Stardust to Stardust: Reflections on Living and Dying

By Erik Olin Wright

Erik Olin Wright, one of the most important sociologists of his time, takes us along on his intimate and brave journey toward death, and asks the big questions about human mortality.

Human life is a wild, extraordinary phenomenon: elements are brewed in the cen-ter of stars and exploding supernova, spewed across the universe; they eventually clumped into a minor planet around a modest star; then after some billions of years this “stardust” became complex molecules with self-replicating capacities that we call life. More billions of years pass and these self-replicating molecules join together into more complex forms, evolve into organisms which gain awareness and then consciousness, and finally, eventually, consciousness of their consciousness. Stardust turned into conscious living matter aware of its own existence. And with that comes consciousness of mortality. . . . That I, as a conscious being will cease to exist pales in significance to the fact that I exist at all. I don’t find that this robs my existence of meaning; it’s what makes infusing life with meaning possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Jul 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642592054

Erik Olin Wright

Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019) was Vilas Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. He authored many books, including Classes, Interrogating Inequality, Class Counts, Deepening Democracy (with Archon Fung), and Envisioning Real Utopias.

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Stardust to Stardust

Erik Olin Wright

Haymarket Books

Chicago, Illinois

© 2020 Erik Olin Wright

Published in 2020 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

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ISBN: 978-1-64259-205-4

Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please call 773-583-7884 or email [e-mail] for more information.

Cover photo © Marcia Wright.

Cover design by Jamie Kerry.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

Editorial Note

This book is a condensation of a blog written by Erik Olin Wright. To prepare it for publication, entries were selected and combined by Rebecca Wright, Marcia Wright, and Cathy Loeb. All of the text was written by Erik Olin Wright, and the blog in its entirety can be found at caringbridge.org.

Photos were selected by Rebecca Wright, Jennifer (Wright) Decker, and Marcia Wright.

A Note from Erik’s Family

Over the course of ten months of treatment and hospitalization for acute myeloid leukemia, Erik wrote a blog, which he made public. He wrote almost every day, including the day before he died. He wrote about what writing was for him: a joy, an excitement, a way of sorting out and deepening his thinking on matters. He started the blog primarily as a form of efficiency—a good way to keep in touch with people and keep them abreast of how he fared—but it became a source of comfort, connection, and revelation. It also magically created community, and this was something Erik did wherever he was. He felt connected to people and they to him. And through their comments and responses to the blog and the awareness that they were all sharing the same information, people experienced connection with one another. That is to say, they felt themselves to be part of a community.

At one of the memorials for Erik, someone commented that he led an integrated life. This immediately rang so true. But why? Perhaps because there were certain qualities in Erik that stayed steady across all sorts of situations—his curiosity; his openness; his brilliance, depth, and acuity; his wide-ranging interests; his generosity of spirit; his kindness. He was by nature a true extrovert, gaining insight, pleasure, and energy from sharing things with other people. He made his blog public because he had no motive for making it private. He was brilliant, but as one of his students said, his intellect wouldn’t have been half so effective if it hadn’t been for his huge heart. He was always himself, was able to be genuine, no matter the situation. As another of his former students wrote, He was always really himself in a way that invited all of us to be ourselves, too.

Erik was as likely to be interested in a baseball game as he was in a sociological question or as he was in the people around him. He was as curious about the lives and views of the CNAs and nurses who cared for him as he was about the lives and views of the academics with whom he spent most of his working life. In the blog, he wrote about hematopoietic stem cells, about the social structure of the hospital ward, about the science fiction novel he was reading, about his grandchildren, about his symptoms, about music, and about life and death. And about love. Wide-ranging interests. And constant curiosity. His capacity to enjoy a lot of his last ten months was astonishing.

Erik’s blog was different from all the academic writing that he had done in his life. And it was unlike his other final writing project, his letter to his grandchildren. It was a particular joy. And thankfully, one of its results was that he was able to experience, in the responses to it, how widely and deeply he was loved. He was a beautiful human being. We miss him terribly. And this is his last gift to us all.

Preface:

The Spirit of Erik Wright

Just after midnight on January 23, 2019, the world lost one of its great social scientists—practitioner as well as thinker. He was seventy-one. Tributes flooded in from all corners of the world—from colleagues and students, from activists and politicians, from people who knew him and those who didn’t, from so many who had been touched by his sense and sensibility. Rarely do social scientists command such a broad audience or elicit such a devoted following.

