Bio: (1947-2019) American sociologist. Erik Olin Wright received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976, and taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison until his death. He is one of the main representatives of neo-Marxism and is one of the advocates of the approach known as analytical Marxism. He dedicated his career to returning the Marxist understanding of the phenomenon of classes to the center of scientific study.  Wright’s study of class can be divided into two periods. In his books Class, Crisis and the State (1978) and Class Structure and Income Determination (1979), Wright details his first class scheme, while his second period of researching classes starts with the publication of his book Classes (1985).

                                   Early Works on Class

Wright’s first class scheme was greatly influenced by the class analysis of Poulantzas. Wright believes that Pulantzas' class scheme does not meet the criteria of Marxist class analysis because, according to such criteria, the proletariat would make up only 23 to 30 percent of the labor force in the United States in the early 1970s, so the proletariat would be a minority. Wright, in order to solve the problems of classifying social classes, introduces the notion of "contradictory locations within the class structure" as his own solution. There are locations within the class structure that are objectively contradictory in their properties, not only in relation to other classes, but in themselves, and they should be analyzed independently. The three contradictory class locations are: managers and supervisors; employees in semi-autonomous jobs and small employers.

Wright believes that three related processes took place during the development of modern capitalism: the reduction of control over the labor process by direct producers; the establishment of complex hierarchies within capitalist enterprises and bureaucracy; and the differentiation of functions previously performed by capitalists. The last process concerns the separation of three aspects of ownership: possession (control over the production process), economic ownership (control over investments and what is produced), and legal ownership. The consequence of this trend is an increase in the importance of management, but also an increase in the influence of large shareholders over small shareholders. From the analysis of all three processes, Wright derives three dimensions in the relations of production that affect one's class position: control over the means of production; control over other people's labor force, and control over investments and resource allocation. By combining the three dimensions of control in production with the three dimensions of legal status in production (legal ownership of production, legal status of employer, and legal status of employee), Wright constructs his class scheme with 10 classes. Wright believes that there are other contradictory locations in practice, but they are not of major importance for class analysis.

Wright determines the class position of individuals who do not participate directly in production relations by their class interests. Wright treats the position of housewife in the context of a family class situation. Students take a pre-class position, that is, their position depends, above all, on their future class position after gaining employment, rather than on their family background. Retirees take a post-class position and are bound by the trajectory of the class positions they have held during their careers. The position of the temporarily unemployed depends on their previous and potential future class positions, while the permanently unemployed belong to the marginal segment of the working class. Employees in the political and ideological apparatus are positioned according to their own attitude towards fundamental political and ideological interests, and not according to economic interests. Wright places members of the political and ideological apparatus in three classes: 1) bourgeois positions - those who create politics and ideology in the highest positions in the state, churches, universities, etc; 2) contradictory locations - those who implement political decisions and spread ideology (eg street police officers and high school teachers); 3) proletarian positions - individuals who are completely excluded from the creation and implementation of politics and ideology (e.g. a cleaner in a police station).

Wright continues with a theoretical analysis of the relationship between class structure and class struggle and introduces the notion of "class capacity" - the capacity of a class to pursue its own interests. He distinguishes between the structural capacities of the class, which depend on the structural development of capitalist societies, and the organizational capacities of the class, which represent the conscious organization of individuals to achieve their class interests, through, more or less, formal forms of organization (unions, labor collectives, strike committees).

                                   Classes and Exploitation

In his second scheme, which he presented for the first time in his book Classes (1985), Wright divided the contradictory class situation into two types: 1) contradictory class locations within one form of production and 2) contradictory class locations between several forms of production. He believes that the main criterion for social relations of production, which are the basis for determining classes, is the unity of appropriation relations and domination relations. Based on this, Wright concludes that contradictory locations exist within the same form of production, but not between different forms of production; there are only heterogeneous or dual locations between them.

In his second class scheme, Wright shifts the focus from studying the relationship of domination to studying the relationship of exploitation. He argues that class concepts based on domination tend to slip into an approach of "diverse subordination" in the study of social relations. In such approaches, it is considered that every subordination is based on a different form of domination - sexual, racial, national, or economic - none of which has primacy. Class subordination thus becomes only one of many subordinations and its centrality in social and historical analysis is lost. Dominance, in itself, does not mean that the actors will have conflicting interests, while the concept of exploitation fully encompasses the conflicting material interests of the actors.

In operationalizing the concept of exploitation, Wright introduces a distinction between economic exploitation and economic oppression. In the case of exploitation, the wealth of the exploiting class directly depends on the work of the exploited class, while in the case of economic oppression, certain groups of people are excluded from the production relationship. In addition, Wright introduces "organization" as the fourth type of productive asset. The organization, as a coordinated cooperation between producers in a complex division of labor, represents a production resource in itself. In current capitalism, this resource is controlled by managers and capitalists. According to Wright, for bureaucracy (including political and economic leaders), authority is not a resource in itself, but the organization is a resource controlled by a hierarchy of authority. Organizational resources are the basis for exploitation because ordinary workers would be in a better position if the management of companies would be democratized. The peculiarity of this type of resource is that the organization cannot be the subject of legal ownership or ownership relations.

