FALLING INTO MARXISM; CHOOSING TO STAY"

I have been in school continuously for over fifty years: since I
entered kindergarten in 1952 there has never been a September
when I wasn’t beginning a school year. I have never held a 9-to-5
job with fixed hours and a boss telling me what to do. In high
school my summers were always spent in various kinds of
interesting and engaging activities -- traveling home from Australia
where my family spent a year (my parents were Fulbright
professors at the University of Western Australia); music camp (I
played viola); assisting in a lab. And in college it was much the
same: volunteering as a photographer on an archaeological dig in
Hawaii; teaching in a high school enrichment program for minority
kids; traveling in Europe. The closest thing to an ordinary paying
job I ever had was occasionally selling hot dogs at football games
in my freshman year in college. What is more, the ivory towers
that I have inhabited since the mid-1960s have been located in
beautiful physical settings, filled with congenial and interesting
colleagues and students, and animated by exciting ideas. This,
then, is the first fundamental fact of my life as an academic: I have
been extraordinarily lucky and have always lived what can only be
considered a life of extreme privilege. Nearly all of the time I am
doing what I want to do; what I do gives me a sense of fulfillment
and purpose; and I am paid well for doing it.

Here is the second fundamental fact of my academic life:

since the early 1970s my intellectual life has been firmly anchored

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

in the Marxist tradition. The core of my teaching as a professor has
centered on communicating the central ideas and debates of
contemporary Marxism and allied traditions of emancipatory social
theory. The courses I have taught have had names like: “Class,
State and Ideology: an introduction to Marxist Sociology”,
“Envisioning Real Utopias”, “Marxist theories of the State”,
“Alternative Foundations of Class Analysis.” My energies in
institution building have all involved creating and expanding
arenas within which radical system-challenging ideas could
flourish: creating a graduate program in class analysis and
historical change in the Sociology Department at the University of
Wisconsin; establishing the A. E. Havens Center, a research
institute for critical scholarship at Wisconsin; organizing an annual
conference for activists and academics, now called RadFest, which
has been held every year since 1983. And my scholarship has been
primarily devoted to reconstructing Marxism as a theoretical
framework and research tradition. While the substantive
preoccupations of this scholarship have shifted over the last 30
years, its central mission has not.

As in any biography, this pair of facts is the result of a

trajectory of circumstances and choices: circumstances that formed
me and shaped the range of choices I encountered, and choices that
in turn shaped my future circumstances. Some of these choices
were made easily, with relatively little weighing of alternatives,
sometimes even without much awareness that a choice was

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

actually being made; others were the result of protracted reflection
and conscious decision-making, sometimes with the explicit
understanding that the choice being made would constrain possible
choices in the future. Six such junctures of circumstance and
choice seem especially important to me in shaping the contours of
my academic career: The first concerns the choice, made just
before graduate school at the University of California-Berkeley, to
be a sociologist, rather than some other “ist”. The second was
posed incrementally during my first years at Berkeley: the choice
to identify my work primarily as

contributing to

Marxism rather

than simply

using

Marxism. The third was the choice to become

what some people describe as multivariate Marxist: to be a Marxist
sociologist who engages in grandiose, perhaps overblown,
quantitative research. The fourth choice was the choice of what
academic department to be in. This choice was acutely posed to me
in 1987 when I spent a year as a visiting professor at the University
of California, Berkeley. I had been offered a position there and I
had to decide whether I wanted to return to Wisconsin. Returning
to Madison was unquestionably a choice that shaped subsequent
contexts of choice. The fifth choice has been posed and reposed to
me with increasing intensity since the late 1980s: the choice to

stay

a Marxist in this world of post-Marxisms when many of my
intellectual comrades have decided for various good, and
sometimes perhaps not so good, reasons to recast their intellectual
agenda as being perhaps friendly to, but outside of, the Marxist
tradition. Finally, the sixth important choice was to shift my

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

central academic work from the study of class structure to the
problem of envisioning real utopias.

To set the stage for this reflection on choice and constraint,

I need to give a brief account of the circumstances of my life that
brought me into the arena of these choices.

Growing up

I was born in Berkeley, California, in 1947 while my father, who
had received a PhD in psychology before WWII, was in Medical
School on the G.I. Bill. When he finished his medical training in
1951 we moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where he became the head
of the program in Clinical Psychology at Kansas University and a
professor of psychiatry in the KU Medical School. Because of anti-
nepotism rules at the time, my mother, who also had a PhD in
psychology, was not allowed to be employed at the University, so
throughout the 1950s she did research on various research grants.
In 1961, when the state law on such things changed, she became a
professor of rehabilitation psychology.

Life in my family was intensely intellectual. Dinner table

conversation would often revolve around intellectual matters and
my parents were always deeply enthusiastic and involved in their
children’s school projects and intellectual pursuits. My mother
would carefully go over term papers with each of us, giving us

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

both editorial advice and substantive suggestions. We were
members of the Lawrence Unitarian Fellowship, which was made
up to a substantial extent of university families. Sunday morning
services were basically inter-disciplinary seminars on matters of
philosophical and social concern; Sunday school was an extended
curriculum on world religions. I knew by about age ten that I
wanted to be a professor. Both of my parents were academics.
Both of my siblings became academics. Both of their spouses are
academics. (Only my wife, a clinical psychologist, is not an
academic, although her father was a professor). The only social
mobility in my family was interdepartmental. It just felt natural to
go into the family business.

Lawrence was a delightful, easy place to grow up.

Although Kansas was a politically conservative state, Lawrence
was a vibrant, liberal community. My earliest form of political
activism centered around religion: I was an active member of a
Unitarian youth group called Liberal Religious Youth and in high
school I went out of my way to argue with Bible Belt Christians
about their belief in God. The early 1960s also witnessed my
earliest engagement with social activism. The civil rights
movement came to Lawrence first in the form of an organized
boycott of a local segregated swimming pool in the 1950s and then
in the form of civil rights rallies in the 1960s. In 1963 I went to the
Civil Rights March on Washington and heard Martin Luther
King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. My earliest sense of politics was

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

that at its core it was about moral questions of social justice, not
problems of economic power and interests.