Erik Wright was an all-around intellectual. Grounded in history, schooled in mathematics, an enthusiastic musician, a latent philosopher, and a magical storyteller, his chosen vocation was to engage the ills of capitalism. He created two renowned research programs. The first was based on a novel understanding of economic inequality. He began this program in the early 1970s, when he was a graduate student, and, along with collaborators, he went on to elaborate this program with new questions and new empirical material until the end of his life. In the early 1990s, however, it began to play second fiddle to another major project. If capitalism systematically generated debilitating inequality, then the task must be, he averred, to imagine and then realize a more just world. He set out to discover the embryos of such an alternative world in organizations and institutions embedded in the interstices of actual, existing capitalism—embryos that he called real utopias, embryos guided by the values of democracy, community, and equality.

At the end of his life, Erik created an evolving real utopia around his hospital bed, a real utopia described in the blog that enchanted multitudes of readers across the world. A condensed version of the blog has now become this book. Always an inveterate recorder of his life, whether through photography or writing or both, Erik this time took his diaries public. During his last ten months, he recounted his thoughts on living and dying, memorably referring to himself as among the most privileged, advantaged, call it what you will, stardust in this immensely enormous universe. He was of that special stardust miraculously turned into conscious living matter aware of its own existence. And then this complex organization ends, and the stardust that is me will dissipate back to the more ordinary state of matter.

This book tells of the ups and downs of the battle with the cancer cells that were colonizing his body, and how they would devour the new and defenseless transplanted immune system; he describes his faith in the power of meditation to control pain; he evokes the poignancy of seeing a fellow patient disappear from one day to the next, a fate he knew could catch up with him too; he ruminates on reciprocity in generosity and in love; and his last post is on the art of being goofy. The book traces the trajectory of the disease and Erik’s response, day by day.

But he also tells of nightmares—that his closest and dearest were collectively laughing at his silly blog, the fear that life and love had deserted him. He recounts a moving exchange with the head of the hematology–oncology team, a Catholic by faith, who recalled the words of Jesus on the cross: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Although an atheist, Erik now understood the universal significance of these words, which gave voice to the spectre of utter abandonment that haunted his sleep.

But that was by night. By day, Erik welcomed all comers into his real utopia. He wrote of the joy of seeing visitors. Friends and students (past and present) would crowd around his bed as he energetically engaged their dissertations, discussed politics of the day, or comforted them in their travails. He was especially animated when Skyping seminars from his hospital bed, reflecting on the meaning of socialism or the conundrums of his last book, How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century. But first place was always family—Marcia, his wife and partner for fifty-three years, now an accomplice in allowing him to live out every second to the fullest; their two daughters, Jenny and Becky; and their three grandchildren, Safira, Vernon, and Ida. Erik was devoted to his 100-year-old mother, called her almost every day, but never let on that his own life was in danger. Erik didn’t fear death; nonetheless, he desperately wanted to live, to be with his grandchildren who gave him such deep joy. The nearer he approached death, the more energetically he pursued life.

Erik rarely looked back on his enormous accomplishments but instead looked forward, planning for a better world. Until December, he was still hoping to teach in the spring. To the very end he was worrying about the future of his department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; about the funding and supervision of his students; and about who would be his successor at the Havens Center, now the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice, which he had created.

As he openly acknowledged, the blog was initially launched as a convenience, an efficient way of telling people how he was doing. But it soon became much more. Liberated from any academic pretension, he ranged over so many themes that caught his fancy. The entries gave meaning to his disappearing life and turned out to be a spontaneous archive of his multiple talents. Even in the hospital, he managed to organize a community of associated producers, engaging the medical staff— the teams of doctors and nurses who tended to his body—in ongoing conversation about their lives and their work. To the end, nothing escaped his indefatigable curiosity.

This book gives us lessons in both dying and living; it shows us how to be a utopian in spirit and in practice, even when death is on the horizon. But this wondrous ethnography didn’t appear from nowhere. To shed light on its origin, all I can do is sketch a short history of Erik’s life and intellect.

What was the beginning? It’s difficult to say. Maybe it was at the childhood dinner table, where each member of the Wright family was asked to give an account of their day’s activities. Or was it as a Harvard undergraduate, enticed by the systemic elegance of the social theories of Talcott Parsons? Perhaps it was at Oxford, where he studied with the Marxist historian Christopher Hill and with the sociologist and political theorist Steven Lukes.

