A Tale of Two Marxisms: Remembering Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019) *

Abstract

Intended to capture the entangled history of Marxism, Alvin Gouldner’s two Marxisms also frame the intellectual biography of Erik Olin Wright. In the 1970s Wright’s Scientific and Critical Marxisms were joined, but later they came apart as each developed its own autonomous trajectory. Erik’s Scientific Marxism was the program of class analysis that first brought him international fame. Begun in graduate school, it tailed off in the last two decades of his life, when it played second fiddle to the Critical Marxism of the Real Utopias Project that Erik began in the early 1990s.