My family, also, was liberal, supporting the civil rights

movement and other liberal causes; but while the family culture
encouraged an intellectual interest in social and moral concerns, it
was not intensely political. We would often talk about values, and
the Unitarian Fellowship we attended also stressed humanistic,
socially concerned values, but these were mostly framed as matters
of individual responsibility and morality, not as the grounding of a
coherent political challenge to social injustice. My only real
exposure to a more radical political perspective came through my
maternal grandparents, Russian Jewish immigrants who had come
to the US before World War I and lived near us in Lawrence, and
my mother’s sister’s family in New York. Although I was not
aware of this at the time, my grandparents and the New York
relatives were Communists. This was never openly talked about,
but from time to time I would hear glowing things said about the
Soviet Union, socialism would be held out as an ideal, and
America and capitalism would be criticized in emotionally laden
ways. My cousins in New York were especially vocal about this,
and in the mid-1960s when I became more engaged in political
matters, intense political discussions with my New York relatives
contributed significantly to anchoring my radical sensibilities.

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My interest in social sciences began in earnest in high

school. In Lawrence it was easy for academically oriented kids to
take courses at the University of Kansas, and in my senior year I
took a political science course on American politics. For my term
project I decided to do a survey of children’s attitudes towards the
American presidency, and got permission to administer a
questionnaire to several hundred students from grades 1-12 in the
public schools. I then organized a party with my friends to code the
data and produce graphs of how various attitudes changed by age.
The most striking finding was that, in response to the question
“Would you like to be President of the United States when you
grow up?” there were more girls who said yes than boys through
third grade, after which the rate for girls declined dramatically.

By the time I graduated from high school in 1964 I had

enough university credits and advanced placement credits to enter
KU as a second semester sophomore, and this is what I had
planned to do. Nearly all of my friends were going to K.U. It just
seemed like the thing to do. A friend of my parents, Karl Heider,
gave me as a Christmas present in my senior year in high school an
application form to Harvard. He was a graduate student at Harvard
in anthropology at the time. I filled it out and sent it in. Harvard
was the only place to which I applied, not out of inflated self-
confidence but because it was the only application I got as a
Christmas present. When I eventually was accepted (initially I was
on the waiting list), the choice was thus between K.U. and

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

Harvard. I suppose this was a “choice” since I could have decided
to stay at K.U. However, it just seemed so obvious; there was no
angst, no weighing of alternatives, no thinking about the pros and
cons. Thus going to Harvard in a way just happened.

Like many students who began university in the mid-1960s,

my political sensibilities were rapidly radicalized as the Viet Nam
War escalated and began to impinge on our lives. I was not a
student leader in activist politics, but I did actively participate in
demonstrations, rallies, organized fasts-for-peace, and endless
political debate. At Harvard I majored in Social Studies, an
intense interdisciplinary social science major centering on the
classics of social theory, and in that program I was first exposed to
the more abstract theoretical issues that bore on the political
concerns of the day: the dynamics of capitalism, the nature of
power and domination, the importance of elites in shaping
American foreign policy, the problem of class and social change. I
found all of this intellectually exciting, and wrote numerous term
papers on these kinds of macro-sociological issues, but these
themes did not constitute for me an over-riding intellectual
preoccupation as an undergraduate. I wrote my senior thesis not on
problems of political economy, classes and the state, but on a
social psychological theme: the causes and effects of student
leaves of absence from universities. I conducted a survey on this
problem and analyzed the data using punchcards in order to
understand the conditions under which leaves of absence would

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

have a positive or negative impact on the students involved. The
thesis was well received, but one would be hard put to find any
hint of radical sensibilities in it.

As graduation approached in 1968 I faced a problem

confronted by most healthy American males of the time: how to
cope with the prospect of being drafted. It was impossible to get a
conscientious objector deferment from my draft board in Kansas
since I could not prove that I was a long-standing member of a
pacifist religious group. I knew people who become expatriates,
and others who were prepared to go to jail rather than be drafted. I
was unwilling to make either of these sacrifices. Instead, I decided
to enroll in a Unitarian Seminary – the Starr King School for the
Ministry – in Berkeley and thus get a ministerial deferment. I
enrolled in the seminary not out of a deep and abiding commitment
to the ministry as a possible vocation – that never occurred to me
as something I would actually do – but because it was the only way
I could think of at the time to keep out of the Army in the context
of the Vietnam War. The enrollments at seminaries, especially in
Unitarian seminaries, increased dramatically in the late sixties.
When I received a scholarship to study history at Balliol College,
Oxford, I therefore organized a way to be formally enrolled in the
seminary while taking courses at Oxford. I made a point of
specializing in the English Puritan Revolution under the tutorship
of Christopher Hill so that if the draft board ever questioned this

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

arrangement I could show that I was studying something connected
to religion.

After two extraordinary years of wallowing in intellectual

pleasures at Oxford, I returned in the fall of 1970 to the United
States and entered the Unitarian Seminary in Berkeley. This is
when the decisive choices through which my academic identity
would be forged began.

Becoming a Marxist: Accountability and eclecticism

When I entered the seminary I was already quite radicalized
intellectually and politically. The general terms of political debate
in England were more permeated with Marxian-inspired ideas than
was generally the case in the US. At Oxford, under the stimulating
guidance of Steven Lukes, I had read much more thoroughly a
range of Marxist work than I had earlier and wrote a series of
papers on various Marxist themes, including my first paper on the
problem of class. Still, in 1970 I would not have said that the
central focus of my scholarly work was the reconstruction of
Marxist approaches to understanding social and political questions.
That changed in the course of the next few years.

At the seminary I had two crucial formative experiences.

First, I initiated and then led a seminar at the Berkeley Graduate
Theological Union called “Utopia and Revolution.” Fifteen or so

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

students from various seminaries participated in the seminar in
which we read and energetically debated socialist, Marxist,
anarchist, and various strands of utopian literature. This was the
first extended academic context in which I was involved where the
primary motivation was not simply the scholarly task of clarifying
ideas and weighing the intellectual merits of arguments, but rather
sorting out our political vision and thinking about how to connect
our concrete activities to a broad agenda of social change. The
seminar was an exhilarating experience. Thirty years later I still
teach a graduate seminar in the same spirit –

Envisioning Real

Utopias.

