A Tale of Two Marxisms: Remembering Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019)*

• Date: 01 December 2020
• Author: Michael Burawoy
• DOI: 10.1177/0032329220966075
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Subject Matter: Special Issue Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329220966075

Politics & Society

2020, Vol. 48(4) 467 –494

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329220966075

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Special Issue Article

A Tale of Two Marxisms:

Remembering Erik Olin

Wright (1947–2019)*

Michael Burawoy

University of California

Abstract

Intended to capture the entangled history of Marxism, Alvin Gouldner’s two

Marxisms also frame the intellectual biography of Erik Olin Wright. In the 1970s

Wright’s Scientific and Critical Marxisms were joined, but later they came apart as

each developed its own autonomous trajectory. Erik’s Scientific Marxism was the

program of class analysis that first brought him international fame. Begun in graduate

school, it tailed off in the last two decades of his life, when it played second fiddle to

the Critical Marxism of the Real Utopias Project that Erik began in the early 1990s.

Keywords

Erik Olin Wright, Marxism

Corresponding Author:

Michael Burawoy, Sociology Department, University of California, 410 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, Berkeley,

CA 94720-1980, USA.

Email: burawoy@berkeley.edu

*This essay, originally published in the January–February 2020 issue of New Left Review, 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).

966075PASXXX10.1177/0032329220966075Politics & SocietyBurawoy

research-article2020

468 Politics & Society 48(4)

A personal note: This contribution was prepared for the Erik Olin Wright Festschrift

at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in November 2019. My thanks to Dylan Riley,

Greta Krippner, and Ivan Ermakoff for their constructive criticisms. Thanks also to

Marcia Wright for her corrective influence on a paper not easy to balance. For more

than forty years Erik was a close friend; we regularly read and commented on each

other’s work. We spent a lot of time together in Berkeley, Madison, and many other

places. As I have tried to grasp Erik’s trajectory over the last half-century, I have

inevitably done so with the partiality of a close companion. We always had our differ-

ences, which on occasion appeared publicly, but I don’t think they ever affected our

relationship. On the contrary, our divergences intensified our engagement with each

other, largely because we had a common project. Erik was always the more reasoned

and willing to compromise, I the more irrational and unbending. He always tried as

best he could to find a rational core to my objections—even if there wasn’t one. I, on

the other hand, pointed to the nonrational foundations of his transcendent rational-

ism. In this engagement with his work, I know that Erik would not have wanted me to

pull my punches, but he would have also wanted to participate and disagree. I have

therefore had to be more cautious than in the past because sadly, for the first time, he

is not here to respond. In my attempt to be true to our relationship, and to clarify the

standpoint from which I evaluate Erik’s life and work, I’ve used endnotes to present

some of our disagreements. Referring to Erik by his first name, unorthodox in such a

paper, keeps me focused on him as well as on his work, helps me keep his spirit alive,

driving his ideas forward—for he was always oriented to the future.

In 1970, Alvin Gouldner could confidently announce that the golden age of Western

sociology was over.1 The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, antiwar pro-

tests, and a growing antistate radicalism had served to deflate postwar American tri-

umphalism and the sociology it had spawned. The proclaimed “end of ideology”—the

notion that the United States had overcome the major challenges of modernity—

proved to be the “illusion of the epoch” (a phrase hitherto reserved for Marxism). The

shoe was now on the other foot: for the new generation, mainstream sociology was

seen as ideology, plastering over the deep pathologies of US society. Demonstrable

injustices belied the claims of the dominant “consensus theory.”2

Gouldner was right to identify the crisis of sociology, but he did not anticipate how the

social movements of the 1960s and the ideas they generated—feminism, Critical Race

Theory, and Marxism—would catalyze a renewal of the discipline. Reflecting on that

renewal a decade later in The Two Marxisms (1980), Gouldner discerned two opposed but

also interdependent tendencies: Scientific Marxism and Critical Marxism.3 In brief,

Scientific Marxism begins from a rational understanding of society that postulates the

determinism of objective structures. It uncovers historical tendencies leading to socialism

when conditions are ripe. Concepts reflect real mechanisms; politics are epiphenomenal;

ideology is distortion of the truth. Critical Marxism, on the other hand, starts out from the

ubiquity of alienation obstructing the potential for human self-realization. It highlights

human intervention against the obduracy of objective structures—history has no preor-

dained end, but is the product of collective mobilization. In the view of Critical Marxism,

concepts exist to interpret social processes; politics is an arena for the realization of