Understanding Class

by Erik Olin Wright

Few ideas are more contested today than “class.” Some have declared its death, while others insist on its centrality to contemporary capitalism. It is said its relevance is limited to explaining individuals’ economic conditions and opportunities, while at the same time argued that it is a structural feature of macro-power relations. In Understanding Class , leading left sociologist Erik Olin Wright interrogates the divergent meanings of this fundamental concept in order to develop a more integrated framework of class analysis. Beginning with the treatment of class in Marx and Weber, proceeding through the writings of Charles Tilly, Thomas Piketty, Guy Standing, and others, and finally examining how class struggle and class compromise play out in contemporary society, Understanding Class provides a compelling view of how to think about the complexity of class in the world today.

Genres: Sociology, Politics, Class, Economics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory

272 pages, Paperback

First published August 4, 2015

About the author

Erik Olin Wright was an American analytical Marxist sociologist, specializing in social stratification, and in egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism. He was the (2012) President of the American Sociological Association.
Erik Olin Wright received two BAs (from Harvard College in 1968, and from Balliol College in 1970), and the PhD from University of California, Berkeley, in 1976. Since that time, he has been a professor of sociology at University of Wisconsin - Madison.
Wright has been described as an "influential new left theorist." His work is 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, etc. In addition, he has 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.

Reviews

[Ezri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Erik Olin Wright's new book has continuity with his earlier work in terms of his research program and his desire to synthesize a greater science of class sociology, and stands as probably the most coherent and strong Analytical Marxist statement to date.

The first part of the book proposes a meta-theory of class that diverges a bit from his work in Classes and Class Counts. Applying some of his own 'anti-reductionist' insights and incorporating others from game modeling, he identifies Marxist, Weberian and Durkheimian class analyses as being useful for analyzing three different questions: What game is it?, What variation of rules for this game?, & How to win, given these rules of this game? His aggregate model makes just about every other attempt to grapple with class look incomplete: not only flattened Marxism that doesn't take the last century of sociology seriously, but what he would call 'Durkheimian' or 'stratification' approaches that never arise to the systemic complexity of Weberian models. Wright even improves upon long-term debates in Marxism by way of commenting on contemporary literature: he rearticulates G.A. Cohen's functional explanation without technological determinism, and discusses at length the difference between the existence and the political self-organization of a class. In my view, this part of the book is an unqualified success and the kind of synthesis only a committed scientist can achieve over decades of scholarship.

The second part of the book attempts to situate this model with some exciting developments in class theory over the last twenty years: attempts to reframe class in more microcosmic terms, the idea that class is dead as a factor of social analysis, the emergence of a distinct 'precariat', what Piketty contributed and missed about class in his book. While not quite as masterfully integrated as the first part, it by no means disrupts the project and is in some ways cumulative—especially when looking towards 'micro-class' for the zoomed-in, finer-grained parts of class analysis.

The third part of the book is part masterstroke and part disappointment, culminating in a sophisticated expansion of Adam Przeworski's attempts to model the rationality of revolutionary change. The model's jump-off is the assumption that the "transition trough"—the inevitable dip in workers' class-interests during socialist transition—makes a democratic transition to socialism impossible. Coupled with the historical insight that a non-democratic transition to socialism will not actually result in socialism, this is thought to negate the chances for any socialist transition period, Like many contemporary Marxists, Wright thinks there are hard reasons that a "dictatorship of the proletariat" cannot really lead to a distinct non-capitalist socialist system; unlike many who bother to remain Marxists, Wright sees hopes for socialism beyond social democracy die with the theory of transition.

Wright offends Marxist orthodoxy further by modeling Gramscian hegemony as the existence of 'positive class compromise' at certain points of a worker / capitalist interest curve. As he extends the curve to account for how class-interests line up over a series of game-situations, he makes a convincing case that this insight doesn't undermine an overall theory of class conflict. This does make me wonder how a(n even) stronger reconstruction of Marxist exploitation theory—one with classical commitments to labor-value extraction in tact—would alter this picture. As it stands, it seems compatible with the great majority and variety of the insights of Marxist and non-Marxist reflections on class compromise: a particularly striking moment is when he casts the subsumption of "work[er]s councils" into capitalist management strategy in somewhat glowing terms.