The second critical experience was a year-long internship

as a student chaplain at San Quentin Prison. Every week I would
drive from Berkeley to the prison north of San Francisco and spend
the day in the Protestant chaplain’s office talking to prisoners. This
was the height of the militant period of the Black Panthers, and
many black prisoners in San Quentin were highly politicized.
When prisoners would come to me and ask me to pray with them, I
would send them to the real chaplain saying that he was better at
that. Very quickly it became known among prisoners that I was a
sympathetic ear for political discussions, both about the conditions
in the prison and about broader issues in American society.
Through the prisoners I met, I became involved in an activist
organization called the Prison Law Project which linked radical,
mainly black, prisoners with leftwing lawyers and was devoted to

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

challenging prison conditions through litigation and other forms of
activism. In the context of my work with the Prison Law Project
and my role in the prison, I decided with my friends in the Project
to write a book about San Quentin which eventually became
published as the

Politics of Punishment

in 1973, about half of

which was written by myself, and the rest by prisoners and others
connected with the Prison Law Project.

The Politics of Punishment

was by far the most ambitious

piece of writing I had ever attempted. I remember when the book
was finally done saying that my respect for even very bad books
had increased since I now knew how much work they entailed.
Writing the book was also the first context in which I had to
navigate the analytical imperatives of serious scholarly exposition
with the political imperatives of popular accessibility and political
relevance. I discovered that I could do academic work which was
not just fun intellectually, but which had moral and political
aspirations as well.

In January 1971 the rules of military conscription changed

and a lottery replaced the previous system. When the first lottery
was conducted, I received a good number – somewhere above 250
as I recall – and since the expectation was that no one with a
number above the low 100s would be drafted in 1971, I gave up
my seminary student deferment and decided to enter graduate
school in Sociology.

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

Although I was formally enrolled as a graduate student in

the Berkeley Sociology Department, the real core of my
intellectual formation occurred in what might be called the Bay
Area Student Run University of Radical Intellectual Thought.
Almost from the start I was heavily involved in a series of
organizations and activities that brought radical students together
across departments within the University of California and across
Universities within driving distance:

•

I regularly attended a Bay Area wide political economy
seminar loosely linked to the Union for Radical Political
Economics that usually met at Stanford in which problems
in Marxist political economy were discussed. Over the
years I presented a number of papers in that seminar,
including the earliest version of my work on rethinking the
concept of class. At one seminar I laid out the problem of
the “middle class” in which I described the class location of
managers as “ambiguous” because of the way they
combined relational attributes both of workers (they did not
own the means of production) and of capitalists (they
dominated other employees). Brigit O’Laughlin, an
anthropologist at Stanford, suggested that these kinds of
locations might better be thought of as “contradictory”
rather than merely “ambiguous”, and thus the term for my
contribution to the analysis of the middle class was born:
“contradictory locations within class relations.”

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•

I was part of the founding editorial collective of

Kapitalistate

, a journal devoted to debates over Marxist

theories of the state organized by the Marxist economist,
James O’Connor, then at San Jose State University. The
collective involved students and unattached intellectuals
from all over the San Francisco Bay Area and, through
reading and commenting on papers, it linked us to students
in Europe (especially Germany) and other places in the
United States (especially Wisconsin). Through my
involvement in the journal collective I read a paper on state
theory written by Roger Friedland and G

sta-Esping

Anderson, at the time sociology graduate students at the
University of Wisconsin, sent them detailed comments, and
ended up co-authoring with them the final published
version of the paper. Through them I became linked to
students at Wisconsin and began to think of the Wisconsin
Sociology Department as an exciting place.

•

I was heavily involved in founding an organization of
socialist-oriented academics called the Union of Marxist
Social Scientists. UMSS was organized to increase
dialogue among activists and left-oriented academics. Its
main activity was an annual conference held each spring at
a summer camp called Camp Gold Hollow in the Sierra
foothills and attended by several hundred people from up

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

and down the west coast. By the mid-1970s this conference
became a politically-charged venue in which students, a
scattering of faculty, grass roots activists, and militants
from various sectarian Marxist-Leninist quasi-parties
gathered to debate theoretical and political maters. At the
last camp I attended, in the spring of 1976, my work on
social class was denounced in a large meeting by members
of the League for Proletarian Socialism (a self-styled
Maoist group) for reflecting “petty bourgeois socialism.”
That annual conference is the direct ancestor of RadFest.

•

In order to enable students to get formal academic credit for
the kinds of study groups in which we were involved, I
convinced a number of faculty members in the Berkeley
Sociology department to act as passive sponsors of a series
of student organized on-going graduate seminars exploring
debates in radical theory. One of these – “Current
Controversies in Marxist Social Science” – met
continuously for four or five semesters and formed the
basis for several courses I subsequently taught when I
became a professor.

Through these activities I discovered that there existed an

on-going, energetic intellectual tradition in which one could be a
radical critic and engage in careful, rigorous, intellectually
sophisticated academic work. The attraction was as much

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intellectual as political. The debates were exciting and demanding.
When we read Althusser, Poulantzas, Altvatar, Anderson, Offe,
Gramsci, Habermas, O’Connor, Hindiss and Hurst, Therborn, and
the other writers in the Marxist renaissance we felt we were at the
cutting edge of ideas, really learning something important and
gaining depth. These texts were usually hard and it took work to
sort them out, but this also was part of the attraction: we were not
doing something easy. There were many people joined together in
the effort and the dialogue created a sense of common purpose and
community.

Some people in these circles were deeply involved in self-

styled Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist or Trotskyist parties, but
most were not. Generally, most people in my intellectual circle saw
party activists as disruptive, as infusing self-righteous dogmatic
styles of argument into theoretical debates. Many of us were or
had been activists in specific movements – the anti-war movement,
the student movement, the prison rights movement – but above all
this intellectual community was academic: mostly graduate
students and a few faculty engaged in the project of forging a new
Marxist social science in the university.

