Erik Olin Wright (February 9, 1947 – January 23, 2019)[6] was an American analytical Marxist sociologist, specializing in social stratification, and in egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism. He was known for diverging from classical Marxism in his breakdown of the working class into subgroups of diversely held power and therefore varying degrees of class consciousness. Wright introduced novel concepts to adapt to this change of perspective including deep democracy and interstitial revolution.[7]
Erik Olin Wright was born on February 9, 1947 in Berkeley, California. His parents were both Jewish. He received two BAs (from Harvard College in 1968, and from Balliol College, University of Oxford in 1970), and a PhD from University of California, Berkeley in 1976. He became a professor of sociology at University of Wisconsin - Madison[1] in 1976.[8]
Wright began making contributions to the intellectual community in the mid-1970s, along with a whole generation of young academics who were radicalized by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.[9]
In 2012, Wright was elected President of the American Sociological Association.[10]
Wright has been described as an "influential new left theorist".[11] His work was concerned mainly with the study of social classes, and in particular with the task of providing an update to and elaboration of the Marxist concept of class, in order to enable Marxist and non-Marxist researchers alike to use "class" to explain and predict people's material interests, lived experiences, living conditions, incomes, organizational capacities and willingness to engage in collective action, political leanings, and so on. In addition, he attempted to develop class categories that would allow researchers to compare and contrast the class structures and dynamics of different advanced capitalist and "post-capitalist" societies.
Wright has stressed the importance of:
According to Wright, employees with sought-after and reward-inelastically supplied skills (due to natural scarcities or socially constructed and imposed restrictions on supply, such as licensing, barriers to entry into training programs, etc.) are in a "privileged [surplus] appropriation location within exploitation relations" because, while they are not capitalists, they are able to obtain more privileges through their relation to the owner of the means of production than less skilled workers and harder to monitor and evaluate in terms of labor effort. The owner(s) of the means of production or their employer in general therefore has to pay them a "scarcity" or "skill/credential" rent (thus raising their compensation above the actual cost of producing and reproducing their labor power) and tries to "buy" their loyalty by giving them ownership stakes, endowing them with delegated authority over their fellow workers and/or allowing them to more or less be autonomous in determining the pace and direction of their work. Thus, experts, managers of experts, and executive managers tend to be closer to the interests of the employers than to other workers.
Erik Olin Wright's books include Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis (Cambridge, 1997), which uses data collected in various industrialized countries, including the United States, Canada, Norway, and Sweden. He was a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until his death.
Later in his career, Wright was associated with a renewed understanding of a socialist alternative, deeply rooted on social associativism.[12] The transition to this alternative, according to Wright, depends on designing and building "real utopias", the name of a research and book of his. Examples of "real utopias" that counter prevailing institutions by advancing democratic and egalitarian principles, thereby point in the direction of a more just and humane world, include Wikipedia and the Mondragon Corporation.