The real disappointment is his advocacy of a return to positive class compromise, or—failing that—simply trying to make the fates of workers less dependent on market institutions, maybe with help from the state. It is easy to criticize Wright for his lack of revolutionary imagination, but far harder to embark on a critique of his work that rises to the same level of rigorous engagement. There is a certain communizer logic in simply reading him backwards: accepting his models as reflective of our social situation, yet approaching the facts with intuitions that imply a far more radical break. This puts one uncomfortably close to hoping for enough of a miserable final crisis that the democratic character of a transition to socialism—or the coherence of a transitional period at all—will be far overwhelmed by factors of imminent survival.

Yet another Marxist critique can be leveled at the level of methodology. While there is quite a bit of dialectical, structuralist, and poststructuralist special pleading that goes into sociological debate, I find the most convincing methodological objection to be from Mike Macnair: the Analytical Marxists of the past and present adopt the norm of modeling class-actors along the lines of nation-states. Perhaps the Analytical Marxism of the future will rediscover revolutionary possibilities by turning its attention to how collective actors can circumvent national boundaries. Until then, Wright's work stands as a shining example of how to make a point about socialism using “actually scientific Marxism”, however unsatisfied we are by his conclusions.

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent even for a reformist


This is excellent for understanding macro- and micro-class dynamics and using a mixture of frameworks within Marxist analysis. The use of Weber with Marc and the discussion of Piketty are worth the price of the books. Now I agree with many who criticize Wright's abandoning of value theory and LTV in his understanding of exploitation and his politics, like most analytic Marxists before him, tend reformist and vaguely willing to attempt to reconcile with post-Keynesian and quasi -socialist liberal ideas;however, his discussions of domination as well as exploitation and oppression, intra-class dynamics,gate keeping,rent-seeking, and other dynamics under-explored areas of Marxist class analysis are vital to a realistic and comprehensive understanding of class.

[Lazaros Karavasilis · Rating 4 out of 5]

What do we mean by ‘class’ today? Is the term still employable? Is there what we used to call ‘class struggle’? Do these questions even matter in an era of left-wing populism that exceeds strict class limitations?

These questions are not only personal inquiries but also questions that can be found in left-wing debates over the past 15 years. The post-1989 left tried to find its identity in a political space that was defined by Third Way politics and by the decline of ‘class’ as an analytical, conceptual and even electoral term. Despite the fact that the 2008 global financial crisis re-kindled the interest in understanding the concept of ‘class’, the left still remains estranged with the term and incorporates in different ways than the ones the left used in the pre-1989 period.

To help everyone who is interested in learning more about what is a class, Wright has endeavoured in his 2015 book on exploring the notion itself, the established theories that revolve around it and offer his own understanding of how class is defined. Granted, Wright originates from a decades-long Marxist tradition and his work is almost exclusively focused on class relations, inequality, and the state, which makes him an expert on the field. However, he refrains from any indoctrinated approaches to the concept and instead prefers to re-examine it from the beginning.

What follows is a three-part study on how class came to be signified, how it was measured and used as an analytical tool and how it transformed over the years. Starting from Marx and ending up in the 21st century, Wright analyses first the established theories on class during the 20th century, he delves into an extensive analysis of class understandings during the 21st century (the part on Piketty is really good on that matter) and he concludes by providing his own analytical framework. What I believe distinguishes Wright’s approach from other approaches is the fact that he does not reject other perceptions of class but attempts to highlight each theory’s strengths and combine them. The result may not sound appealing but it works in creating something unique that proves Wright’s analytical insight.

As a first contact with Wright’s work I can say that I am deeply interested in reading other works of his in the near future, not only for his analysis but for his political opinions too.

