Wikipedia Deep Dive

Erik Olin Wright

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In 1981, Harvard University tried to hire Erik Olin Wright. The sociology department wanted him. Harrison White, one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century, championed his cause. But Harvard's president, Derek Bok, reportedly blocked the appointment. The problem wasn't Wright's scholarship—it was his politics. Wright was a Marxist, and this was America at the dawn of the Reagan era.

That same year, Harvard denied tenure to Theda Skocpol, who would go on to become one of the most cited political scientists alive. The decision sparked accusations of gender discrimination, and the university eventually reversed course. But Wright never did join Harvard. He stayed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he'd been since completing his doctorate in 1976, and he remained there until his death in 2019.

This is the story of a man who spent his career trying to answer a deceptively simple question: What is social class, really? And more ambitiously: Can we imagine a better world and actually build it?

The Making of a Marxist Sociologist

Erik Olin Wright was born in Berkeley, California in 1947—the same year that marked the beginning of the Cold War, the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the first stirrings of McCarthyism. His parents were both psychology professors at the University of Kansas, where he grew up in Lawrence.

His educational path was unusual. He earned a bachelor's degree in social studies from Harvard in 1968, then crossed the Atlantic to get another bachelor's degree in history from Balliol College at Oxford. Only then did he return to Berkeley—where he'd been born—to complete his doctorate in sociology in 1976.

The timing matters. Wright came of intellectual age during the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. An entire generation of young academics was radicalized during this period, and Wright was among them. But unlike many radicals who eventually mellowed or moved on, Wright spent his entire career rigorously developing Marxist theory—while simultaneously making it empirically testable and relevant to contemporary capitalism.

The Problem With Marx's Classes

To understand Wright's contribution, you need to understand the problem he was trying to solve.

Classical Marxism divides society into two main classes: those who own the means of production (capitalists) and those who must sell their labor to survive (workers). This framework made intuitive sense in the nineteenth century, when factory owners and factory workers had clearly opposing interests. The owner wants to pay workers as little as possible; workers want to be paid as much as possible. The owner wants workers to work harder; workers want to work less. The conflict is built into the structure of the relationship.

But what about a software engineer at Google who earns four hundred thousand dollars a year? What about a hospital administrator who manages three hundred employees but doesn't own the hospital? What about a skilled electrician who can demand premium wages because licensing requirements limit who can do the work?

These people don't own factories. They sell their labor. By the classical Marxist definition, they're workers. But their material interests, their lived experiences, their politics—these often have little in common with a minimum-wage cashier or an Amazon warehouse picker.

Wright spent decades developing a more sophisticated framework to capture these distinctions.

Contradictory Class Locations

Wright's key insight was that many people in modern capitalist societies occupy what he called "contradictory class locations." They're neither pure capitalists nor pure workers. They have some characteristics of each.

Consider a manager. She doesn't own the company, so in one sense she's a worker selling her labor. But she has authority over other workers. She makes decisions about hiring and firing. She controls the pace of work for her subordinates. In these respects, she functions as an agent of capital, even though she's technically an employee herself.

Or consider a highly credentialed professional—a corporate lawyer, a specialist physician, an expert consultant. These people possess scarce skills that are in high demand. Their expertise might be naturally rare, or it might be artificially scarce because of licensing requirements, expensive education, or other barriers to entry. Either way, employers have to pay them more than it actually costs to "produce" them (in the Marxist sense of the cost of their education, training, and sustenance). This extra payment is what Wright called a "skill rent" or "credential rent."

These credential-holders are also harder to monitor. You can watch a factory worker and count how many widgets they produce per hour. It's much harder to evaluate whether a corporate lawyer is billing efficiently or whether a surgeon is operating at peak performance. Employers therefore have to "buy" the loyalty of these workers by giving them more autonomy, better conditions, sometimes even ownership stakes in the company.

The result, according to Wright, is that managers, experts, and especially executive managers tend to be closer in their interests to employers than to other workers. They might vote differently, live in different neighborhoods, send their children to different schools. Their class consciousness—the way they understand their own position in society—is different.

Why This Matters

This might seem like academic hairsplitting, but the stakes are genuinely important.

If you're trying to build a political coalition of working people, you need to understand who actually shares interests with whom. Classical Marxism predicted that the working class would eventually develop class consciousness, recognize their shared interests, and organize collectively. But this prediction has largely failed in advanced capitalist societies. Workers haven't united. Why not?

Wright's framework offers an answer. The working class isn't a unified group with shared interests. It's fragmented into subgroups with different relationships to capital and different degrees of class consciousness. A unionized autoworker, a freelance graphic designer, and a middle manager at a bank might all technically be "workers," but they experience capitalism very differently.

Wright tested these ideas empirically. His 1997 book Class Counts analyzed data from multiple industrialized countries—the United States, Canada, Norway, Sweden—to see whether his class categories actually predicted things like income, political views, and attitudes toward collective action. The data largely confirmed his framework.

From Analysis to Utopia

But Wright wasn't content just to analyze capitalism. He wanted to move beyond it.

In the later part of his career, Wright became increasingly focused on what he called "real utopias"—actually existing institutions and practices that embody democratic and egalitarian principles, even within capitalist societies.

The phrase "real utopia" sounds like an oxymoron, and that's intentional. The word "utopia" comes from the Greek for "no place." It refers to an ideal society that exists only in imagination. Wright wanted to find utopias that were real—places and institutions you could actually visit, study, and potentially replicate.

