Classes : A Marxist Critique

In Classes: A Marxist Critique, Paul Kamolnick has produced what may prove to be the most fundamental critique of Erik Olin Wright's class structure analysis to date. The recent publication of Wright's Classes has raised a number of central questions regarding his continuing project on the class structures of advanced capitalist societies. Has Wright now totally abandoned Marxism in favor of orthodox neo-classical economics, social psychology, and Weberian stratification theory? How does Wright's latest argument relate to his earlier work, especially his critique of Paulantzas? What is the meaning of Wright's dependence on Jon Elster, John Roemer, and the 'rational actor' subject grounded in the doctrine self-proclaimed methodological individualism? Following an extended critical Preface, Kamolnick first situates Wright within the social formation of a sociological and Althusserian Marxism while arguing the basic continuity between Wright's earlier and later work on class. Though Marxism must itself always remain a social formation, Kamolnick argues that Wright rejects Marxism in favor of bourgeois academic sociology. In chapters two and three kamolnick reveals how Wright's new theory of class consciousness is incapable of producing a knowledge of class structure and how Wright is led to rely ultimately on non-Marxist, bourgeois practices of science and knowledge production in order to overcome this. Classes: A Marxist Critique ends by considering the implications for Wright's new transnational data set of his failure to ground a knowledge of class structure, and finally, by arguing for the new directions Marxist class analysis should take in the 1980s and beyond. The thrust of Kamolnick's argument is the challenge for Marxists to revolutionize present sociologized practices of the labor process, objectivity, knowledge production, and Marxism itself. Class analysis must completely break with abstract sociologism and ground itself thoroughly within the concrete process of self-object