That the intellectual anchor of debates in this community

was Marxist, there can be no doubt. Still, not everyone who
participated in these activities called themselves “Marxist”. Among
radical intellectuals of the early 1970s many people saw their work

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

as drawing from the Marxist tradition or being inspired in various
ways by that tradition without defining their central goal as
contributing to the reconstruction of Marxism. One can use
Marxism without being a Marxist.

Most of what I have published, if you strip away the

rhetorical parts that proclaim how the work tries to contribute to
Marxism, could almost as well have been written in the softer spirit
of having a Marxist inspiration. I could have framed my arguments
by saying something like “the Marxist tradition is a rich and
interesting source of ideas. We can learn a lot from it. Let’s see
where we can go by taking these traditional notions of class and
massaging them, changing them, combining them with Weberian
and other elements in various ways.” I could have cast my class
analysis this way without invoking any commitment to Marxism
per se as a tradition worth reconstructing.

Many sociologists in the late 1960s and early 1970s, radical

intellectuals of my generation, made that kind of choice. Consider
Theda Skocpol’s early work, especially

States and Social

Revolutions

. This book could have been written as a Marxist work

with no real change in any substantive thesis. It could have been
written as a book that was amending and reconstructing certain
weaknesses in the Marxist tradition, particularly its inattention to
the problem of state capacity and state breakdown, in order to
rebuild and strengthen that tradition. Instead she chose, for reasons

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that she would have to explain in her own set of intellectual and
personal coordinates, to treat the book as a dialogue with the
Marxist tradition but firmly, rhetorically, outside it. I made the
opposite choice. The question is, why did I do this, what was my
thinking behind it?

Let me give you a vignette that I think helps to reveal

what’s at issue here. In 1986 I gave a talk in Warsaw called
“Rethinking Once Again, Alas, the Marxist Concept of Class” or
some pretentious title like that. In the talk I discussed such things
as contradictory class locations, exploitation in Soviet-type post-
capitalistic society, the role of control over different kinds of assets
for constructing new kinds of exploitation, and so on. Afterwards,
the first question was the following: “Professor Wright, I find your
ideas very interesting and very compelling. I think there is a lot to
be discussed about them, but why do you call this

Marxist

? Why

deflect attention from what you are really talking about by saying
that this has anything to do with Marxism?” What is at issue here
is a dramatic difference in the contexts for pursuing radical
intellectual work. In the Polish context of 1986 to declare that this
was a reconstruction of Marxism meant something utterly different
from what the same words mean when they are declared in the
context of American sociology. In Poland, to reconstruct Marxism
in the 1980s was to salvage an ideology of state repression. In the
United States, to embed one’s work in a rhetoric of reconstructing
Marxism means something entirely different: to declare one’s

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solidarity with struggles against capitalism, class inequality and
oppression.

Thus I think the first motivation behind the declaration of

my work as contributing to Marxism centers around a point in the
sociology of knowledge. What does it mean to define one’s work
as integral to an oppositional current within an established set of
institutions? This is very close to what sociologists talk about
when they talk about “reference groups.” What really was at stake
to me was the nature of the constituency or audience to whom I
wanted to feel accountable. Whose criticisms did I want to worry
about, and whose did I want to simply be able to dismiss?

These psychological issues are an important part of what is

at stake in making the choice to see my work as embedded in the
Marxist tradition, as contributing to the reconstruction of that
tradition rather than simply drawing on it. Defining my work this
way establishes whom I am accountable to, whose opinions are
going to matter. The issue of reference group, however, is not just
psychological, since reference groups are also social networks that
dispose of real resources and impose real pressures of various
kinds. Choosing a reference group, then, has the effect of creating
a set of constraints which one faces in the future.

In the decision to describe my work as contributing to

Marxism, then, there is a kind of Ulysses and the Siren story at

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work (to use a metaphor elaborated by Jon Elster). It is an attempt,
however imperfect, at blocking certain pressures of co-optation
which one experiences once one enters a profession. It is an
attempt to make life more difficult for oneself. The same holds
true for Feminist sociologists today. Some Feminists say that their
work is contributing to Feminism as such. Rather that just
contributing to sociology inspired by Feminism, they see their
work as contributing to building Feminist Theory. Such
declarations make life more difficult, since you could say most of
the same things without framing your agenda in this more
provocative manner. Making one’s life more difficult in this way,
however, is not a sign of masochism; it is a strategy which makes it
harder to inadvertently slide into a theoretical and intellectual
practice which is overwhelmed by its professional acceptability.
The pressures for mild, nonconfrontational, acceptable scholarship
are enormous, and situating one’s work firmly in a radical
oppositional current is one way of partially neutralizing those
pressures.

There is another side to the choice to contribute to building

Marxism as an intellectual tradition rather than simply using it that
entered my own decisions and which has become increasingly
important in my subsequent on-going decision to stay in Marxism
rather than to become, as is more fashionable these days, post-
Marxist. This second aspect of the choice raises issues in
philosophy of science rather than sociology of knowledge. What is

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the best way to contribute to the enhancement of our knowledge of
social life? Is the most productive strategy to work within what one
considers the best available paradigm, or is it better to take a more
eclectic approach, avoiding any strong commitment to a single
perspective but instead picking and choosing from different
traditions as is appropriate for different particular questions one
might ask? In a somewhat over-stylized way we can contrast two
stances towards these issues: a stance which places great value on
ambitious programs for theoretical coherence and integration in the
form of a sustained paradigm, and a stance, sometimes referred to
as a more empiricist approach, which argues that what we want to
do is deeply and intensively describe the world while eclectically
drawing from different sorts of ideas as we see fit for different
problems.