The newly formed class scheme has 12 class positions, employers are divided into three classes, while employees are divided into nine classes formed by crossing two axes of ownership of assets: the axis of ownership of skills/qualifications and the axis of ownership of organizational assets. In the new scheme, managers are ranked only by qualifications, not by the number of organizational resources they control. The supervisors in the new scheme are divided into three classes, while in the previous one, they formed a single class. The class of technocrats and semi-self-employed is now omitted and partially replaced by the class of non-manager experts. The proletariat, which used to be one class, is divided into two classes according to qualifications.

Wright used his new theory of exploitation to reformulate the Marxist theory of history. Wright's basic argument is that increasing the probability of a successful transition from one form of production to the next grows steadily with increasing social productivity. He believes that socialism is no longer the only possible future of capitalism, that is, capitalism can be transformed into either statism or socialism. The relative openness of the future of capitalism presumes that workers are no longer the bearers of revolutionary change. Socialism, in the new theory of history, is also a form of exploitation, which was not the case in classical theory.

                     Class Analysis That Merges Marx and Weber

In recent works, Wright studies the similarities and differences between Marxist and Weberian class analysis, while developing a micro level of class analysis. The key to understanding the micro levels of class analysis is his understanding of class structure. The class structure is made up of relationships between class locations that are filled by individuals. Wright believes that class locations are not in the true sense of classes, but rather locations within the production relationship and that the number of class locations will depend on the empirical and theoretical needs of research in a particular case. The position of an individual in production relations can be complex, while some individuals are completely outside the system of production relations. Thus, the class structure at the micro level of analysis represents mechanisms that directly affect individuals and places them in certain class locations. It is necessary to understand how the macro-structural context conditions the processes at the micro-level, and on the other hand, how the choices and strategies of individuals, which take place at the micro-level, can influence macro-structural events. It is on this micro-level of analysis that Marxist class theory meets Weberian analysis because micro-analysis requires the study of the market situation of individuals, so Wright leaves room for Weberian class analysis to better explain the situation of individuals or institutional variations in different capitalist societies.

In addition to paying more attention to the micro-level of analysis, Wright began to study the dynamic aspects of classes and class structures, primarily through the analysis of various class mechanisms. These class mechanisms create different consequences for members of the class, and the most important consequences of class mechanisms are: material interest, life experience, and capacity for collective action. Material interest is realized through class mechanisms such as interest in economic prosperity and interest in acquiring economic power. Wright believes that material interest becomes common to members of a class location if they have similar life experiences that shape their subjective attitudes. The capacity for collective action is a class mechanism that is particularly interesting for Marxist class analysis.

Wright introduces several new concepts into his class analysis. Multiple locations serve to explain cases where individuals have more than one class location, perform multiple jobs that put them in different class locations, or when the same person is employed but also owns capital. Mediated class locations are class locations formed by individuals through kinship or relations with the state, and not with their work or personal ownership of productive property. These class locations are also important for determining the class position of unemployed spouses, unemployed, pensioners, and students. The class location of the spouses should also be viewed as a function of direct and mediated class location, while the “class interest” of unemployed married individuals (with working spouses) should be viewed as a combination of the influence of direct and mediated location.

Temporal locations relate to individual career dimensions. As many employees change positions in the production system during their careers, they will also have different class locations over time. However, if a lower-level individual knows that he will surely advance during his career (unless some external factors work), his material interest will differ from the interest of the person currently in the same class location, but without a real chance of advancement. The temporal uncertainty of a class location can also be applied to mediated class locations because if a person in a mediated location loses a material connection, for any reason, with people who have a direct class location, then his "shadow location" becomes dominant.

                          Subclass and Pats to Real Socialism

In his recent work, Wright also deals with the issue of the subclass for the first time. The main feature of this group is complete social exclusion and deprivation of any work skills. Members of the subclass are economically oppressed, but they are not systematically exploited in the capitalist system. Wright introduces a new term "state form of production" or "state relations of production" to explain the production aspect of the state and its enterprises (it excludes the political apparatus from the state form of production - courts, police, administration). Within the state form of production, the dominant classes would be those that determine the appropriation and allocation of surplus realized by the state, contradictory locations would be state managers and bureaucrats, while the subordinate class would be direct producers of goods and services within the state system. This class structure would be outside the class structure in the private sector. The uniqueness and separation, of the state form of production, vary in time and space, due to different types of relations between private capital and the market and the state, in different cases.

Wright spent the last decade of his life mostly focused on advocating and writing about possible pats of transition from capitalism to socialism, and his approach to this topic is evident in his books Envisioning Real Utopias (2010), Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy (2014),  and How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century (2019). 

Main works

The Politics of Punishment: A Critical Analysis of Prisons in America (1973);

Class, Crisis, and the State (1978);

Class Structure and Income Determination (1979);

Classes (1985);

The Debate on Classes (1989);

Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis (1997);

Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (2003);

Approaches to Class Analysis (2005);

Envisioning Real Utopias (2010);

Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy (2014);

Understanding Class (2015);

How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century (2019).