About

Marcel Paret is a faculty member in the Sociology department at the University of Utah. His research focuses on critical sociology with a particular emphasis on issues of race, class, capitalism, and social movements, especially in the context of South Africa. Paret's work explores the intersections of race and class in political and social struggles, drawing on neo-Gramscian theory and engaged sociological praxis. He has contributed to understanding the dynamics of populism, redistribution, and exclusionary values globally, as well as the complexities of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement and its radical traditions. His scholarship also addresses the relationships between race, capitalism, and social movements, analyzing the political shifts and voter behavior in South Africa's volatile electorate. Paret engages deeply with the legacies of Black liberation movements and communist parties in the United States and South Africa, highlighting divergent historical trajectories and their implications for contemporary politics. Additionally, he reconstructs and advances critical sociological theories related to migrant labor, economic precarity, and postcolonial racial transformations, building on the foundational work of scholars like Michael Burawoy. His research critically examines the concept of racial capitalism through the lenses of Cedric Robinson and Stuart Hall, emphasizing the importance of understanding diverse theoretical frameworks to address the complex interplay of race and capitalism.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• Political economy
• Law
• Epistemology
• History

Selected publications

• Confronting racial authoritarianism: lessons from apartheid South Africa

  Race & Class · 2026-01-31

  articleSenior author

  In the face of burgeoning authoritarianism in the United States, this article turns to South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement for lessons in contesting this regime. The authors highlight two tensions in the 1970s and 1980s that are relevant for organisers today. First, South African activists worked to construct a mass coalition with popular support. But they did so at the expense of core demands, abandoning anti-capitalism in the name of democracy. This first tension then is between organisational form and political content. Second, Black Consciousness activists in the movement articulated an expansive conception of Blackness that worked to unify a broad sector of the oppressed. But they had to be careful not to let this identity broaden into an amorphous abstraction detached from lived experience and demands for dignity. This second tension then is between abstract and concrete articulations of racial identities. The authors conclude by drawing lessons from these tensions that can help us effectively fight a racist and capitalist authoritarianism in the United States.

  PublisherDOI

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

  British Journal of Sociology · 2026-03-23

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  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.

  PublisherDOI

• Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in Sao Paulo and Johannesburg

  The Journal of Development Studies · 2025-06-26 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• South Africa’s volatile electorate: changing bases of party support in 2014, 2016, and 2019

  Journal of Contemporary African Studies · 2025-01-02

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Race, Class, and the Politics of Liberation in the Life of Eddie Webster

  South African Review of Sociology · 2025-04-03

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The RCM triangle: race, capitalism, and movements

  Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2025-02-14 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Absorbed in Struggle: South Africa’s Passive Revolution From Below

  Critical Sociology · 2025-03-31 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  If South Africa appeared to be on the verge of socialist revolution in the mid-1980s, a decade later the country’s ruling party was presiding over a regime of privatization and the removal of capital controls. At the center of this process was the abolition of apartheid and the rise to power of the African National Congress (ANC). Previous scholarship appropriately characterizes South Africa’s democratic transition as what Gramsci called a ‘passive revolution’ – a strategy of ruling-class self-preservation that leaves the fundamental social structure untouched – but it focuses too heavily on elite maneuvers, including especially the ANC’s bait-and-switch in the final years of apartheid. These maneuvers, we argue, are the tail end of a process that fundamentally revolves around absorption. Central to this earlier moment in South Africa was an umbrella grouping of anti-apartheid forces called the United Democratic Front (UDF). We argue that the UDF represented a linchpin of the passive revolution in South Africa, serving as an organ of absorption , a means of incorporating the increasingly radicalized masses into a reformist political project. Rather than counterposing this ‘from below’ narrative to a passive revolution implemented ‘from above’, however, our account illustrates how passive revolution unfolds through a dialectic between both of these moments, above and below.

  PublisherDOI

• Race and biopolitical struggle: unpacking Chari’s <i>Apartheid Remains</i>

  Safundi · 2025-09-08

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Communists and Black liberation movements: divergent trajectories in the United States and South Africa, 1939–1969

  Social Forces · 2025-01-15 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In the 1920s, the Moscow-based Comintern began to promote a Black Communist movement, with specific emphasis on the United States and South Africa. Despite this common point of departure, the United States and South African Communist parties followed opposite trajectories. By the mid-20th century, the former dwindled as it grew increasingly detached from Black movements, while the latter developed a close relationship with the African National Congress, setting the stage for the party’s explosive growth in the post-apartheid period. To explain this divergence, we focus on what we call movement politics: the dynamic interaction among movements as they pursue particular political orientations and strategies. In the instances examined here, movement politics takes the form of a triangular relationship among three sets of actors: the international Communist movement, Black movements, and national Communist parties. We examine this dynamic interaction in two key conjunctures: first, during World War II, when loyalty to the Soviet Union proved to be an asset for the CPSA and a liability for the CPUSA; and second, during the Cold War, when South African Communists and Black movements converged on a politics of national liberation, while in the United States, Black movements turned to Third World liberation or anti-Communism as two alternatives to the CPUSA. These divergent trajectories reveal the period considered here, 1939 to 1969, as a critical juncture when American Communists became alienated from Black movements, while their counterparts in South Africa developed a lasting alliance with Black movements that persists to this day.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Between Hope and Failure: Refusing Precarity and Building Solidarity in South Korea Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest. By ChunJennifer JihyeHanJu Hui Judy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2025. Pp. 322, $32.00 (paper). ISBN: 9781503642256.

  Critical Sociology · 2025-08-27

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Shannon Gleeson

  Cornell University

  39 shared

• Sofya Aptekar

  CUNY School of Law

  32 shared

• Zachary Levenson

  University of Johannesburg

  14 shared

• Rachel Ferreira

  Fundação Oswaldo Cruz

  4 shared

• María Alejandra Pérez

  Institute of Cardiology

  4 shared

• Michael Burawoy

  University of California, Berkeley

  4 shared

• Irene They

  New York University Press

  4 shared

• Lauren Duquette-Rury

  4 shared

Education

• Phd, Sociology

  University of California Berkeley

  2013