EXTENDED BOOK REVIEW The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism by Michael Burawoy (1985) Verso, London: 272 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0860918042 Reviewed by: Rick Marsh (2019) Michael Burawoy’s early and highly influential contribution to the understanding of factory regimes has often been associated with the hegemonic despotism and increased attempts by management at ideological control. At the outset, ample warning is given. On page 5 of his book, Burawoy writes: ‘This is an unfashionable book. It defends an unfashionable thesis about an unfashionable class formed in an unfashionable place. The class is proletariat. The place is the point of production.’ Burawoy identifies his work with its ‘polemical context.’ He views The Politics of Production as an intervention against the diverse contemporary, intellectual and currents that claim an identity with the left, but deny or underestimate the importance of the working class and the primacy of production. Burawoy engages intellectual development which has done much to revitalize and challenge contemporary Marxism. These include research on the labour process, the state, and the working-class consciousness and action. The main purpose of this book is to identify the evolution of various production arrangements in different settings, and to show how these arrangements have shaped workers’ struggles. Inter alia, Burawoy set himself the task of developing an analysis of the ‘politics of production whose objective was to undo the compartmentalization of production and politics by linking the organization of work to the state.’ (p. 122). One of the starting points of Burawoy’s analysis is that the working class has not only lost its revolutionary temper, but also is a dying class. There have emerged classes, such as intellectuals as agents for alternative visions of the future. This is the polemical context of the book; the emergence of perspectives that conjure away the working-class. The structure of this book, comprised of five chapters, offers a welcome break from conventional textbooks of sociology. In Chapter One, Burawoy draws on the work of Harry Braverman in his seminal text, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. This chapter positions the discussion of Braverman’s work within the framework of the factory regime and production politics. Braverman presents capitalism as a process of becoming: of realising its own inner essence, of moving according to its immanent tendencies, of encompassing the totality, of subordinating all to itself, and of destroying all resistance (pp. 22-23). Braverman’s deskilling thesis has been the subject of considerable questioning. Burawoy argues Braverman has failed to come to terms with the specificity of capitalist control over the labour process (p.26). Thompson (1989 p. 118) concludes there is too much control over the labour process. Moreover, he states