and I do think he conceived of it as a strategy. Broadly, he understood public universities as key institutional sites for building political power. I never really liked his engagement with Polanyi in the aughts, though I admittedly always found Polanyi to be hopelessly organicist. He was actually the only figure over whom Michael and I consistently clashed. But in his writings in this period, Michael saw the commodification of knowledge as a relatively recent front in capital’s colonization of our lifeworld. And as he formulated the problem, a key site in this onslaught was the public university.

It was always less about defending the university qua institution, and more about transforming the university in the process. I’m not convinced he’d thought through the practical and strategic implications of this politics, and what it would entail on the ground. But I do know that he understood “the university” as something that extends far beyond our brick-and-mortar campus. It should be as expansive as possible, and this is the work Michael was doing in two respects: first, pedagogically, he saw his teaching as a means of developing a critical consciousness in a sizable cross-section of working-class students; and second, institutionally, he saw his work in the International Sociological Association as developing a deliberate internationalism that could transcend the limits of a narrow American approach to sociology.

While he never won me over to this political approach—nor did he really try for that matter—I have come to develop a deep respect for what he was up to. As Trump wages his war of attrition against institutions of higher education, I have begun to reflect on the meaning of the university—and the public university in particular—in relation to our broader society. I don’t think that the reactionary assault on universities is only about creating a populist bogeyman—critical race theory, DEI, cancel culture, and so forth; it is equally about one of the only institutions in our society that continues to enable critical thinking. Now, I admittedly think Michael had a rose-goggled vision of the university, especially teaching at Berkeley. Though even there, he was faced with the neoliberalization of the public university. In the UC system, much like universities in the rest of the country, critical thinking has been consistently relegated to the margins, and is in the process of being shrunk down until it’s small enough to drown in the bathtub. Deans of finance turn campuses into glorified real estate holding companies, and disconnected consultants instruct us to worship at the altar of efficiency. Broadly, this assault has unfolded over many decades, assuming the form of a slow chipping away rather than a blitzkrieg. And yet, Michael saw the university as an institution uniquely positioned in our society to enable us—whoever this collective subject might be—to wage a war of position.  

Of course, this politics is marked by all sorts of tensions and contradictions. Are we waging a defensive war, preserving the (limited) university as it already exists? Are we attempting to return to a past whose conditions of possibility are no longer with us? Or are we waging an offensive war, seeking to remake the university in the process? I think Michael saw himself as doing both simultaneously, but I’m not quite sure. Over the last year, we exchanged countless emails about my move to a public university in Florida, and especially after he visited 13 months ago, we were in regular dialogue about the so-called “war on woke” here—that, and the repression of Palestine solidarity activism on campus. But it was only after his untimely death that the full extent of Trump’s assault became apparent, and so it was really in the last month or two that I came to reflect on the university in this way. I wish he were still with us so that I could initiate one of our interminable email exchanges.

Even now, over two months after his killing, I still find myself reflexively opening new emails and typing “Bu” into the “To:” bar, watching his full name and email address appear as if by magic. And then I remember, sheepishly closing the window. Sometimes I wait a beat, open a new window, and instinctively find myself typing his name again. Other times, I just close the window and stare for a while. But one thing is certain: I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking of Michael as my first reader, no matter how much time passes. His influence was really that formative, and at this point, he will live on as my mentor, my role model, and my superego.

Zachary Levenson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Florida International University and a Senior Research Associate in Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City (Oxford University Press, 2022), which received the ASA’s Robert E. Park Book Award, and co-editor of The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism (Routledge, 2024).