The general-case glass ceiling hypothesis states that not only is it more difficult for women than for men to be promoted up levels of authority hierarchies within workplaces but also that the obstacles women face relative to men become greater as they move up the hierarchy. Gender-based discrimination in promotions is not simply present across levels of hierarchy but is more intense at higher levels. Empirically, this implies that the relative rates of women being promoted to higher levels compared to (...) men should decline with the level of the hierarchy. This article explores this hypothesis with data from three countries: the United States, Australia, and Sweden. The basic conclusion is that while there is strong evidence for a general gender gap in authority—the odds of women having authority are less than those of men—there is no evidence for systematic glass ceiling effects in the United States and only weak evidence for such effects in the other two countries. (shrink)

Democracy means rule by the people, but in practice even the most robust democracies delegate most rule making to a political class The gap between the public and its representatives might seem unbridgeable in the modern world, but Legislature by Lot examines an inspiring solution: a legislature chosen through “sortition”—the random selection of lay citizens. It’s a concept that has come to the attention of democratic reformers across the globe. Proposals for such bodies are being debated in Australia, Belgium, Iceland, (...) the United Kingdom, and many other countries. Sortition promises to reduce corruption and create a truly representative legislature in one fell swoop. In Legislature by Lot, John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright make the case for pairing a sortition body with an elected chamber within a bicameral legislature. Gastil is a leading deliberative democracy scholar, and Wright a distinguished sociologist and editor of the Real Utopias series, of which this is a part. In this volume, they bring together critics and advocates of sortition who have studied ancient Athens, deliberative polling, political theory, social movements, and civic innovation. Without obscuring its limitations, the contributors offer a wide variety of ideas for how to implement sortition and examine its potential for reshaping modern politics. Legislature by Lot includes sixteen essays that respond to Gastil and Wright’s detailed proposal. Essays comparing sortition to contemporary reforms see it as a dramatic extension of deliberative “minipublics,” which gather random samples of citizens to weigh public policy dilemmas without being empowered to enact legislation. Another set of essays explores the democratic principles underlying sortition and elections and considers, for example, how a sortition body holds itself accountable to a public that did not elect it. The third set of essays considers alternative paths to democratic reform, which limit the powers of a sortition chamber or more quickly establish a pure sortition body. With contributions by Arash Abizadeh, Tom Arnold, Terrill Bouricius, Deven Burks, Lyn Carson, Dimitri Courant, Donatella della Porta, David M. Farrell, Andrea Felicetti, James S. Fishkin, Brett Hennig, Vincent Jacquet, Raphaël Kies, Tom Malleson, Jane Mansbridge, Christoph Niessen, David Owen, John Pitseys, Min Reuchamps, Yves Sintomer, Graham Smith, Jane Suiter, and Pierre-Étienne Vandamme. (shrink)

Marxism: Crisis or Renewal? It has become commonplace nowadays to speak of a crisis— and even of the end— of Marxism. This dire forecast can hardly be ...

Erik Olin Wright est, avec Fredric Jameson, David Harvey ou Perry Anderson, l’une des figures majeures du marxisme anglo-américain contemporain. Mais il est l’une des moins connues en France. La parution d’ Utopies réelles aux éditions la Découverte en 2017, dans une collection dirigée par Christian Laval et Laurent Jeanpierre, marque à cet égard un tournant. Dans cet entretien, l’un des premiers parus dans une revue française, Wright revient sur sa trajectoire intellectuelle depuis les années 1960. (...) Il trace notamment la généalogie du « marxisme analytique », dont il reste à ce jour l’un des principaux représentants. Il évoque également l’idée d’« utopie réelle », par l’entremise de laquelle il esquisse les voies d'un anticapitalisme pour le xxi e siècle. (shrink)

This paper explores a contrast between the Marxist and feminist traditions of emancipatory social theory: whereas in the Marxist tradition theorists have spent considerable time and energy discussing the problem of the viability of classlessness as an emancipatory project, feminists have spent relatively little time defending the viability of a society without male domination. The paper argues that this difference in preoccupations reflects, at least to some extent, differences in the relationship between prefigurative egalitarian micro experiences and macro institutional change (...) with respect to gender oppression and class oppression. The paper also explores the implications of this contrast for the kinds of explanatory theory developed within the two traditions. Marxists' greater tendency than feminists to seek relatively deterministic accounts of the demise of the form of oppression on which they focus is viewed as at least partially a way of contending with the difficulty in establishing the viability of the emancipatory project of classlessness. (shrink)

Some of the important conceptual debates between different approaches to class analysis can be interpreted as reflecting different ways of linking temporality to class structure. In particular, processual concepts of class can be viewed as linking class to the past whereas structural concepts link class to the future. This contrast in the temporality of class concepts in turn is grounded in distinct intuitions about why class is explanatory of social conflict and social change. Processural approaches to class see its explanatory (...) power as deriving from the way meanings and identities are linked to class via a history of experiences; structural approaches, in contrast, emphasize the linkage between class and perceived interests via the objective possibilities facing people in different class locations. This paper tries to integrate these two temporalities by exploring the ways in which trajectories of class experience intersect structures of objective possibility in shaping different dimensions of class consciousness. (shrink)

