Class, Gender and Utopian Community: in Memory of Erik Olin Wright
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Class, gender and utopian community: In memory of Erik Olin Wright Gay Seidman1 University of Wisconsin-Madison Most sociologists try to understand society as it is in the present, not pondering how we might want to organize it in some far-off future. What prompted Erik Wright’s shift, from a decades-long effort to map class structures in the industrial societies, to focus on finding paths to a more egalitarian future? Like many sociologists, I found this turn to ‘real utopias’ puzzling -- especially coming from Erik, a scholar who took such pride in his early work, combining Marxist concepts with rigorous social science methods. By the late 1990s, Erik’s focus seemed almost diametrically opposed to that earlier project. Instead of mapping complicated capitalist employment relations, he began looking for new social arrangements that might encourage egalitarianism, and seeking organizational patterns and policies that might produce communities shaped by fairness and generosity – rather than by exploitation and competition. 1 This paper was first presented at the Universidade de Coimbra, January 24, 2020. For comments and suggestions, I am indebted to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Michael Burawoy, Greta Krippner, Heinz Klug, Sara Trongone and especially, Marcia Wright. 1 That shift intrigued me. I first met Erik in the late 1980s, when his work on ‘contradictory class locations’ had already established him as a leading Marxist sociologist. In 1990, largely because of Erik, I joined the Madison faculty, where I had a front-row seat as Erik embarked on what Michael Burawoy (2020) calls a ‘tale of two Marxisms’. Even from the office next door, Erik’s transformation seemed surprising. But before I turn to the role feminism played in Erik’s surprising shift to the study of ‘real utopias’, I want to say something more personal about his impact on our daily lives. Erik was my colleague, neighbor, and dear friend for 30 years – literally, half my life. More than a year after his passing, Erik’s absence still leaves a gaping hole in my daily life. As a mutual friend at Berkeley, Carol Hatch, used to say, Erik had the personality of a summer camp director – someone who pulled everyone around him into joyous, productive games, who could see the bright side of anything, who kept us going when things got rough. 2 Erik brought that energetic warmth to our community, as well as to his intellectual work, pulling his friends into activities like canoeing on the Wisconsin River or cross-country skiing across an icy lake, year-end retreats, helping us struggling with personal issues, giving advice to graduate students. Sadly, I never did go on any of the socio-cultural bike tours he offered every year to members of the UW-Madison sociology department, but I will always miss the dinners he organized for visiting scholars, Thanksgiving feasts with Erik playing fiddle while we danced Virginia reels, baby showers for pregnant colleagues, graduation celebrations for our students. Erik and Marcia’s home became the heart of a global community of scholars and activists, simultaneously close-knit and limitless – a community which those of us who were lucky enough to have been in, will cherish forever. Of course, very few camp directors have ever come close to Erik’s brilliance, or his intellectual rigor and insight, but Carol’s description captures the spirit that infused Erik’s intellectual work, as well as his face-to-face interactions: his infectious energy and enthusiasm, his ability to point out new directions, to pull us into new collective adventures, to build a better community. Those who have read Erik’s work know brilliant his insights could be – and how clearly he could spell out complicated issues, or interrogate simple ones. In person, you could always count on him for brilliant insights, and for thoughtful, 3 reasonable responses -- even to ideas that challenged his basic beliefs -- responses rooted in his deep generosity, his commitment to social justice and his egalitarian universalism. He could always find the gem in a student’s dissertation proposal, acknowledge a reasonable insight even in arguments with which he completely disagreed, or offer a way out of an intellectual dead-end. But back to my initial question. What prompted Erik’s turn away from Erik’s early ‘scientific Marxism’ -- that careful, data-based, analytic mapping of capitalist class structures and class locations – and why did he shift to searching for alternative social organizations and a new emancipatory project? The search for ‘real utopias’ often seemed more idealistic than empirical, more philosophic than pragmatic. In fact, some of my more conservative colleagues wondered aloud whether Erik’s ‘real utopias’ project might reflect a return to his past -- pointing out that after graduating from Harvard, Erik attended a liberal religious seminary, 4 and served as a student chaplain in San Francisco’s notorious San Quentin prison. Though he moved to a doctoral program in sociology at Berkeley just a year or two