My view on this contrast of intellectual practices is not the

conventional one for someone who is committed to a paradigmatic
view of knowledge in his own work. Most people who are
committed to some kind of effort at building strong paradigms are
anti-eclectic: eclecticism is viewed as the enemy of paradigm
building. I believe, to the contrary, that there is a constructive
symbiotic relationship between paradigm-mongers and carefree
eclectics. The optimal intellectual terrain for radical theory -- or for
any sociological knowledge for that matter -- is a mixture of
people who are committed eclectics and people who are committed
paradigmists. If I could snap my fingers and make every radical

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intellectual a committed Marxist, I wouldn’t do it. I think it would
be bad for Marxism and certainly bad for the left. If I could snap
my fingers and make everybody a committed eclectic, if that’s not
an oxymoron, I would also not do it. Eclecticism is in a certain
sense parasitic on committed paradigms. To be an effective
eclectic, you’ve got to have some other scholars around who are
worrying obsessively about how to rebuild paradigms and maintain
the maximum coherence possible within them. But if that’s what
everyone did, it would be a constraint on the possibility of
effectively reconstructing paradigms because the puzzles and
worries and anomalies that a reconstructive project faces often
come from the insights generated by the eclectics.

The environment of intellectual work that I see as optimal,

and which I try to achieve to the extent possible in the intellectual
settings within which I work, thus values an intellectual pluralism
in which no one is holier-than-thou about meta-theoretical
principles. Dialogue between the doubts of the eclectics and the
commitments of the paradigmists strengthen both. These issues
hold for contemporary feminism as well as Marxism. In the
feminist tradition radical feminism is crucial for healthy feminism,
even though I think radical feminism is not the most plausible
version of feminism. Still, it would be a shame for the feminist
tradition if radical feminists were somehow persuaded to abandon
the most radical and extreme forms of feminism. Similarly for the
socialist tradition of intellectual work, it is important to have a

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body of scholarship and intellectual work that remains committed
to rebuilding rather than simply drawing from the Marxist
tradition.

Becoming a Sociologist:
fuzzy-disciplines and intellectual pluralism

The second choice in the early 1970s that helped forge my
academic identity was the fateful decision to become a sociologist.
When I entered sociology I saw it more as a platform on which to
do my work than as a discipline to which I felt any commitment as
such (although I have to admit that over time my sense of loyalty
to the field has grown considerably). As an undergraduate I
majored in an interdisciplinary social science program (social
studies), after which I studied history for two years at Oxford. I
currently participate actively in an academic network sponsored by
the MacArthur Foundation in which most participants are
economists, and since 1975 I have been on the editorial board of
the journal

Politics & Society

, which has stronger roots in political

science than in sociology. I see myself as a social scientist and
social theorist rather than a capital S Sociologist. Why, then, did I
choose Sociology as an academic home?

Of all the social sciences, sociology seemed to me to be the

least disciplinary; it had the fuzziest boundaries. But even more
significantly, Sociology has valued its own marginal traditions in a

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

way that other social sciences don’t. Even anti-Marxist
sociologists recognize the importance of Marx as one of the
intellectual founders of what has become sociology. All graduate
courses in theory contain at least some reading of Marx. There are
economics departments in which the name Marx would never be
mentioned. The only social science discipline that might have
served as well as sociology was political science, and I suppose if I
had been at some other university I might have become a political
scientist. But at Berkeley I felt that sociology was a more
congenial place in which to be a radical, and in general I now think
political science tends to be somewhat less hospitable to radicalism
because of the tight relationship between political science and the
state. Political science is a breeding place for government advisers
and policy analysts, and that aspect of political science as a
discipline would be a constraint that I did not want to choose. So, I
chose sociology.

Becoming a Multivariate Marxist:
legitimating Marxism and careerism

Very quickly in graduate school, even in a place like Berkeley, it
becomes clear where the intellectual core of sociology as a
discipline lies. Having decided to be a sociologist and having as a
mission the reconstruction of Marxism as social science, I saw a
crucial task of my work to try to increase the credibility of

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

Marxism within the academy, and I felt that quantitative research
was a good way to accomplish this. As I wrote in 1987, reflecting
on my early theoretical ambitions: “I originally had visions of
glorious paradigm battles, with lances drawn and the valiant
Marxist knight unseating the bourgeois rival in a dramatic
quantitative joust. What is more, the fantasy saw the vanquished
admitting defeat and changing horses as a result”

My decision to launch a series of projects involving large

scale data gathering and sophisticated statistical analysis was not
driven by any epistemological conviction that these techniques
generated deeper insights or more reliable knowledge. Indeed, on
that score I have generally found that I learn more from good
qualitative and historical research than from quantitative research.
But I felt that at that point in the history of Marxism in sociology
(the mid-1970s), establishing the credibility of Marxism using a
quantitative methodology had the greatest chance of making a
difference in the intellectual space Marxists could occupy within
the academy. I also just like playing with numbers and was pretty
good at it.

This decision to pursue quantitative research was also

bound up with particular personal relations in graduate school. My
closest friend at Berkeley was an Italian student, Luca Perrone.
Luca was a sophisticated European intellectual, at ease with the
various theoretical currents of leftwing thought, but also

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

enthusiastic about quantitative research. He was the perfect
kindred spirit with whom to forge a quantitatively oriented Marxist
research program. My first publication engaged with Marxism was
written with Luca, a long theoretical essay published in Italian in
1973 comparing the conception of the state and politics in the work
of Talcott Parsons and Nicos Poulantzas, and subsequently, my
first quantitative publications in class analysis, including my first

ASR

article in 1977, were also written jointly with him. As we

approached the end of our time together in Berkeley we wanted to
concoct a long-term project that would enable us to continue
working together – a project that would bring me regularly to
Europe and Luca to the United States. A large well-funded cross-
national quantitative study on social class seemed a good way to
do this. Tragically, Luca died in a skin diving accident in 1981,
and thus did not live to see the results of our early collaboration.

To be honest, there was also, from the start, a darker side to

the appeal of quantitative research. All academic disciplines as
institutions contain a system of rewards and sanctions that
channels work in particular directions, and there were clearly more
resources to be had through quantitative research. I was very
ambitious as a young scholar – ambitious in my search for what I
considered to be the “truth”, but also ambitious for status,
recognition, influence, world travel. Embarking on a line of
research anchored in conventional survey research thus offered
tangible rewards.

