Erik Olin Wright

University of Wisconsin–Madison | UW · Department of Sociology

This book is a critical appraisal of the themes Göran Therborn has pursued up till now, and is introduced by Robin Blackburn, for almost twenty years his editor at New Left Review. In between Science, Class and Society (1976) and The Killing Fields of Inequality (2011) Göran has consistently challenged received wisdom in politics and the social sci...

The Pope has articulated a need to change the way society thinks about economic growth, but it is implausible to rely primarily on moral conversion to solve our environmental and social ills.

No texto, que é o capítulo introdutório do livro Class counts, Wright defende a relevância da análise de classes para o entendimento da sociedade e da política contemporâneas. Ainda que a variável "classe" não explique sozinha todos os fenômenos sociais, nem mesmo seja parte das explicações de todos, ela é significativa em uma grande variedade dele...

Stuart White argues that egalitarians need a diverse toolkit of policy proposals in order to move closer to a just economic system. In particular he argues that a policy of Basic Capital grants should be included in this toolkit along with a variety of other more familiar instruments such as unconditional Basic Income, welfare state services and in...

Erik Olin Wright on last year's best-seller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

On Marx’s tomb in Highgate cemetery is one of his most quoted passages: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Usually this is taken as a call to action. But it is also a call to produce a certain kind of knowledge, knowledge that is relevant to the task of social transformation. Such knowledge ne...

I think it is useful to contrast two different ways of thinking about the moral foundations of what can be called “critical emancipatory social science.” The first emphasizes the ways in which existing institutions and social structures generate human suffering and obstruct human flourishing. The second emphasizes the ways in which existing institu...

This paper explores a broad framework for thinking sociologically about emancipatory alternatives to dominant institutions and social structures, especially capitalism. The framework is grounded in two foundational propositions: (1) Many forms of human suffering and many deficits in human flourishing are the result of existing institutions and soci...

Economic inequality in contemporary advanced societies is strongly tied to the variation in wages across occupations. We examine the extent to which this variation is captured by social class and occupational prestige and ask how the associations between class, prestige and wages can be explained. Based on data from eleven countries in the European...

A “real utopia” isn’t an oxymoron or a figment of the imagination. Erik Olin Wright writes, instead, that real world examples of functioning social alternatives can help us find ways to improve the human condition. When history provides an opportunity to effect such changes, a familiarity with real utopias will provide a roadmap.

Socio-Economic Review (2011) 9, 395–418 Advance Access publication March 2, 2011 doi:10.1093/ser/mwr001 REVIEW SYMPOSIUM Keywords: civil society, social capital, commodification, markets, democracy, historical sociology, political sociology JEL classification: Z13 economic sociology, social and economic stratification, Y80 related disciplines On Ge...

Throughout most of the 20 th century, socialism constituted the central ideological matrix for thinking about alternatives to capitalism. Even in settings where socialism as such was not an immediately feasible political goal, the idea of socialism helped to give political direction to struggles against capitalism. Things have changed. Now, at the...

Perhaps the most intractable aspect of gender inequality concerns inequalities within the family around the domestic division of labor, especially over child care and other forms of caregiving. These enduring gender inequalities constitute a significant obstacle to achieving “strong gender egalitarianism”—a structure of social relations in which th...

Elements of a Reconstructed Class Analysis

The concept of class has greater explanatory ambitions within the Marxist tradition than in any other tradition of social theory and this, in turn, places greater burdens on its theoretical foundations. In its most ambitious form, Marxists have argued that class – or very closely linked concepts like mode of production or the economic base was at t...

Wolfgang Streeck, num influente trabalho publicado em 1997, sustentou de um modo convincente que a performance econômica em sociedades de mercado se incrementa quando as escolhas racionais e voluntarísticas dos atores sofrem restrições advindas de constrangimentos normativos e institucionais. Neste artigo, proponho três modificações a essa tese cen...

Wolfgang Streeck convincingly argues, in an influential paper published in 1997, that economic performance in market societies is enhanced when the rational, voluntaristic choices of actors are constrained by a variety of normative and institutional constraints. This paper offers three modifications of this central Durkheimian thesis: (1) the meani...

This commentary on "Interrogating the Treadmill of Production" by Gould, Pellow, and Schnaiberg takes up the challenge, invited by the article itself, of asking some of the questions that still seem unanswered by the model. Among the questions asked are: Why not refer to capitalism instead of the treadmill and to workers/owners instead of producers...