Perhaps Erik was a utopian all along. His animated film, The Chess Game, made in 1968, when Erik was twenty-one, expresses the dilemmas of revolution, dramatically played out on a chessboard. His unpublished manuscript, Chess Perversions and Other Diversions, completed in 1974, has a similar quality. It disturbs the vested interests behind the rules that define chess and other games by introducing a series of modifications with transformative consequences. This book, he wrote in the preface, is an invitation to that kind of freedom and delight that comes with invention and straying from the conventional path. Running a maze efficiently has its pleasures, as any laboratory rat could tell us. But changing the maze is reserved for the experimenter. Harking back to his youth, perhaps unconsciously, Erik’s last book shows how changing the rules of capitalism can, indeed, be a revolutionary move.

Erik himself liked to trace his interest in utopias to 1971, when he was a student at the Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkeley, avoiding the draft. It was then that he organized a student-run seminar called Utopia and Revolution to discuss the prospects for the revolutionary transformation of American society. He then worked at San Quentin as a student chaplain, joining an activist organization devoted to prison reform. From this emerged his first book, The Politics of Punishment, coauthored with San Quentin prisoners and prison rights activists.

This prepared him well to be a graduate student at Berkeley in the heady days of the early ’70s. In those times, especially at Berkeley and especially in his chosen discipline of sociology, students were more concerned about changing the world than advancing their academic careers. The Free Speech Movement, the Third World Strike, the antiwar movement, and the civil rights movement had left faculty at war with one another, opening up spaces for graduate students to demand greater control of their education. Erik and his fellow graduate students put together their own seminars, the most important of which was Controversies in Marxist Social Science, a version of which Erik taught almost every year at Madison. Erik was also an energetic participant in the Marxist collective around the journal Kapitalistate, a principal organizer of Commie Camp—an annual retreat to discuss pressing issues in Marxist theory and practice. Again he took this project with him to Wisconsin, where it became known as RadFest. For Erik, sociology itself became a real utopia.

Thus, Erik became a major figure in an intellectual project that captivated many of us in those days: to bring a Marxist perspective to the discipline of sociology. His dissertation challenged sociology not on ideological but on scientific grounds, demonstrating that a reconstructed Marxist definition of class, rooted in the concept of exploitation, could explain income inequality better than then-current sociological models based on socioeconomic status and economic theories based on human capital. At the same time as he was challenging sociology, Erik was reinventing Marxism. The middle class had long been a thorn in the side of Marxism—it was supposed to dissolve, yet it seemed to get bigger and bigger. To explain this anomaly, Erik redefined the middle class as composed of three contradictory class positions—managers and supervisors, small employers, and semi-autonomous professionals—lying between the three fundamental classes: capital, labor, and the self-employed.

So Erik began a research program in class analysis, garnering funds to administer his own national survey designed to accurately measure his new class categories. His ideas spread, and soon there were teams of researchers in fifteen countries, fielding parallel surveys. His analysis sparked many invigorating debates about the meaning and measurement of class. Through these debates and in response to criticism, Erik revised his scheme over the years, sometimes with small adjustments, sometimes by shifting its foundations. Erik Olin Wright became a household name in sociology and neighboring disciplines. Five books appeared over two decades, all marked by his limpid style and translated into multiple languages.

In recognition of a scholar of such global renown, the University of Wisconsin awarded Erik a distinguished professorship, and in 1984 he was given his own center for critical social science that he named after his close colleague, Gene Havens, who also died of cancer. Erik was able to capitalize on an international prominence that drew in countless visiting scholars, activists, and luminaries to make the Havens Center a unique hub for left-wing thought. These visitors will remember Erik not only for his incisive intellectual contributions but for his hospitality as well—and perhaps also his specialty dishes such as Leeks in Red Wine or his Coqless Coq au Vin.

In 1981, Erik joined a group of brilliant international social scientists and philosophers, advancing what they called Analytical Marxism or, more colloquially, No Bullshit Marxism. Their goal was to clarify the foundations of Marxism in a no-holds-barred grilling of each other’s work. Over the last four decades, the composition of the group has changed and drifted from its Marxist moorings, but Erik remained a stalwart but open-ended Marxist in its midst. It became a second intellectual home and one source of inspiration for his turn to the moral foundations of Marxism.