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

I cannot reconstruct exactly what the balance of these

motives were in the mid-1970s when I did my dissertation
research, a quantitative study of class structure and income
determination, or in the late 1970s when I began my 20-year
comparative project on class structure and class consciousness. But
whatever the balance between grantsmanship and intellectual
purpose, the choice to direct my research in this way was
enormously consequential, and not always in ways to my liking. It
resulted in a narrowing of askable questions and a divergence
between much of my best theoretical work and my empirical
research. Originally, the idea in 1978 when I began the
comparative class analysis project was to do a survey of class
structure and class consciousness in the US, Italy and Sweden.
This was meant to be a brush-cleaning operation: settling and
clarifying a range of empirical issues before returning to the
problems I cared about the most – the state, politics, social change.
But quickly the project expanded as scholars in various other
countries asked to join the research, leading eventually to surveys
more or less replicated in over a dozen countries. This enlarged
scale of the enterprise created a set of expectations and
commitments that could not be easily (or responsibly) abandoned,
and yet the work did not always yield intellectual insights in
proportion to the time and resources the project absorbed.

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

Choosing a department:
professional vs intellectual sociology

I initially went to the University of Wisconsin without a great deal
of thought and deliberation. Through my involvement in

Kapitalistate

I had made friends with a number of graduate

students there, and through them various faculty in the department
became aware of my work even before I was on the job market. In
1975, I was asked by the department to apply for an assistant
professorship and was quickly offered a job even before I went for
an interview, so I never really went on a national job search to
explore all options. In 1987, however, I was offered a job at the
University of California in Berkeley and spent a year there “trying
it out”. By the spring of 1988 I was clearly faced with a genuine,
unmistakable choice, a choice laden with “road not taken”
potentials.

Here is how I characterized the big difference between

these two departments in the late 1980s. If you think of the famous
people in the Berkeley department what comes to mind are titles of
books:

TVA and the Grass Roots, Alienation and Freedom, Habits

of the Heart, Mothering

. When you think of the famous people in

the Wisconsin department what comes to mind is the journals in
which they publish, the topics which they pursue, the datasets they
have developed: the ASR and AJS, mobility and status attainment,
the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, log-linear analysis. Wisconsin

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

was an article-writing department and Berkeley a book-writing
department.

This contrast between the two departments is also reflected

in the nature of their graduate programs: at Wisconsin a significant
number of graduate students write dissertations that are spin-offs in
one way or another from large, on-going research projects. The
model of education is that of an apprenticeship, and while students
are expected to do original and innovative work, many do so
within the context of some professor’s research shop. At Berkeley,
it is quite rare for students to play this apprenticeship role. Students
are expected to be autonomous intellectuals; dissertations are
supposed to be first drafts of books; it is rare that dissertations are
in any direct way derivative from the data and projects of their
advisers.

In agonizing about the choice of where to be, I stylized the

contrast between these two settings by saying that Berkeley was
one of the leading intellectual departments in which I would be on
the discipline-oriented wing, whereas Wisconsin was one of the
leading discipline-oriented departments in which I would be on the
intellectual wing. Which of these settings, I thought, do I want to
be in? Which would provide the most creative context for my
future work? The irony was that although I actually found the
intellectual climate of Berkeley more comfortable in many ways
than that of Wisconsin, I felt that I would be more challenged and

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

pushed in more interesting ways if I was more an intellectual
maverick in a disciplinary department than a disciplinary maverick
in an intellectualized one. I felt that at that point in history and at
that point in my life, perhaps, the creative tension would be more
constructive in Madison. At Berkeley I would be constantly
arguing with post-modernist currents about the relevance of culture
for everything and the impossibility of explaining anything. In
Madison I would be arguing for the importance of an open and
dialectical perspective on the relationship between social change
and social action and the need for unconventional voices in
sociology. So, I returned to Wisconsin, although I have retained
close ties to Berkeley and frequently return to give talks.

In the years since that choice the two departments have

converged somewhat. I recently did a mini-study of dissertations
done at Wisconsin and Berkeley since the 1960s in order to better
characterize the two departments. Berkeley has been fairly
consistent over the entire period: 75-90% of dissertations in each
decade used qualitative methods. At Wisconsin there has been a
sharp change: from the 1960s through the 1980s, roughly 70-80%
of dissertations were quantitative. In the 1990s this dropped to just
over 50%. This methodological shift in dissertation research
reflects a change in the composition of faculty, and more broadly
in the intellectual culture of the Wisconsin Department.

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

Staying a Marxist

When I became politically radicalized and first began my
intellectual work in the late 1960s, Marxism really was the only
game in town: if you were a serious intellectual and really wanted
to develop theoretical groundings for radical critique of the status
quo, in some way or another you had to find a home in or make
peace with the Marxist tradition, whether or not you then used the
label as a self-designation. Marxist theorizing was at the cutting
edge of sophisticated intellectual debate and, while Marxism never
became part of the academic mainstream, there was a certain
intellectual caché in calling oneself a Marxist within the academy.
In sociology, Marxism was treated as a real rival to more
mainstream traditions, so even though most sociologists disagreed
with me, I felt that my ideas were taken seriously.

Beginning in the mid-1980s and accelerating in the 1990s,

Marxism became increasingly marginal to academic life and
intellectual debate. It is not that Marxist

ideas

have disappeared –

many in fact have become absorbed into the mainstream – but
rather that Marxism as an intellectual terrain is no longer the site of
wide-ranging, energetic, innovative theoretical work. Particularly
since the “fall of Communism”, to many people Marxism now
seems an archaic discourse, and discussions of exploitation, class
struggle, revolution, and socialism seem faintly ridiculous rather
than hard-edged, nuanced challenges to the status quo. Many

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

radical intellectuals who, in the 1980s firmly identified their own
work with Marxism now no longer do so. They have not
necessarily become self-described ex-Marxists and certainly not
rabid anti-Marxists – as happened in the 1950s when the exit from
Marxism was deeply bound up with anti-Communism – but they
do longer see the reconstruction of Marxism as a pressing, or even
relevant, task.

I have remained stubbornly working inside of Marxism and

continue to work for the reconstruction rather than abandonment of
this intellectual tradition. I do so, above all, because I continue to
believe that many of the core ideas of this tradition are
indispensable for any project of emancipatory social change.
Specifically, the diagnosis of capitalism as a system of oppression
built around class and exploitation, and the normative vision of a
radically egalitarian democratic alternative to capitalism, are
fundamental insights integral to Marxism. While I no longer see
Marxism as a comprehensive theoretical paradigm capable of
constituting a general theory of history and society, I still believe
that the Marxist tradition contains a coherent framework of ideas
that can provide a solid grounding for a socially-engaged research
program.