His examples were varied. One was the Mondragon Corporation in Spain's Basque Country. Mondragon is a federation of worker cooperatives that employs over eighty thousand people and generates billions of euros in annual revenue. Workers own the company. They elect their managers. Wage ratios between the highest and lowest paid workers are capped at a ratio of about six to one—compared to ratios of three hundred to one or more at major American corporations.

Another example, perhaps surprisingly, was Wikipedia. Here is an institution that produces a vast public good—a comprehensive encyclopedia in hundreds of languages, freely available to anyone with an internet connection—using almost entirely volunteer labor. No one owns Wikipedia in the capitalist sense. No one extracts profits from it. It operates through what Wright called a "social economy" based on cooperation and intrinsic motivation rather than market incentives or state coercion.

Wright didn't claim these institutions were perfect or that they could simply be scaled up to replace capitalism. But he argued they demonstrated something important: alternative ways of organizing economic life are possible. They exist. They work. They point toward a more just and humane world.

Deep Democracy and Interstitial Revolution

Two concepts from Wright's later work deserve special attention.

The first is "deep democracy." Most democratic societies practice what you might call "thin democracy"—citizens vote periodically for representatives who then make decisions on their behalf. Wright advocated for democratic participation that goes much deeper, extending into workplaces, communities, and other institutions where important decisions affecting people's lives are made.

The logic is straightforward. If you spend forty or more hours a week at work, and decisions at work profoundly affect your life, why shouldn't you have a democratic voice in those decisions? Why should workplaces be run as authoritarian hierarchies within supposedly democratic societies?

The second concept is "interstitial revolution." Unlike classical Marxism, which often emphasized seizing state power through dramatic transformation, Wright envisioned social change happening gradually, in the cracks and margins of existing institutions. Real utopias grow within the interstices of capitalism. They expand. They connect with each other. Over time, they might come to form the foundation of a fundamentally different society.

This vision is less dramatic than storming the Winter Palace. It's also more plausible in advanced capitalist democracies where violent revolution seems both unlikely and undesirable.

The Fiddle Player

There's a detail in Wright's biography that feels important to mention: he was an avid fiddle player who often encouraged guests to square dance at parties.

This might seem trivial, but it captures something about the man. He was a rigorous scholar who published dense theoretical works on class analysis. He was also someone who believed in conviviality, in community, in people coming together for shared joy. The two things weren't in tension for him. They were connected.

Wright died on January 23, 2019, from acute myeloid leukemia. He was seventy-one. His final book, How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century, was published posthumously.

The Students He Taught

One measure of a scholar's impact is the students they train. By this measure, Wright was extraordinarily influential.

Among those who completed their dissertations under his supervision was Vivek Chibber, now a prominent sociologist at New York University and editor of the socialist magazine Catalyst. Another was Wilmot James, who went on to become a member of Parliament in South Africa and chair of that country's Human Genome Project. César Rodríguez Garavito became a leading human rights scholar and director of the Center for Law, Justice and Society at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia.

Wright also served on dissertation committees for scholars who became major figures in their fields. Gøsta Esping-Andersen, the Danish sociologist whose typology of welfare states became foundational in comparative politics, worked with Wright. So did Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, who later became president of the American Sociological Association. And Devah Pager, whose audit studies exposed racial discrimination in hiring practices—she would send out identical résumés with stereotypically Black and white names and document the dramatically different callback rates—also had Wright on her committee.

Wright himself was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 2012, a recognition of his standing in the discipline.

The Tension at the Heart of His Work

There's an interesting tension running through Wright's career. On one hand, he was an analytical Marxist—part of a movement that tried to make Marxist theory rigorous, precise, and empirically testable. This meant stripping away some of the vaguer and more metaphysical elements of classical Marxism. It meant using the tools of mainstream social science—surveys, statistics, comparative analysis—rather than relying solely on dialectical reasoning or historical materialism.

On the other hand, Wright remained committed to the normative vision of Marxism: the belief that capitalism is fundamentally unjust and that a more egalitarian society is both possible and desirable. He never retreated into pure description or claimed that social science should be value-neutral.

Some critics thought these two impulses were in tension. How can you be rigorously scientific while also being openly committed to a political project? Wright would likely have replied that all social science involves values, whether acknowledged or not. The choice is not between value-laden and value-free scholarship, but between being transparent about your commitments and pretending you don't have any.

What Remains

Wright's work remains relevant because the questions he asked haven't been answered.

The working class, as classically conceived, has not developed unified class consciousness. Inequality has grown dramatically since Wright began his career. The Marxist prediction that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions has not come to pass—but neither has capitalism delivered broadly shared prosperity or solved its recurrent crises.

Meanwhile, experiments in alternative economic organization continue to proliferate. Worker cooperatives, platform cooperatives, mutual aid networks, community land trusts, participatory budgeting—these are all examples of what Wright would have called real utopias. None of them has replaced capitalism. But they exist, they function, and they demonstrate that other ways of organizing economic life are possible.

Whether these interstitial transformations can accumulate into something more fundamental remains to be seen. Wright believed they could. He was wrong about many things over his career—he revised his class framework multiple times as evidence challenged his earlier formulations—but he remained optimistic about the possibility of a more democratic and egalitarian future.

That optimism, grounded not in wishful thinking but in careful analysis of actually existing alternatives, may be his most enduring legacy.