Aliona Lyasheva · CC BY-SA 3.0

A sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wright spent his career reworking Marxist class theory to fit a modern workforce that classical Marxism's owner-versus-worker split no longer described well, breaking the working class into subgroups with differing degrees of power and class consciousness. He introduced concepts like "interstitial revolution" — building alternatives to capitalism within its existing structures rather than overthrowing them outright — as part of a broader research program on realistic, egalitarian alternatives to capitalism.