“24 hours a day, seven days a week on sociology”—that’s how Michael described his life during his retirement gathering in April 2023. For him, sociology had always meant teaching, so it came as no surprise that he agreed to the event only on one “non-negotiable condition” that the event be an opportunity to bring together and celebrate not him, but his students and former students from across nearly five decades, as the organizing committee wrote to us, his students.

This is Michael, forever curious about what we think and do. Back at Berkeley, during that intense yet bewildering stretch of writing our dissertations, we used to whisper among ourselves that we saw him in our dreams more often than we saw our own parents. It wasn’t some Freudian spell. He wasn’t a demanding father figure; quite the opposite. He related to me as an equal, listening intently to my ramblings and half-formed ideas with such intent and making them feel worth pursuing. Sometimes, his typed pages of our discussions would magically appear before my eyes the next day. His pedagogy was grounded in dedication and deep respect for how each of us developed our thinking. He didn’t manufacture his students or their projects, as some famous people do. Instead, he nurtured us to become original thinkers in our own ways.

For his retirement gathering, “Conversations with Burawoy: Pedagogy, Power, and Practice,” we were invited to share updates on what we had been doing. A few days before the event, Michael sent us his “Final Instructions,” writing, “You can say a lot in five minutes, and I want to make sure that the people who come last are not squeezed out of existence. . . . Be aware! This is going to be a great reunion!” The phrase “Final Instructions” felt like it had come straight from the Central Committee, so I took it seriously. Here’s what I shared at that momentous reunion.

“Michael’s lifelong interest has been in the great transformations of the first and second worlds. I have joined him from the Asia side, performing a kind of duet across continents in thought and writing for decades.

Coming from South Korea during the heyday of the student movement, I landed in Berkeley in 1987 to study what was prohibited in South Korea at the time – socialism and North Korea. Michael had recently landed what he called his dream job at Lenin Steel Works in Hungary as a furnaceman. He tended an 80-ton furnace burning at 1,600 degrees, seeking to witness democratic socialism in practice. But instead, it marked the beginning of his decade-long journey into the transition from socialism to capitalism. During this period, I wrote a dissertation about the perilous united front of Chinese and exiled Korean communists in northeast China. Franz Fanon, Michael’s interlocutor on postcolonialism, saw peasant militancy and bourgeois nationalism as two historical trajectories facing the colonized. I compared how Korean peasant migrants turned these trajectories into regional, temporal, and gendered variations. Korean citizenship, labor, and property rights constituted the rivalry between Chinese nationalists and Japanese colonizers—the two bedfellows sharing the capitalist bed. When I wrote the first draft, entitled Materializing Nation and Gender, email technology had not yet been invented. Michael was working in a Russian mine, enduring humiliation as an unproductive worker, but still found the time to read it and fax me single-spaced, five-page comments within two weeks. With such a devoted advisor, anyone could finish the dissertation against all odds.

After graduation, a three-year postdoc at the University of Michigan, a hub of interdisciplinary studies, and my joint appointment in Sociology and East Asian Studies at NYU steered me into reading and teaching Marx’s Das Kapital and Marxism, French Marxist philosophy, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism. In this new phase, I reworked the national and colonial questions, incorporating new archival research from China, which had made up half of my dissertation, treating it as a workbook in which I tested my newfound learning. This resulted in my first book, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution. I gave Michael a copy in his office. He flipped through it from cover to cover, then placed it face down on his desk, saying, “Every word is different,” with a mix of excitement and disapproval.

Still, I followed Michael as he pursued the dream of Leon Trotsky. Trotsky viewed the revolution in the Soviet Union as betrayed but not overthrown, believing that the future would depend on the workers. As Michael moved his fieldwork from Hungary to the Soviet Union and then to Poland, socialism was collapsing upon his arrival in each country. His friends urged him to stop traveling, perhaps to save Cuba and other socialist countries. While Michael witnessed these shocking transformations in each nation-state, I did so in a transnational process. The return migration of ethnic Koreans from northeast China to South Korea, which I began to research as a postdoc project, turned out to be a crucial piece of the larger puzzle—the epochal transformation in East Asia. China and North Korea were transitioning to capitalism, while South Korea transformed its long-sought democratization into a neoliberal capitalist machine. The cascading labor migration of Koreans across these borders—refugees from North Korea to China, filling jobs and lands left behind by ethnic Koreans who migrated to South Korea as undocumented laborers—contributed to the global reign of capitalism and the formation of a transnational Korean community.

