Erik Olin Wright

Erik Olin Wright: The Marxist Who Counted

Vivek Chibber called him "the greatest Marxist sociologist of his time," which in American academia is a compliment with a small audience and a long half-life. What made Erik Olin Wright unusual was not that he was a Marxist in a discipline with few of them. It was that he treated Marxism as a research programme with testable propositions, spent decades running international surveys to find out whether its class categories actually described anybody, and then, when the answers came back complicated, changed the theory rather than the data.

Berkeley, Kansas, Oxford

Wright was born on 9 February 1947 in Berkeley, California, and raised in Lawrence, Kansas, where both his parents — M. Erik Wright and Beatrice Ann Wright, née Posner — were psychology professors at the University of Kansas. An academic childhood in the middle of the country, in a household of researchers, produced someone temperamentally incapable of accepting a slogan in place of an argument.

He took a BA in social studies at Harvard College in 1968, then a second BA in history at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1970. His doctorate in sociology came from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976 — which is to say his intellectual formation ran straight through the years when the American New Left was at its height and then collapsed. In 1971 he married Marcia Kahn. In 1976 he joined the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and he never left it, spending more than four decades in the same building.

Contradictory Class Locations

The problem Wright set himself early was embarrassingly basic and had been ducked for a century. Marx's theory of class turns on the division between those who own the means of production and those who sell their labour. But by the late twentieth century most people in a developed economy were neither capitalists nor proletarians in any straightforward sense. What is a middle manager? A staff engineer? A university lecturer with a pension fund invested in the companies she criticizes?

Wright's answer, developed in *Class, Crisis, and the State* (1978) and elaborated in *Classes* (1985), was the concept of contradictory class locations. Certain positions in a capitalist economy are genuinely ambiguous — they exercise real authority over other workers and possess scarce skills that give them leverage, while remaining employees who do not own the assets they work with. Such positions are not anomalies to be tidied away but structurally contradictory, pulled in two directions at once, and their political behaviour follows accordingly.

Crucially, Wright did not stop at the concept. *Class Counts* (1997) put the framework to work on comparative survey evidence, measuring whether his categories predicted anything about how people in different countries actually think and behave. It is a rare case of a Marxist theorist submitting his own scheme to the kind of quantitative test that could have destroyed it.

The Heretic

Wright's Marxism was heterodox in ways that made orthodox Marxists uneasy. He rejected the Soviet Union as socialist. He accepted that class is not a binary but admits multiple gradations. He conceded that markets are not inherently exploitative. He belonged to the group of scholars known as the analytical Marxists, who insisted on holding Marxist claims to the standards of clarity and evidence applied to any other social science, and who dismantled a good deal of received doctrine in the process.

He was also, by disposition, unwilling to leave the argument at critique. His most quoted complaint about his own field was that it explains what is wrong with existing institutions but that "much less explores the design of alternatives to existing institutions that would help realize moral ideals of justice and human flourishing."

Real Utopias

That complaint became the Real Utopias Project, the work of his last two decades and the reason his name reaches beyond sociology. *Envisioning Real Utopias* (2010) defined the term precisely: real-world alternatives that function now and that also prefigure the world as it could be. He was uninterested in blueprints and equally uninterested in waiting for a revolution. He wanted institutions that already exist and can be examined — the Mondragón cooperatives in the Basque Country, and Wikipedia, which he took seriously as a functioning democratic institution producing enormous value outside both market and hierarchy.

The strategic vision was gradual: capitalism eroded from within by the accumulation of non-capitalist institutions, rather than smashed. "Incremental tinkering may not be inspiring," he wrote, "but it is the best we can do." He returned to the argument in a shorter, more accessible form in *How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century* (2019), completed as he was dying. He was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 2012, using the platform to press the same case.

Why Erik Is Called a Genius

The quality at issue is intellectual honesty operating at an unusual scale — the willingness to take a body of theory he was politically committed to and subject it, seriously and expensively, to the possibility of being wrong. Building a multi-country survey apparatus to test your own Marxist categories is not what ideologically motivated scholarship normally looks like. Colleagues credit him with the most sustained analysis of class and capitalism since Marx himself, and his non-doctrinaire method is what earned him readers in mainstream stratification research who had no sympathy for his politics. He was also a formidable teacher: Vivek Chibber, Gøsta Esping-Andersen and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva were among the scholars he supervised.

The counter-case deserves stating. His class scheme has been criticised as increasingly baroque — a taxonomy elaborated to accommodate awkward cases until it began to lose the explanatory sharpness that made Marx's binary useful in the first place. The Real Utopias Project is open to the objection that assembling examples of admirable institutions is not the same as demonstrating that they can scale, or explaining how the transition would survive the resistance of those who lose by it; his own "incremental tinkering" line concedes something to that charge. And Wright built no movement outside the university. He was a genius of rigour rather than of vision — the analyst who made a tradition argue properly.

Legacy

Wright died of acute myeloid leukaemia on 23 January 2019, aged seventy-one, having finished his last book while ill. An avid fiddle player, he left a body of comparative class data still being mined, a vocabulary — contradictory class location, real utopia — that outlived him immediately, and a demonstration that radical politics and methodological seriousness are not opposites.

Achievements

• Notable work: Envisioning Real Utopias
• Held posts at University of Wisconsin–Madison