Both Basic Income and Stakeholder Grants, if sufficiently generous, are likely to have an impact on the balance of power between classes: Stakeholder Grants make it easier for individuals to become self-employed and “own their own means of production,” thus reducing their dependency on capitalists; by unconditionally guaranteeing each individual an...

This paper examines the quality of jobs generated during periods of job expansion from the 1960s through to the 1990s in the USA. The central results of the study are: first, the long 1990s economic boom produced a pattern of asymmetrically polarized job expansion: very strong expansion of jobs in the top tier of the employment structure combined w...

this report and incorporating the perspectives and knowledge of its own members. The intervention team was widely respected and thus able to facilitate the LSC's deliberative planning effort and set their group process on track

a comparison of the 1960s and 1990s This paper examines the quality of jobs generated during periods of job expansion from the 1960s through then 1990s. The central results of the study are: First, the long 1990s economic boom produced a pattern of asymetrically polarized job expansion: very strong expansion of jobs in the top tier of the employmen...

this paper. After a very brief discussion of the institutions of the participatory governance in Porto Alegre, I argue in the next section that the experiment offers a particularly successful resolution to the problems of deliberation among unequals through its didactic functions. In the following section on interfaces with civil society, I argue t...

As the tasks of the state have become more complex and the size of polities larger and more heterogeneous, the institutional forms of liberal democracy developed in the nineteenth century—representative democracy plus techno- bureaucratic administration—seem increasingly ill suited to the novel problems we face in the twenty-first century. "Democra...

Discussions of Marxism as a social theory typically adopt one of four basic stances: 1. Propagating Marxism. Marxism is a comprehensive worldview for understanding the social world. It provides the theoretical weapons needed to attack the mystifications of capitalism and the vision needed to mobilize the masses for struggle. The central task for Ma...

ort as a pivotal feature of class relations and a central determinant of class conflict. Instead he treats the problem of eliciting work performance within capitalism as an instance of technical inefficiencies reflecting a tension betweenformal rationality and substantive rationality within capitalist economic relations. The basic objective of this...

Aage Sorensen, in "Toward a Sounder Basis for Class Analysis," argues that Marxists are correct in placing exploitation at the center of class analysis since an exploitation-centered concept of class has a much greater potential for explaining the structural foundations of social conflicts over inequality than does its principle rival, the material...

One of the great virtues of Charles Tilly's Durable Inequality is that it might be wrong. So often attempts at constructing grand theories in sociology turn out, on close inspection, to consist largely of tautologies and vacuous propositions—conceptual frameworks that are so flexible and indeterminate that no empirical observations of the world wou...

The general-care glass ceiling hypothesis states that not only is it more difficult for women than for men to be promoted up levels of authority hierarchies within workplaces but also that the obstacles women face relative to men become greater as they move rtp the hierarchy. Gender-based discrimination in promotions is not simply present across le...

this paper I will explore three recent proposals for how contemporary developed capitalist societies might move significantly in the direction of more egalitarian distributions of standards of living: large stakeholder grants to be given to all citizens upon reaching the age of majority; unconditional universal basic income; and, a specific form of...

In his paper, "Toward a Sounder Basis for Class Analysis" Aage Srensen endorses the traditional Marxist idea that exploitation is central to understanding the ways in which class relations generate inequalities and antagonisms of material interests, but proposes that the Marxist approach to exploitation be replaced by one which identifies exploitat...

This article proposes a general theoretical framework for under- standing the concept of "class compromise" in terms of a "reverse- J" model of the relationship between the associational power of workers and the interests of capitalists: increases in working-class power adversely affect capitalist-class interests until such power crosses some inter...

In February 2000, when the current American economic expansion passed the 107th month, President Clinton proudly announced that this expansion was the most sustained in U.S. history, surpassing even the "golden age" of the 1960s. Praise for this expansion extends well beyond our own borders. Throughout the developed world, the American economy now...

Robert Chernomas and Ardeshir Sepehri indicate that various state-supported transfers that go to the “underclass” are largely paid for by taxation of workers' compensation. Such expenses therefore cannot be considered drains on the social surplus which would otherwise be available to dominant classes in the form of “exploitation.” These arguments a...

Robert Chernomas and Ardeshir Sepehri indicate that various state-supported transfers that go to the "underclass" are largely paid for by taxation of workers' compensation. Such expenses therefore cannot be considered drains on the social surplus which would otherwise be available to dominant classes in the form of "exploitation." These arguments a...

If the evidence I discuss above is correct, then it certainly seems premature to declare the death of class. Class may not be the most powerful or fundamental cause of societal organization, and class struggle may not be the most powerful transformative force in the world today. Class primacy as a generalized explanatory principle across all social...