[Matthias]

Some empires go about razing everything as they expand, grinding the culture and bodies of the conquered into dust, gloating in the lamentations of their women, &c. On one hand, if you're the kind of jerk who's inclined to go start a war of conquest in the first place, this probably feels amazing. On the other hand, this is a bit self-defeating: you're burning up what could be your own new resources. Attempts to do this generally burn bright, burn quick, and smell awful. Far smarter to march in, assert your fundamental supremacy, but do so while co-opting local elites, incorporating local culture, and making clear that participation in your empire has plenty of advantages. Your empire will be a hybrid thing, and you won't be able to distribute all the land to your most trusted cohorts, but your empire will also be more likely to exist in twenty years - and to exist as a more interesting, prosperous place.

The first, critical half of Understanding Class is a project of theoretical imperialism, but of the nice, friendly sort that co-opts local elites, hires their poets, marries their children to those of its generals, and only brings out a few examples for grisly execution - just to show them who's boss. Wright marches through the fields of Weberians, Durkheimians, and other sundry principates to clearly announce that Marxist class theory is supreme, that it the most fundamental nature of power relations across human societies, but that it is also a benign, flexible empire happy to contain all other theories within itself. Or, to switch metaphors a bit (but only a bit), he is like one of those Christian missionaries who shows the pagans that they were engaging in before was actually only an incomplete and implicit Christianity all along.

Two broad strategies characterize this ecumenism, although of course their particular implementation depends on the details of the theory he's engaging with. Both start off by acknowledging the legitimacy of forms of "class analysis" and social phenomena more generally that are pursued by non-Marxists, and which seem to take categories other than the bourgeoisie and proletariat (or whatever) as their object: subjectively recognized status groups, professions, und so weter. The first is that the Marxist account of antagonistic class relations rooted in property ownership and the production process represent the background condition for the more immediate relations that the other sociologists want to pursue. So, for instance, Weber and his epigones want to anchor class in exchange relations, but these exchange relations obviously depend on productive and ownership relations. The second, rather critical realist, strategy is to show the necessity of latent causal nexuses to any sociological theory with greater explanatory strategy than "shit happens." This has as its target those theories whose notion of "realism" is that sociological objects that are not a mere creation of the analyst but have some emic reality. Not so, we need to explain why some particular subjectively felt groups are more likely to arise than others, and objective class relations allows us to do this.

Like Caesar, Wright's anabasis also produces some excellent descriptions of the conquered. I'm not familiar with everyone he details, but let it be said that I've read Max Weber and Charles Tilly quite extensively, that both are very lucid writers, and that I still feel that I learned a great deal about their theories from Wright's gloss. Like any conquerer's gaze, it may distort, but if so it's a useful distortion of two sociologists I already admire and have learned a lot from.

The second, more speculative, part is fascinating but weaker, both analytically and (if it's not inappropriate to raise this objection) politically. If I were tempted to extend the metaphor, I could say that this is the fruit of offering too many concessions to local elites (meaning, interlarding his Marxism with too many sundry additional theories,) but I don't actually think that this is the case - except in the sense that there's a methodological weakness that's shared with much glib neoclassical economics. That methodological weakness is that he constructs an admirably clear theoretical model, on empirical foundations that seem to me to be very thin (one or two studies that have an alternative explanation), and then uses it to draw conclusions on the possibilities of "positive class compromise," i.e. conditions that would benefit both workers and capitalists when socialism is impossible. As arguments for Bernsteinian revisionism go, these are extremely weak. However, understood not as conclusions but speculations, they are inherently interesting, and those wishing to give greater substantiation (or falsification) to them may produce something quite useful. Bong-rip ideas have an important place in social science, not everything should be judged as if it's a finished product.