I have not, however, pursued this goal simply as an

individual project of my own. To sustain these commitments and
hope to accomplish these goals requires embedding oneself in a

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

particular set of social networks, a particular circle of people
whose work one reads, with whom one discusses issues, and whose
judgments matter. A “reference group” is not just an impersonal
audience defined by some social category; it is also a circle of
people with names and addresses who constitute the active,
ongoing basis for the intellectual interactions and support which
spur one’s own intellectual development.

In my case, there are two such concrete reference groups

that have anchored my work since the 1970s. The first is a group of
scholars that was at the core of an intellectual current known as
“Analytical Marxism” in the 1980s. The group has a less high-
blown name that it gave to itself: the NBSMG – the No-Bullshit
Marxism Group. The NBSMG is a group of a dozen or so
philosophers, economists, sociologists, political scientists and
historians from five countries in a variety of disciplines that met
every September in London, Oxford or New York for a three-day
conference from 1979 to 2000 (since then it has shifted to a two-
year schedule). Many of the names associated with the NBSMG
over the past two decades are relatively familiar – Jon Elster,
Adam Przeworski, G.A. Cohen, John Roemer, Robert Brenner,
Sam Bowles, Josh Cohen, Robert van der Veen, Pranhab Bardhan,
Philippe van Parijs and Hillel Steiner.

The term “analytical” in “Analytical Marxism” reflects its

central intellectual style: bringing the concern with conceptual

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

precision, clarity and rigor characteristic of analytical philosophy
to bear on Marxian themes. Substantively, the central mission of
the group was initially to explore systematically the theoretical and
normative foundations of a series of pivotal Marxian ideas –
exploitation, class, the theory of history, economic crisis.
Subsequently the preoccupations became less narrowly focused on
Marxist concepts, but the normative concerns with equality and
social justice continued.

The group was initially formed around discussions of G.A.

Cohen’s extraordinary book,

Karl Marx’s Theory of History: a

defense

(Princeton University Press, 1978). I read this book in the

summer of 1979 (while in the process of adopting a baby in Costa
Rica) and was completely blown away by it. This book is by far
the most rigorous and profound book on Marx’s work that I have
ever read, and certainly the book that has most influenced the way
I think about Marxism. I wrote a long review essay of the book
with Andrew Levine that was published in

New Left Review

1980. Cohen read it, and invited me to attend the 1981 NBSMG
meeting. I was invited back in 1982 and have been a member of
the group since then.

For the first fifteen years or so the group met in the same

room every year and ate at the same restaurants. Mostly, we only
saw each other during this three-day period. For me it was like a
little chunk of the year snipped out, reserved for this special world.

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

I had the rest of the year, then the three-day, no bullshit meeting in
London.

Most years, of the ten or eleven people who attended a

meeting about half presented papers. These got distributed five or
six weeks in advance and were generally read quite carefully by
participants. At the meeting itself, someone other than the author
would introduce and comment on a given paper. Roughly an hour
and a half or so would be spent demolishing/discussing the paper
in a no-holds-barred manner. The intellectual style was intense and
analytically exhausting. To an outsider, many of the discussions
might seem destructive, but I think this would be a mistake. The
interactions involved a particular form of intellectual
aggressiveness that is not inherently invalidating; the very act of
taking each other’s work so seriously is itself an affirmation of
respect and support. An outsider wouldn’t really see this. Many
people looking at this behavior would think this was a gladiatorial
combat in which death was the only possible outcome. But from
the inside it can be an enormously exciting setting for coming to
terms with the subtle problems and gaps in one’s ideas and gaining
insights about the inner workings of other people’s work.

The group is, as one might predict, all men. We have had

discussions in the group from time to time about gender issues,
both as a topic – I presented a paper on Marxism and Feminism at
one meeting – and as an issue in the group’s composition. For

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

better or worse, nobody in the group knew well any women
scholars who both shared an interest in the substantive topics about
which we were concerned and engaged those topics in the
intellectual style that marked the group. It was probably also the
case, I suppose, that many members of the group felt that the kind
of intensity of the group would be harder to sustain if it was gender
mixed. In any event, no women have been recruited as members of
the “club”, although several have been invited at various times. In
these terms the NBSMG raises important, and troubling, issues in
the sociology of gender. Networks of this sort are crucial sites
where productive intellectual development occurs, where ideas are
forged and refined. While the NBSMG does not control any
financial resources – it gives no grants and everyone always pays
for his own travel and expenses – nevertheless as a vigorous
interpersonal network of intellectual exchange, it is influential and
valuable. Undoubtedly the gender composition of the network both
reflects the historically marginalized role of women intellectuals in
the Marxist tradition and contributed in some way to sustaining
such gender inequality.

From the early 1980s to the late 1990s, the NBSMG was

the organized reference group that mattered most to me. When I
wrote papers in that period, the ghosts who sat in the back of my
room and periodically jumped up to tell me that what I had written
was ridiculous, and made me worry about whether I got it right,
were mainly from this group (or, perhaps, kindred spirits to this

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

group). The group has unquestionably given my work a particular
direction and cast because I have to worry, by virtue of this
reference group, about certain issues while others seem less
pressing.

Gradually in the course of the 1990s, the intellectual

agendas and theoretical commitments of many of the members of
the group changed. Two participants – Jon Elster and Adam
Przeworski – decided to leave the group, feeling that in the context
of busy schedules it no longer served their needs in a useful way. A
number of others felt that while the normative issues at the core of
group, especially a radical egalitarian stance towards issues of
social justice, remained central to their work, the specific
preoccupation with Marxism as a source of ideas and debates for
advancing that normative agenda was no longer so important. By
the year 2000 several people in the group expressed the sentiment
that perhaps it was time to end the annual gathering, but we voted
to continue, as much because of the value we all placed on the
fellowship and durability of the group as on its intellectual pay-
offs. The 2001 meeting was scheduled for New York in mid-
September, but had to be cancelled because of the 9/11 attacks.
When we met the following year, September 2002, we decided to
move to an every-other-year cycle. At the moment, it is uncertain
whether this is simply a gentle way of incrementally ending the
group, or whether it will continue in a less energetic way. In any

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

event, the drift in its intellectual priorities and the decline in its
intensity have reduced its role as an anchor for my academic work.