In this article, we review the intrinsic democratic flaws in electoral representation, lay out a set of principles that should guide the construction of a sortition chamber, and argue for the virtue of a bicameral system that combines sortition and elections. We show how sortition could prove inclusive, give citizens greater control of the political agenda, and make their participation more deliberative and influential. We consider various design challenges, such as the sampling method, legislative training, and deliberative procedures. We explain (...) why pairing sortition with an elected chamber could enhance its virtues while dampening its potential vices. In our conclusion, we identify ideal settings for experimenting with sortition. (shrink)

Stuart White argues that egalitarians need a diverse toolkit of policy proposals in order to move closer to a just economic system. In particular he argues that a policy of Basic Capital grants should be included in this toolkit along with a variety of other more familiar instruments such as unconditional Basic Income, welfare state services and income supports, and support for worker cooperatives. The various policies in the egalitarian toolkit, however, have implications for issues other than contributing to a (...) more just economic system. In particular, they have implications for the long term stability, transformation, or even transcendence, of capitalism as an economic system. In this article I will argue that unconditional Basic Income has a greater potential to erode capitalism than does Basic Capital. While both of these policies in the egalitarian toolkit may make the economic system statically more just, over time Basic Capital grants are likely to strengthen capitalism as the core structure of the economic system, whereas unconditional Basic Income has the potential to erode the dominance of capitalism. As part of a long-term project of human emancipation, therefore, unconditional Basic Income should have priority over Basic Capital. (shrink)

The author makes the case for sortition from a Marxist perspective, explaining how sortition could become part of an anticapitalist political strategy.

Both Basic Income and Stakeholder Grants, if sufficiently generous, are likely to have an impact on the balance of power between classes: Stakeholder Grants make it easier for individuals to become self-employed and “own their own means of production,” thus reducing their dependency on capitalists; by unconditionally guaranteeing each individual an above-poverty standard of living, a generous Basic Income gives every worker an exit-option from the labor market, thus also reducing their dependence on capitalists. Of the two proposals, however, Basic (...) Income is likely to have the more profound effect on relative class power for several reasons: many people will “blow” their stakes either through bad luck or waste; basic income increases the possibility of engaging in decommodified, nonmarket activity, thus expanding the sphere of economic practices outside of capitalism; basic income increases the capacity of collective struggle by providing a guaranteed strike fund for workers. (shrink)

This special issue explores the theoretical and practical prospects for creating legislative bodies via sortition. This preface summarizes the purpose of the issue and each of the articles therein.

Perhaps the most intractable aspect of gender inequality concerns inequalities within the family around the domestic division of labor, especially over child care and other forms of caregiving. These enduring gender inequalities constitute a significant obstacle to achieving “strong gender egalitarianism”—a structure of social relations in which the division of labor around housework and caregiving within the family and occupational distributions within the public sphere are unaffected by gender. This article explores three kinds of publicly supported parental caregiving leaves that (...) bear on the potential for public policy to transform this private realm of inequality: equality-impeding policies, equality-enabling policies, and equality-promoting policies. The authors defend the third of these as necessary, given the importance of cultural constraints on the slow erosion of the gender division of labor over caregiving activities. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between class and the gendered domestic division of labor by examining how the contribution by husbands to housework in dual-career families varies across the class system. The article uses data from the United States and Sweden. The findings indicate that location in the class structure is not a powerful or systematic determinant of variations in the division of labor across households.

In this review, I argue that Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias is necessary reading for anyone interested in thinking through the possibilities of creating noncapitalist ways of organising economic and social life in the world today. However, I also raise questions about Wright’s deterministic interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy, his relative neglect of class-analysis, and his non-Gramscian conception of the relationship between the state, economy, and civil society.

En este trabajo se estudia la teoría del cambio revolucionario en dos autores inspirados por corrientes diferentes del marxismo. En el caso de Étienne Balibar se analiza su teoría de la violencia y la civilidad, mientras que en el de Erik Olin Wright se estudia su análisis de la depresión de transición. El artículo muestra cómo nuestros dos pensadores presentan una teoría convergente de abandono del modelo leninista de cambio social.

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. (shrink)

This lecture reflects on the difficulties of democracy in Erik Olin Wright’s democratic socialist vision, one he elaborates in How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century and Envisioning Real Utopias. It rejects the notion that radical democratic projects in cities, workplaces, and cooperatives can simply be scaled up for purposes of national or postnational political rule. It reflects on selected requirements of democracy apart from democratic governing institutions and practices: from democratic political culture, to education (...) and accountability, to handling globalized powers and problems such as finance, capital, and the climate crisis. The lecture concludes ambivalently, suggesting that democracy may be both necessary and impossible in realizing a politically free, socially just, and ecologically sustainable future. (shrink)