This lively new collection from one of America's leading sociologists covers a wide range of theoretical problems of interest to radical social scientists and political activists. The book opens with a fascinating autobiographical essay exploring the challenges and benefits of being a Marxist scholar in the present era. Following this is a discussi...

In responding to Tony Novak's criticisms of his earlier article "The Class Analysis of Poverty," the author makes four principle points. First, contrary to Novak's views, a class analysis to poverty should define poverty in terms of both income-poverty and asset-poverty. Second, while Novak is correct that the term "underclass" often has a pejorati...

We explore a range of issues concerning the gender gap in workplace authority in seven countries (the United Stares, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, Norway and Japan). There are six main empirical conclusions. First, there is considerable cross-national variation in the gender gap in authority: The gap is lowest in the four English-s...

To understand more fully the nature of poverty it must be viewed as the result, in part, of inherent features of the social system. The author describes four general approaches to explaining poverty: poverty as a result of inherent individual attributes, as the by-product of contingent individual characteristics, as a by-product of social causes, a...

This paper explores the differential permeability of three class boundaries - the boundaries determined by property, authority and expertise - to intergenerational mobility among men in four developed capitalist economies: the US, Canada, Norway and Sweden. In all four countries, the authority boundary is the most permeable to intergenerational mob...

"Reconstructing Marxism"explores fundamental questions about the structure of Marxist theory and its prospects for the future. The authors maintain that the disintegration of the old theoretical unity of classical Marxism is in part responsible for what is commonly called the crisis of Marxism. Only a reconstructed Marxism can come to terms with th...

This paper explores a contrast between the Marxist and feminist traditions of emancipatory social theory: whereas in the Marxist tradition theorists have spent considerable time and energy discussing the problem of the viability of classlessness as an emancipatory project, feminists have spent relatively little time defending the viability of a soc...

This article explores the relationship between class and the gendered domestic division of labor by examining how the contribution by husbands to housework in dual-career families varies across the class system. The article uses data from the United States and Sweden. The findings indicate that location in the class structure is not a powerful or s...

The structural analysis of classes can be divided into the analysis of class locations and the analysis of permeability of boundaries separating those locations. Marxist analysis of class structure has been primarily concerned with the first of these while Weberian class analysis has focused on the second. We attempt to combine a Marxist structural...

Some of the important conceptual debates between different approaches to class analysis can be interpreted as reflecting different ways of linking temporality to class structure. In particular, processual concepts of class can be viewed as linking class to the past whereas structural concepts link class to the future. This contrast in the temporali...

Self-employment declined in the United States almost steadily from the 19th century to the early 1970s. Since then, it has risen every year. Explaining this reversal in the historical fortunes of the petty bourgeoisie is the central task of this article. We reach four basic conclusions: first, the reversal in the decline of the self-employed is sta...

The paper written by a famous sociologist, one of the main advocates of analytical Marxism, analyzes this school of social and economic thought which emerged in the end of the 1970s. The author briefly outlines the history of analytical Marxism and explicates its distinctive characteristics which distinguish it from both neoclassical tradition and...

This study explores a series of predictions concerning the likely changes in the American class structure in the 1970s made by Wright and Singelmann in their work on proletarianization. They argued that, in a period of economic stagnation such as occurred in the 1970s, there should be an acceleration of the process of proletarianization and a decli...

The basic conclusion of the analysis of this article is that for a combination of economic and political reasons, a capitalist road to communism is implausible, and for political reasons a socialist road is more likely to succeed than the mixed road. The pure capitalist road is impossible because capital flight would immediately undermine the econo...

Research on strikes has suffered from the lack of convincing measures of power which are operationally independent of the behaviors and outcomes such power is meant to explain. In particular, many discussions of strike behavior discuss the disruptive potential of strikes for the economy as a whole as an important structural basis of power, but such...

In spite of the basic similarity in the overall shape of the class structures of Sweden and the United States, there are some real differences as well In particular, the American class structure is characterized by a higher pro portion of managers and supervisors than the Swedish class structure. whereas the Swedish class structure has a higher pro...

This paper presents the first systematic investigation of the American class structure based on data gathered from an explicitly Marxian, relational perspective. Classes in this research are not defined in terms of categories of occupations, but in terms of social relations of control over investments, decision making, other people's work, and one'...

This paper attempts to address empirically the debate between two opposed images of the transformation of work in contemporary capitalism. The first, commonly associated with "postindustrial theory," sees work as becoming more humanized, more autonomous, less routinized; the second image, associated with Marxist theories of proletarianization, sees...