Erik Olin Wright - Understanding Class

Luxembug Lecture by Erik Olin Wright, Analytical Marxist Sociologist, Wisconsin This talk explores a new way of integrating Marxist, Weberian, and Durkheimian approaches to class analysis. All three of these strands of theory and research attempt to identify central lines of cleavage within economic systems that define people with common economic interests in potential conflict with others; but they differ in how they specify the causal mechanisms that generate such commonality and conflict of interests. I argue that all three kinds of mechanisms exist. The question is how best to understand their interconnection. One way of sorting this out is through the metaphor of society as a game. Conflicts of interests can be specified over what game to play, over the rules of a given game, or over the moves within a given set of rules. Marxist approaches identify classes with the first of these, Weberian with the second, and Durkheimian with the third. Erik Olin Wright is Vilas Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin. His academic work has been centrally concerned with reconstructing the Marxist tradition in ways that attempt to make it more relevant to contemporary concerns and more cogent as a scientific framework of analysis. He was president of the American Sociological Association in 2011–12. His most recent books include Envisioning Real Utopias (2010); American Society: how it really works (with Joel Rogers 2011 and 2015); Understanding Class (2015); and Alternatives to Capitalism (with Robin Hahnel, 2016). isconsin/USA (in English) Website: https://www.rosalux.de/event/56728