Archive of Erik Olin Wright

We need a way of assessing not just what is wrong with capitalism, but what is desirable about alternatives.

For Erik Olin Wright, our greatest chance at developing non-capitalist economic institutions may be in periods of class compromise initiated from below. The question is what it would take – or even whether or not it is possible – to rebuild such conditions in the present.

Erik Olin Wright, the great Marxist sociologist and pioneering scholar of class in capitalism, died from acute myeloid leukemia on January 23, 2019. He was 72. In this article, originally published in the New Left Review, Wright gives a lucid and elegant introduction to his "Real Utopian" view of the socialist project.