Excavating Early Burawoy: Toward a Third Position in the Race-Class Debates

This paper intervenes in contemporary sociological debates over the relationship between race and class by excavating the early writings of Michael Burawoy. Against the prevailing polarization between twin absolutist models in which either racism or capitalism alone possesses causal force, we argue that Burawoy articulates a third position-one that grants relative autonomy to both racism and capitalism while rejecting their causal reduction to one another. Drawing on Burawoy's empirical work in southern Africa from the 1970s and early 1980s, we show how he theorized race and class not as discrete variables, but as articulated through historically specific configurations of labor, state policy, and political struggle. Probing the limits of his formulations-particularly his leanings toward economic determinism and inattention to racial subjectivity-we do what Burawoy himself always advocated: we reconstruct his approach. We do this by way of issuing three key injunctions drawn from, but going beyond, his work: (1) interrogate rather than assume the coherence of race and class categories; (2) treat racism as a structured contingency embedded within capitalist social relations; and (3) actively align anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles, moving from logic to strategy. In doing so, we argue that Burawoy offers a distinctively Marxist perspective that does not subordinate race to class, but rather insists upon their mutual articulation. This third position opens the door to a historically situated theory of racial capitalism and a more strategic approach to political struggle.