I probably ought have read Wright's earlier books on class first, in which he lays out his theories explicitly rather than in contrast with others - indeed I leave with the desire to get around to them soon - but didn't feel as though I failed to understand anything on that account, and the book was stimulating throughout. Recommended to anyone who's interested in the broad subject and isn't too intimidated by a bit of disciplinary inside baseball.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is a collection of essays on how the concept of class is understood by different thinkers and schools of thought, the merits and demerits of each in various contexts.

marxists understand class in terms of a conflicting relationship, with capitalists exploiting workers. the term "exploitation" doesn't always have a warm connotation, but its use in this context is ambiguous in english and in german (one can exploit any resource), and marx himself at least sometimes was using it in a more clinical way. (the labor theory of value is often invoked here, but there are good reasons to set that to one side: even if it isn't defunct/confused, it is normatively inert.)

even still, there is a normative tinge to marxist analysis of class. one reason marxists recommend it is that when the worker sells their labor to the capitalist a special kind of conflict arises that is acknowledged even by contemporary mainstream economics: the worker controls their own level of effort due to informational asymmetries -- enabling not just shirking but also strikes and (they say) potentially revolutionary change if workers of the world were to unite. marxists want to draw particular attention to the class line demarcated by the ownership of the means of production precisely because it is the ultimate political battle-line as they conceive it, pointing out the special power in the hands of the disadvantaged, the control of effort retained by workers. that is the sense in which marxist class analysis is distinctively normative.

for weberians class is more descriptive, more about explaining the common fate among individuals who share economic interests within a capitalist society. weber had an interest in the spread of instrumental rationality under capitalism. wright explains, "The central difference between Marx’s and Weber’s concept of class, then, is that the Weberian account revolves exclusively around market transactions, whereas the Marxist account also emphasizes the importance of conflict over the performance and appropriation of labor effort that takes place after market exchanges are contracted." if you want to pin a politics on this view of class, you could say weber's point of view is more aligned with management and the owners of capital -- but wright notes that it is also attentive to the fate of workers under capitalism.

we get some discussion of the third large school of thought after marx and weber: durkheim. one illuminating table in the book used the society-as-game metaphor to summarize the three big thinkers on class this way:

[begin quote]
Marxist class analysis is anchored in the problem of what game to play. At the very heart of Marxism as a social theory is the idea of emancipatory alternatives to capitalism. The fundamental point in analyzing class relations and both the individual practices and collective struggles that are linked to those class relations is to understand the nature of oppression within capitalism and the possibility of an emancipatory systemic alternative. The critique of capitalism in terms of exploitation, domination, and alienation is intimately connected to the Marxian concept of class, and the normative vision of a democratic and egalitarian alternative to capitalism is grounded in an account of the transformation of those class relations. Sometimes Marxist class analysis is elaborated in terms of a “grand narrative” about how the internal contradictions of the game of capitalism set in motion a dynamic that both makes the rules unstable and creates a collective agent capable of challenging the game itself; at other times the idea of an alternative is framed more modestly as an immanent possibility with a much more open-ended understanding of the collective agents that might strive to realize the alternative. But in any case it is the connections among class, the critique of capitalism, and emancipatory alternatives that animates Marxist class analysis.

Weberian class analysis is situated especially at the level of the rules of the game. Weber, indeed, only used the term “class” to describe inequalities generated through market interactions. For Weberians, capitalism is the only viable game in town, but its institutional rules can vary a lot. At stake in the variation of rules are the ways markets are organized and regulated and the ways in which players with different market capacities enter into exchange. The “big classes” of Weberian class analysis consist of people who are situated in different ways with respect to the possible capitalist rules of the game: rules governing labor organizing; rules governing the autonomy of capitalists in determining working conditions and employment rights; rules governing monopolies and competitive practices; rules governing access to education and job training; and so on. Some of these rules are created by states, others by firms, and still others by associations of various sorts. The purpose of class analysis, then, is to define the relevant categories of people similarly situated with respect to this variability in the rules of the game.