later, perhaps his 1990s shift simply marked a return to his more religious, philosophical beginnings? Last fall, a question from Boaventura de Sousa Santos about how Erik approached gender issues in his work pushed me to think in new ways about Erik’s intellectual trajectory – especially, about what propelled that extraordinary intellectual shift. Erik’s turn to searching for ‘real utopian’ stemmed from a very sociological perspective, one informed by classic sociologists, deep egalitarian ideals, and, above all, by Erik’s endless intellectual curiosity. But on rereading Erik’s work, I am increasingly impressed by how much this new direction was shaped by a profound engagement with feminist concerns. Of course, I would not deny that his initial turn was prompted by real world events: Erik was quite clear that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 posed new theoretical challenges, for Marxist theory and for sociology more broadly. When the only historical example of Marx’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat fell apart, Erik argued, Marxists confronted a theoretical vacuum. Without an acceptable vision of what a more inclusive society might look like, what kind of society should leftists aspire to? If ‘actually existing socialism’ offered no guide to a better future, how should activists think about their goals? 5 That question certainly nagged at Erik -- who, though he did not consider himself a committed Weberian, always insisted on confronting ‘inconvenient facts’ when they contradicted his theoretical assumptions. For decades, Erik participated actively in a group of social scientists who called themselves ‘analytical Marxists’ (or, as he often called them, informally, the ‘no-bullshit Marxists’) – a group of leftist scholars who prided themselves on a direct engagement with mainstream economic and ‘rational choice’ theories, trying to develop an intellectually- rigorous ‘scientific Marxism’. For many of these scholars, and certainly for Erik, the collapse of the Soviet Union raised serious questions about what Marxists should be focusing on, and even more, what it meant for Marxism’s long-term vision of a classlessness society as a desirable or attainable future -- a question that is likely to be debated for years to come (eg, Burawoy 2020; Riley, 2020). But interpreting Erik’s intellectual shift as stemming simply from a desire to reconstruct Marxist theory may overlook the extent to which, by the early 1990s, feminist perspectives had become central to Erik’s understanding of social relations. Rereading his work, I think it is clear that questions raised by feminists -- about what emancipation means, and about how to get there -- shaped Erik’s vision of ‘real utopias’, and prompted a re-examination of how we might reach them. 6 Erik’s understanding of gender dynamics was shaped by personal experience, at home and at work, as anyone who knew his personal history would understand. Erik grew up in a household marked by domestic egalitarianism: in contrast to gender stereotypes of the 1950s, both his father and his mother were highly- regarded professors of psychology. Later, as an undergraduate at Harvard, he met his life partner, Marcia; in fact, they both took an undergraduate sociology course with Talcott Parsons. I don’t think anyone who knows the family could doubt that Erik’s domestic life, with Marcia and their two daughters, Jenny and Rebecca, strengthened his faith that a better, world is possible – and that gender inequalities would have no place in a ‘real’ utopia. That conviction was also influenced by Erik’s interactions at work, especially with feminist graduate students and colleagues. Soon after Erik arrived in Madison in the late 1970s, Cindy Costello and other graduate students pushed him to include feminist theorists in his graduate seminars on sociological theory. Always open to suggestions, Erik asked the students to design an entire section of the course, incorporating the readings they proposed in his syllabus. In the process, several graduate students formed what became an ongoing women’s group – which is still meeting, some forty years later. That openness to others’ ideas continued throughout Erik’s career. Some extraordinary graduate students came to Madison to work with him -- including 7 socialist feminists, like Janeen Baxter, Raka Ray, Greta Krippner, Elizabeth Wrigley-Fields, Julia Adams, and many, many more. Working with these students pushed Erik to ask new questions – as did Erik’s broader collaborations with leading feminist scholars, including people like Nancy Folbre, Juliet Schorr, Janet Gornick, Marcia K. Meyers, Debra Satz -- the list goes on and on. Recognizing that influence prompted me to look more closely at how, in the early 1990s, Erik’s growing appreciation of gender inequality coincided with– or even shaped – his efforts to rethink ‘scientific Marxism.’ Rereading his work from that period, it seems clear that a growing awareness of how socially-constructed dynamics shape gender inequality, at home as well as at work, pushed Erik to think differently about the way all identities are embedded within, and shaped by, social relations.