Erik Olin Wright

Erik Olin Wright was an American sociologist and a leading figure in analytical Marxism who devoted his career to developing a rigorous, empirically testable framework for class analysis. He argued that many people occupy contradictory class locations, positions such as managers and supervisors that combine elements of both the capitalist and working classes rather than fitting cleanly into a single traditional Marxist category, and he built large comparative survey projects to measure class structure across countries on this basis. In his later work, especially Envisioning Real Utopias (2010), Wright turned from class analysis toward the systematic study of institutional alternatives to capitalism, evaluating real-world experiments such as cooperatives, participatory budgeting, and unconditional basic income for their potential to expand social empowerment over economic life.