This was a central theme of my book, published in 2015, The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea. It offers a counterintuitive argument on Korean unification. While postcolonial and Cold War Asia have traditionally fixed the inquiry of Korean unification to ethnic and territorial integration, I argue that South and North Korea are already unified by capital in a transnational form. This thesis focuses on the synchronous marketization across these countries. More importantly, I reinterpret the 20th-century socialist revolutions in China and North Korea through the lens of the Russian Revolution, examining their built-in contradictions resulting from the incorporation of capitalist principles such as commodity production and the appropriation of surplus value. I consider the current marketization a repeated effort to reconcile these contradictions. This book critiques the conventional transition paradigm of history and instead examines the temporalization of history as a process of political subjectivation. I wrote the book in the company of historians during many years of residency at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and I dedicated the book to Michael.

Revolutionary Michael was drawn to Karl Polanyi to understand society’s responses to current market despotism. Here, too, we have met again. I am now completing A Sublime Disaster, a book based on eight years of ethnographic research into the 2014 ferry disaster in South Korea and the diverse ways different groups have responded to this capitalist catastrophe. For instance, both the far right and the far left share a common language of rhizomatic sociality—fun, spontaneous, anonymous, horizontal, and non-cumulative associations. I interpret this as a shared opposition to a social life saturated with competition and commodification. Some of the most utopian practices flourished and disappeared without due recognition, simply because they exceeded the leftist imagination. How many such praxes emerge and vanish, never crystallizing into a new political order? As Walter Benjamin reminds us, we must remain vigilant in recognizing revolutionary interventions. Though critical theorists like Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus claim that politics is rare, I believe that such rare events cannot occur without the small, often unrecognized events in the social. In the grim reality of our times, I hold fast to Michael’s favorite from Gramsci: ‘Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’”

***

The invited contribution to “In Celebration of Michael Burawoy” in Critical Sociology (editor, David Fasenfest) gave me the opportunity to step back and situate his work within the broader Marxist tradition. At the time, my colleagues and I at York and in Toronto were launching initiatives to bring together Marxists around the city. I returned to Michael’s defining work from my generation at Berkeley and in South Korea: The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism. This time, I realized that he, too, was part of the May ’68 generation, having graduated that year with a BA in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. He was a contemporary of Louis Althusser and his students, including Étienne Balibar, whose writings from the 1980s and 1990s—many of which have been translated in recent years—continue to shape the current of Western Marxism. In The Politics of Production, Michael engaged deeply and deliberately with Althusser, particularly on the concept of totality, and joined his critique of the idea of expressive totality advanced by Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School for its near totalization of social life under the terms of alienation and commodification. Michael conceptualized what readers and translators of Althusser term “structural totality” as “structured totality.”

Michael wrote in our email exchanges in July 2024:

“What an honor, what a delightful essay revitalizing a book that has been lost and linking it to other more contemporary visions of politics. . . . I’m not sure I ever use the word ‘structural’ totality, I think it is “structured’ totality.”; and “In English ‘structural totality’ doesn’t sound right and is a rather weak and passive version as compared to ‘structured totality’ which implies a totality that is STRUCTURED. In other words, something is done to the totality. Anyway, I like the way you have revised it. Thank you! One other thing has stuck in my gut, and that is the phrase: ‘24 hours a day, seven days a week on sociology’—that’s a bit much! Can you just replace that with ‘he summarized the last four decades of his life as a 24 hour sociologist’ . . . .’ As I say I love your piece because it unequivocally marks me as a Marxist in the company of other Marxists and points to The Politics of Production as the signal text.” 

***

At York University in Toronto, many people regard the place as another Berkeley from the 60s, though it has been changing in recent years. In January 2023, I invited Michael to be the keynote speaker for a conference on Korean Marxism and Capitalism, which I co-organized with Dongjin Seo in South Korea. At the time, I didn’t know he was retiring just a few months later, but I wanted the event to be a celebration of his life and an opportunity to honor his work as both a researcher and a theorist, especially given how rare it has become to see such a seamless blend of the two roles. His talk took place in person, not long after in-person classes had resumed post-COVID, although most meetings and talks were still conducted online. Nevertheless, more than 150 faculty and students filled the room for his lecture, and over sixty stayed for hours afterward for the reception. Michael saw this as a sign of people’s yearning for conversation and connection. I immediately thought of his comment as reflecting his belief in people and their energy to act collectively, in contrast to modern thinkers like Max Weber and Carl Schmitt, who harbored deep mistrust of the masses.