My second reference “group” has, if anything, increased in

salience over time. It consists of a single person, Michael
Burawoy, a professor of sociology at Berkeley. Michael and I have
read nearly every page that either of us has written in the past
twenty-five years or so. He is constantly reminding me not to lose
sight of the ultimate point of it all by becoming preoccupied with
analytical rigor at the expense of political relevance; I am
constantly telling him to be more precise in his formulations, to be
clearer about the underlying logic of the conceptual distinctions he
makes. Our intellectual styles are quite at odds with one another in
many ways. He does ethnographic research of an extraordinary
fine-grained character; my research has been quantitative, typically
obliterating much of the nuance and texture of the subjects I study.
He is generally skeptical to claims about “objective” truth; I have
generally defended rather conventional philosophical views of the
scientific aspirations of Marxism and sociology. We have
discussed these issues and their bearing on our respective work
while walking my dog in the woods, biking the hills of Marin
County and looking for open restaurants in Moscow. In the late
1980s this dialogue took the form of a series of published
exchanges between the two of us in the 1987 and 1989 issues of
the

Berkeley Journal of Sociology

. (The first of these exchanges is

reprinted in my 1990 book,

The Debate on Classes

; the second

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

appears as chapter 9 in

Interrogating Inequality

). Subsequently we

coauthored a number of papers, most recently “Sociological
Marxism” in the

Handbook of Sociological Theory.

We are now

(2003) in the process of trying to write a book together based on
this paper. The idea is to reflect on the past twenty-five years or so
of empirical research and theoretical development within Marxist-
inspired social science, and identify what we feel to be its
enduring, robust core. Our hope is to elaborate a distinctive
sociological Marxism around this core. The particular way in
which personal loyalty and closeness is combined with intellectual
difference in our relationship has been for me a vital source of
intellectual challenge and encouragement. It is also, surely, at least
part of the personal dimension of “staying” Marxist.

Envisioning Real Utopias

In my work with Burawoy, we have identified the robust core of
the Marxist tradition as consisting of two theoretical clusters: first,
a

diagnosis of capitalism

, both of the ways it imposes harms on

people and of its logic of development and reproduction; and
second,

an account of the possibilities of a radically democratic,

egalitarian alternative

to capitalism. Class analysis pervades both

of these: the analysis of class and exploitation is central to
understanding how capitalism works, and the transformation of
class relations is central to understanding a future beyond
capitalism.

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

For two decades, from the mid-1970s until the mid-1990s,

most of my scholarly work was dominated by the first of these
theoretical clusters, above all by the problem of strengthening the
Marxist concept of class as a tool for studying capitalist societies.
Except for occasional essays, I had given relatively little attention
to the problem of emancipatory alternatives to capitalism. It now
seems urgent to grapple with this issue. With the end of the cold
war and the rise of capitalist triumphalism, this second theoretical
cluster of the Marxist tradition has lost much of its credibility even
among critics of capitalist society. For all of their oppressive
flaws, the existence of the Statist Economies of the USSR and
elsewhere were a practical demonstration that alternatives to
capitalism were possible. Marxist critics of those societies could
then make a plausible argument that what these societies needed to
become socialist was a radical democratic transformation. By the
early 1990s those arguments no longer seemed credible to most
people.

In this historical context, as my work in the Comparative

Class Analysis Project was winding down in the middle-1990s and
I faced the question of what research to pursue next, I decided to
embark on what has since become

the

Real Utopias Project

. The

project directly grew out of my interactions with my closest
colleague at Wisconsin, Joel Rogers. Joel is deeply engaged in
both the theoretical and practical problems of progressive policy
reform, ranging from issues of reinvigorating democratic

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

institutions (he was the central founder of the New Party in the
1980s) to the problem of creating new labor market institutions
that advance both economic equality and productive efficiency. He
coined the expression “high road capitalism” to describe this
endeavor and characterizes the strategy of reform as “paving the
high road and closing off the low road.” I wanted a project which
would be relevant to this kind of pragmatic concern with change
within the limits of existing possibilities while also advancing the
traditional Marxist concern with understanding alternatives outside
of those limits. I initially called this endeavor “Society by Design,”
but felt a bit squeamish about the elitest social engineering tone of
the expression. On a Sunday morning dog walk together (which we
have done nearly every Sunday when both of us are in town since
the late 1980s) Joel suggested that I call this enterprise, “designing
realistic utopias.” Soon this became The Real Utopias Project. As
in many intellectual enterprises, getting the brand name right
helped a lot in giving the project greater coherence and focus.

The idea of the project is to investigate systematic

proposals that attempt both to embody emancipatory values and to
take seriously the problem of institutional feasibility. The project is
organized around a series of international conferences at which
specific proposals are elaborated and debated. Each conference has
resulted in the publication of a book containing the proposal and a
range of the commentaries. The first of these books, published in
1995, revolved around work by Joel Rogers and Joshua Cohen on

Erik Olin Wright Autobiographical Essay

the problem of Associative Democracy. Subsequent books have
dealt with market socialism (John Roemer, 1996), asset
redistribution within capitalist markets (Sam Bowles and Herbert
Gintis, 1999), empowered participatory governance (Archon Fung
and Erik Olin Wright, 2003), and universal basic income and
stakeholder grants (Bruce Ackerman, Ann Alstott and Philippe van
Parijs, 2004).

My academic career embodies a series of deep, probably
unresolvable tensions: tensions between radical egalitarian values
and elite academic professionalism; between the commitment to
Marxism as a vibrant intellectual and political tradition and the fear
of being trapped in indefensible, outmoded assumptions; between
being relevant to real struggles and devoting my energies to
refinements of abstract concepts. These tensions are impossible to
escape, at least for me, but I hope in the end that they have been
creative tensions that have pushed my ideas forward and kept me
from sliding into comfortable complacency.