Following Michael Burawoy’s Annual Lecture for the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) on ‘Social Movements in the Neoliberal Age’, I thought it worth dusting off one of the threads in a recent article of mine that explores his wider project of Sociological Marxism. My article, entitled ‘The Limits of Sociological Marxism?’, was published last year in the journal Historical Materialism and can be downloaded here. It develops a sympathetic critique of Sociological Marxism, which has been fashioned by both Michael Burawoy and Erik Olin Wright. At the centrepiece of this project is a theory of capitalism as a particular form of class exploitation. An exploitation-centred and relational concept of class is thus presented, rooted in the social relations of production, and projected through the analysis of contemporary society. With class relations and the dynamics surrounding the reproduction and transformation of capitalist forms constituting a cornerstone of Sociological Marxism, there might seem to be little to disagree upon. What could therefore be contentious about Sociological Marxism?
Posts tagged: Michael Burawoy
Social Movements in the Neoliberal Age
Each year the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) at the University of Nottingham hosts a major event in the form of its Annual Lecture, which was delivered last week by Professor Michael Burawoy from the University of California, Berkeley. Previous CSSGJ Annual Lectures have included, since 2006, David Harvey, Gerald Cohen, Hilary Wainwright, Philip McMichael, Siba Grovogui, Samir Amin, and Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin. It was an honour to host Michael Burawoy, a figure that consistently breaks the boundaries of public sociology by contributing to understanding class politics, postcolonialism, social movements, and globalisation “from below”. His lecture, available below and entitled ‘Social Movements in the Neoliberal Age’, was a major statement on the wave of social movements that have unfolded since 2010. What were the main themes that arose in his lecture in tracing social movements under neoliberalisation?
Reading Moby Dick and Antonio Gramsci
Back in 2010 I was fortunate enough to be invited by Ian Bruff to present various papers at the Standing Group on International Relations (SGIR) 7th Pan-European International Relations Conference in Stockholm (7-9 September 2010). Amongst my presentations was my participation in a roundtable discussion on Antonio Gramsci along with various people, including Mark Rupert and Owen Worth. My intervention was entitled ‘Gramsci’s Method’ and it attempted to outline an approach to reading Gramsci by bouncing off some ideas drawn from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). I had been reading that book over the summer and it reminded me of various insights in the Prison Notebooks on issues of method and epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. As a snappy intervention that raised some specific questions about method and hermeneutic understanding in approaching the reading of texts, I thought it might be worthwhile to relay the content of that roundtable presentation here, not least as it links with some forthcoming publications of mine.