Durkheimian class analysis takes both capitalism and its specified institutional rules as given and focuses on the moves of players within the game. This is the world of micro-classes and fine-grained occupational differentiation. The interests of professors in research universities are different from those in community colleges, given the rules of the game in academic labor markets and the rules that govern working conditions, pay, and autonomy in these different kinds of institutions. Thus, people in these different micro-classes will develop different identities and make different moves for realizing their interests. Autoworkers, coal miners, truck drivers, and oil rig workers all operate under different labor market conditions, work in industries facing different kinds of sectoral competition and challenges, and have different collective capacities, and thus also face a different set of possible moves to realize their interests. So long as there is no real prospect of challenging the general rules of the game, their interests remain largely distinct and fragmented most of the time.
[end quote]

the other chapters felt more like essays, and i believe some were previously published elsewhere. some interesting bits:

* charles tilly's book durable inequalities and its treatment of class gets a chapter. i will try to read this book soon, as it sounds interesting and provided the framework elizabeth anderson used in her book on racial integration in america i reviewed a couple weeks ago.

* michael mann's multi volume work sources of social power gets a chapter. sounds complicated.

* there is a chapter on aage sorensen's theory of class, which sounds wild and interesting, tho wright is quite critical. sorensen agrees with marx that class lines should be drawn through exploitative relationships, but he thinks talk of the labor theory of value and appropriation of surplus value is bunk. instead he defines exploitation in terms of the extraction of economic rents: returns on assets above what would be obtained under perfectly competitive markets. this was very entertaining to read about, because some of the conclusions are wild: elimination of all exploitation of this kind is according to sorenson himself likely to lead to great misery, since the welfare income would vanish.

* the remainder of the book has some interesting odds and ends on piketty, the precariat class, and a substantial essay on class compromise with some nice charts summarizing some of the story in adam przeworski's capitalism and democracy.

[Mark Plakias · Rating 4 out of 5]

It seems clear that in the coming election cycle, the topic of socialism will come to the main stage, introduced by the already-acknowledged growing disaster of inequality. Since Americans are brainwashed from a very early age to not consider alternatives to capitalism, and thus ignorant of non-capitalist economic models, or these days even what a strong workers collectivist model looks like, most of us have a significant learning curve.

I came to this work after reading Erik Wright's obit a the end of January, which I encourage you to do (NYT version). He was a life-long Marxist scholar and active organizer of colloquia about alternatives to capitalist models. This book is actually a bit of a smoothie of various essays, but they are all consistent in their focus on how to think about class -- which entails and nourishes concentrating on inequality: its causes, dynamics, and how to counteract it. It is technical, on the level of energetic analyses of Weber vs Marxian sociological models, but never gets out of control.

America has the worst inequality in the developed world, and the triple-play of neoliberal ideology, powerful right-wing think tanks, and the backlash against assertive government has brought us to the brink. As noted at the start, the coming electoral cycle promises new thinking to counteract these forces, which have done so much damage, and left so many in the hole. For the intellectually voracious only.

[G J · Rating 4 out of 5]

After such an articulate work on delineating the different forms of class analysis Wright is able to reformulate conventional Marxist categories and incorporate other such systems within it for a more thorough analysis modern society. This extends to causal explanations that have more purchase into peoples daily lives beyond the more structural mechanisms. Unfortunately immediately after this he forgoes any attempt at situating this analysis to resuscitate the practical element of the Marxist political project and instead launches into a vast hypothetical of possible return to the 'positive' class collaboration Keynesian days. He may not even be wrong but the fact it was prefaced with 1 page the justification for this vast departure in the book for the next 50 seemed a strange move.

[Nikhil · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first part provides a clear meta view of the way different people have looked at social class. After this, the book wades more into speculative matters and loses some of its luster. This book is very theory-heavy which is part of what makes the first part good and the latter two parts lacking. If one is to make a forward-looking argument, I think it requires a greater focus on empirics and this was not a focus. Nonetheless it's useful reference for someone with an interest in the subject.

[Nathan Fisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's an easy snarky comment to be made about Wright and such-and-such and this being a manifesto of reformism, but in all seriousness, his work is a well that is always worth drawing from, even if his Marxism concedes more than I think necessary.