Class, Gender, and Utopian Community: In Memory of Erik Olin Wright*

• Author: Gay W. Seidman
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Date: 01 December 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0032329220965395
• Subject Matter: Special Issue Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329220965395

Politics & Society

2020, Vol. 48(4) 505 –524

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329220965395

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Special Issue Article

Class, Gender, and Utopian

Community: In Memory

of Erik Olin Wright*

Gay W. Seidman

University of Wisconsin–Madison

Abstract

This essay, written in memory of Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019), explores Wright’s

shift from a decades-long effort to map class structures in industrial societies to a

search for paths to a more egalitarian future, pointing to the key role of feminist

theory in that shift.

Keywords

class, gender, utopias

Corresponding Author:

Gay W. Seidman, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 8128 William H. Sewell Social Sciences Building,

1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706-1393, USA.

Email: gseidman@wisc.edu

*This essay is part of a special issue of Politics & Society celebrating and examining the life and work of

longtime board member Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019).

965395PASXXX10.1177/0032329220965395Politics & SocietySeidman

research-article2020

506 Politics & Society 48(4)

Most sociologists try to understand society as it is in the present, not ponder how we

might want to organize it in some far-off future. What prompted Erik Wright’s shift,

from a decades-long effort to map class structures in industrial societies, to search for

paths a search for paths to a more egalitarian future?

Like many sociologists, I found this turn to “real utopias” puzzling—especially

coming from Erik, a scholar who took such pride in his early work combining Marxist

concepts with rigorous social science methods. By the late 1990s, Erik’s focus seemed

almost diametrically opposed to that earlier project. Instead of mapping complicated

capitalist employment relations, he began looking for new social arrangements that

might encourage egalitarianism, seeking organizational patterns that might produce

communities shaped by fairness and generosity, rather than by exploitation and

competition.

That shift intrigued me. I first met Erik in the late 1980s, when his work on “con-

tradictory class locations” had already established him as a leading Marxist sociolo-

gist. In 1990, largely because of Erik, I joined the Madison faculty, where I had a

front-row seat as Erik embarked on what Michael Burawoy calls a “tale of two

Marxisms.”1 Yet even from the office next door, Erik’s transformation seemed surpris-

ing. What prompted Erik’s turn away from his early “scientific Marxism”—that care-

ful, data-based, analytic mapping of capitalist class structures and class locations—and

organizations why did he shift to searching for alternative social organization and a

new emancipatory project?

A few months after Erik passed, a question from Boaventura de Sousa Santos about

how Erik approached gender issues pushed me to think in new ways about Erik’s intel-

lectual trajectory—especially about what propelled that extraordinary intellectual

shift. Erik’s search for real utopias stemmed from a very sociological perspective, one

informed by classic sociology, deep egalitarian ideals, and above all by Erik’s endless

intellectual curiosity. But on rereading Erik’s work, I am increasingly impressed by

how much that new direction was shaped by a profound engagement with feminist

concerns, by how his interactions with feminists, and feminist thinking, reshaped

Erik’s vision of how we might construct a better world.

Before turning to the role feminism played in Erik’s surprising shift to the study of

real utopias, however, I want to say a little more about Erik, who was my colleague,

neighbor, and dear friend for thirty years—for literally half my life. As a mutual friend

at Berkeley, Carol Hatch, often said, Erik had the personality of a summer camp direc-

tor—someone who pulled everyone around him into joyous, productive games, who

could see the bright side of anything, who kept us going when things got rough.

More than a year after his passing, Erik’s absence still leaves a gaping hole. Erik

brought his energetic warmth to our community, as well as to his intellectual work, pull-

ing friends, students, and colleagues into activities like canoeing on the Wisconsin

River or cross-country skiing across an icy lake, year-end retreats, helping those who

might be struggling with personal issues, giving generous advice to graduate students.

Sadly, I never did go on any of the sociocultural bike tours he offered every year to

members of the UW–Madison sociology department, but I will always miss the dinners

he organized for visiting scholars, Thanksgiving feasts with Erik playing fiddle while