Review of: Erik Olin Wright (2015) Understanding Class

In light of the collapse of socialism in the former Soviet Union and the increasing complexity of today's globalised capitalist societies, scholars have already declared the "death of class".However, recent years have seen developments that can be closely connected to the notion of class.The adverse outcomes of neo-liberalism, the rise of the politics of austerity and the accompanying pauperisation of huge parts of societies have led to a debate about increasing social inequality, precarisation and social polarisation.Different social and political movements around the world, like Occupy Wall Street, the 15-M Movement and the Arab Spring, have put these issues prominently on the political agenda.Interestingly, although connected to these matters, the notion of class plays a rather marginal role in these discussions.This might be partly due to the fact that class is still very much seen to be related to orthodox Marxism and its political as well as scholarly battle against liberal perspectives.As one of the most prominent and influential scholars within the field of class analysis, the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright has argued for a long time that class is far from being dead, and sees it instead as a relevant and apt concept for explaining different social phenomena.In his newest contribution, Understanding Class, Wright pursues this aim through three agendas.First, albeit staying distinctively Marxist in his theorisation and analysis, Wright's work aims to update and extend the classical Marxist notion of class in order to make it applicable to current-day capitalist societies.Moving beyond the classical demarcations between Marxist and non-Marxist theory by developing an integrative theoretical framework is one of the stated aims of Understanding Class.Second, Wright wants to show how contemporary scholars have used class as an explanatory category; he explores if and how their reasoning can inform Marxian class analysis.Third, Wright aims to show how class conflict and compromise can be empirically studied nowadays.Those familiar with the author's earlier work will know most of the material compiled in this book, as nine out of twelve chapters have been published elsewhere between 1996 and 2009.The chapters are organised in three parts and an introductory chapter.Part one focusses on different frameworks of class analysis, which are then interrogated and criticised from a Marxist point of view.The second part of the book -"Class in the Twenty-first Century" -accesses the works of three other authors (among them Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century) as well as the wider debate about the alleged "death of class".The book concludes by turning to the issues of class conflict and class compromise, thereby connecting the theoretical and empirical levels.Wright starts his book with a move towards an integrated class model.Instead of pitting the class definitions of social stratification approaches, Weberian accounts and Marxian class analysis

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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