Talk on Social Movements in the Age of Neoliberalism by Michael Burawoy, Professor of Sociology, University of California Berkeley on Tuesday, 22 January 2013 at 3.00 p.m.
Abstract:
The social movements of the last two years — ranging from 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 — 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?
Brief Biography:
Michael Burawoy is a professor of Sociology at the University of California Berkeley and the President of the International Sociological Association. Burawoy has been a participant observer of 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. Burawoy has also thematized and driven a highly influential global debate on public sociology.
