Erik Olin Wright's last book was published at a time when socialist ideas had once again entered the mainstream of American politics. In many ways, his recommendations for anti-capitalist strategy built upon his work of the past four decades, but in others, they were a departure from it. In this talk I offer an appreciation and assessment of his argument. I suggest that while Wright's argument was characteristically bracing, it represented a turn away from class analysis and, in so doing, turned to a perspective that weakens the very anti-capitalism that he endorsed.
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Vivek Chibber teaches sociology at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn (Harvard: 2022) and Confronting Capitalism: how World Works and how to Change it (Verso, 2022).