The celebration of his life, centered around his latest writing on W.E.B. Du Bois, ended with a fitting finale—the cake. When the university’s post-COVID policy banned outside food, I still managed to bring in a special cake I had designed at a local bakery. I’d asked for miniature gears, dynamite boxes, and worker figures, all arranged on a Minecraft-themed base to reflect his decades of work in factories and mines. Michael got a bit nostalgic, sharing stories from his time underground. But the cake started melting, and he had to pause and cut it. I sometimes wonder what more he might have shared if that sweet interruption hadn’t come. He kept the cake topper, while Fidan and I split the figures and decorations. Now, I see them on my bookshelves as I write.

This was from what he wrote about the occasion: 

“Dear Hyun Ok, Gosh, that was an intense and interesting day for me.  I met so many interesting and exciting people. And I had lots of interesting responses to the talk. And such a nice reception after the talk, people hung around for the mechanical cake! But the dinner was spectacular. The highlight was getting together with you and learning about this amazing book that you are writing. It sounds absolutely fascinating, situating the disaster in its widest context – the perfect extended case method! The conspiracy theories are so interesting and justified. It’s OK to take your time in finishing – sabbatical is perfect for that. . . .”

I never imagined that the introduction I gave at his talk would become a tribute to his life just two years later. A slightly different version appeared in Canadian Dimension, a leftist publication. Here is the introduction. 

“Certainly, it is my most profound honor and utmost privilege to present Professor Michael Burawoy. He does not need an introduction. Instead, I want to present him as a revolutionary, not just writing revolutionary texts, but working and living as a revolutionary. 

At Berkeley in his mid-40s, whenever he gave a talk, he used to wear the same red shirt and walk briskly across the podium with such passion about what he was talking about. Watching his hair blowing, we also blew away our anxiety and insecurity, and we were rooting for him. At the center of his office door, he put the logo that marked the relaunching of the South African Communist Party in 1990, when his neighbors were late professors Neil Smelser and Robert Bellah, and network analysts.

As a revolutionary, he did not just study workers but became a worker, not for a conventional ethnography of participant observation and interviews but for sharing work and life with other workers, a universal socialist ethic. Born in Manchester, the first industrial working-class city, it was as if he was destined to lead that life. After earning a BA in mathematics from Cambridge, he soon headed out to Zambia to research the copper mines in 1968 and produced his amazing first book, Manufacturing Consent. When doing his PhD at the University of Chicago, he began working on the shop floor as a machine operator in Chicago in the 1970s and then also in Hungary and Russia in the 1980s and early 1990s. In his interview with the Village Voice, Michael said that his work as a furnaceman in Lenin Steel Works in Hungary in 1984, tending an 80-ton, 1,600-degree furnace, fulfilled his life dream of getting a job in a steel mill in a socialist country. That story becomes a legend. He has published books from 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 such key questions in Marxism as surplus value, totality, crisis, and periodization. 

I think Michael also followed the dream of Trotsky, who saw the revolution in the Soviet Union as betrayed but not overthrown, believing the future would still depend on the workers. While the Frankfurt School focused on alienation and commodification of the masses to explain why revolution did not occur in developed Western capitalist countries, machine operator Burawoy, in contrast, was a productionist who ventured into the belly of the beast—the shopfloor and Marxist-Leninist countries. When various Marxists debated whether 20th-century socialism was state capitalism—a mirror image of welfare capitalism—Professor Burawoy crossed the two great divides of socialism and capitalism, and of West and non-West, long before postcolonialism theory emerged. Instead, he theorized hegemonic and despotic labour regimes across these divides, organizing them into 2×2 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 2×2 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. 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 and decolonizing the discipline of sociology.

Without further due, here is our dearest comrade, professor, and furnaceman, Michael Burawoy.”

After this introduction, Michael stood up from his chair and walked toward me. “No one’s ever introduced me like this,” he said, before giving me a long, heartfelt hug.