W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life of Critical Engagement - Lecture 2 - Race, Class & Consciousness

In the second of four lectures on W.E.B. Du Bois, Michael Burawoy discusses one of the most fraught inter-disciplinary debates in recent years: the relationship between race, class and capitalism.

Inspired by studies of apartheid South Africa, Cedric Robinson developed the concept of “racial capitalism” associated with the Black Radical Tradition in which racism drives capitalism both historically and globally – a view he distinguishes from conventional Marxism in which capitalism drives racism, what we might call “racialized capitalism.” The writings of W.E.B. Du Bois have become a terrain for conducting the debate.

For nearly 50 years Michael Burawoy taught sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been an ethnographer of workplaces in the US, Zambia, Hungary and Russia. In various books, including The Color of Class on the Copper Mines (1972), Manufacturing Consent (1979), The Politics of Production (1985), The Radiant Past (with Janos Lukács) (1992), Public Sociology (2021), he has advanced theories of advanced capitalism, state socialism and postcolonialism, while developing the distinctive methodology of The Extended Case Method (2009).