Content area
Full text
Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis. By Erik Olin Wright. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 576p. $64.95 cloth, $27.95 paper.
The Comparative Class Analysis Project, some results of which are reported in this book, is one of the few truly great social research endeavors of our time. Carried on over a period of 17 years, it sheds more light on existing structures of inequality in advanced capitalist countries than any other research of which I am aware. Through the efforts of Erik Wright and his coworkers, a unified questionnaire about class relations was administered to random samples of labor force participants in more than 15 capitalist countries. The data analyzed in Class Counts comes from Australia, Canada, Japan, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. All students of social inequality, irrespective of theoretical inclination, are deeply indebted to Wright for the intelligent planning and dogged determination needed to complete this enormous undertaking.
Wright initiated the project to help develop a theoretically coherent and empirically viable Marxist class analysis. He was particularly troubled by the question of how Marxist theory, a system organized around a polarized concept of class, could deal with intermediate locations commonly called the middle class. Class Counts is the fifth book Wright has written or coauthored using information and/or ideas from the project. It is a quantitatively oriented book specifically written (1) to persuade non-Marxist social scientists that Marxist class analysis can produce rigorous and interesting empirical result and (2) to convince Marxists that useful results can be obtained through quantitative research methods. As in all of Wright's written work, the prose is vigorous, concise, and steadfastly free from unnecessary jargon. Wright has a remarkable capacity to extract empirically testable propositions from a diverse and often contested theoretical literature. As a consequence, Class Counts ranks as one of the most conceptually integrated and theoretically focused research reports I have ever encountered.
The class analysis practiced by Wright is based on the notion of exploitation conceived as an "antagonistic interdependence of material interests." The basis of exploitation is an asymmetric relation in which one group possesses certain productive resources, and another group is excluded from access to them. The material welfare of the former group depends upon the material deprivation...