The changing historical context was a second inspiration for the real utopias project, which began in 1991, the very year the Soviet Union collapsed. Whatever one thinks of the Soviet Union and its satellites—and Erik was very dismissive of them—they did provide an ostensible alternative to capitalism. The dramatic collapse both encouraged and demanded a new imagination of socialism that was democratic, free, and egalitarian in character. When Erik referred to real utopias, he was not thinking of some blueprint that emerges deus ex machina from the head of a political dreamer, to be realized in an unknown future, in an unknown place, by some unknown people. Instead, a real utopian is an anthropologist who scours the earth for institutions and organizations that are potential challenges to capitalism, putting each of them under an investigative and analytic microscope, studying their conditions of existence, their dynamics and internal contradictions, the possibility of dissemination. Some of his favorite examples were participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil; the cooperatives of Mondragon in Spain’s Basque Country; the collective self-organization of Wikipedia; and plans for universal basic income grants. The public library was one of his favorite illustrations of socialism—you borrow what you need to develop your abilities and return it when you’ve finished. The library doesn’t have to be limited to books—and what goes in can be subject to public discussion.

Erik realized that by itself each real utopia is as likely to be an aid to capitalism as an alternative, and so it was important to link them to one another in a broad anticapitalist movement with a common language and vision. He offered both a science of possibilities and a political direction. In the last decade of his life, ever since the publication of his magnum opus, Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik spent much time traversing the world, talking to activists who became keenly interested in hitching his framework to their own grassroots projects. Here was a brilliant intellectual paying tribute to their often invisible labors, encouraging them to struggle for social justice, often against all odds, including enduring insults and reprisals.

His critics attacked him for his Panglossian view, but Erik would respond by saying that today we need optimism of the intellect as well as optimism of the will. It is easy to be a pessimist, he would say. It’s hard work to be optimistic and realistic under the crushing sinews of capitalism. His genius was to uphold both the optimism and the realism.

Erik leaves us with both a way of thinking and a way of being. I know of no one who thought more lucidly, more cogently, more speedily, more effortlessly than Erik; no one who so effectively cut to the heart of any issue, any paper, any book. Always gentle and astute, his manner was both elevating and intimidating. He took your own claims, arguments, and facts more seriously than you did yourself. When he argued with others, he never resorted to exaggeration, distortion, or oversimplification. Instead, he zeroed in on the best in his opponents’ arguments, usually better than what they could offer themselves. Such was his generosity of spirit. He brought all these gifts to the legions of students he taught and the audiences he addressed across the globe, calling on them, too, to be logical, rigorous, and imaginative—but no less important, by his example, to be decent and honest, and to give others the benefit of the doubt.

The values he espoused—equality, freedom, community, and, I think he would now add, love—were not only the substrata of a new society; they were moral principles to follow in our daily lives. We can’t wait for the future; we must demonstrate our faith in that future by our actions in the here and now. Erik sought to be egalitarian in his dealings with all, regardless of status or rank. There was not an evil bone in his body nor a jealous fiber in his soul.

He was a permanent persuader and an indefatigable builder of community, enabling people around him to flourish, or, as Marx would say, to develop their rich and varied abilities. We can’t be just like Erik, but we can be inspired by his many virtues and try to follow in his footsteps, guided by his vision and refashioning it as we move forward.

—Michael Burawoy, September 10, 2019

University of California, Berkeley

Journal

The illness and treatment

—April 19, 2018

On Friday, April 6, I was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. This was completely out of the blue—I had no symptoms at all. The suspicion was raised as a result of a pretty routine blood test and then confirmed by a bone marrow biopsy. Given my age and the details of the mutations involved, this is not the kind of leukemia that can be kept at bay by periodic cycles of chemo and remission. The only real approach is to try for a complete cure through intensive chemotherapy followed by a stem cell transplant, which basically gives me an entirely new immune system. The whole process is fraught with potential problems, ranging from glitches to setbacks to catastrophes, but there is a non-remote possibility that at the end of the process I’ll be fully back to normal. That’s my plan!

We decided to have the treatments at Froedtert Hospital of the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, rather than in Madison. I activated my doctorly networks as soon as I had the news—my brother-in-law at the University of Florida College of Medicine and two doctors in Madison. They each talked to the hematology–oncologists they knew in whom they had the most confidence. And all three said that the Medical College of Wisconsin was the place to go for stem cell transplants. I managed to get an appointment for consultations on Tuesday, April 10, with the lead doctors in both the hematology–oncology team and the transplant team, and felt extremely good about them as people, as well as their approach to the whole endeavor. We could have still done the first phase of the process in Madison, but it seemed better to have everything in one place.

The steps in the process, as best as I can tell, are:

A month of chemo, which began April 11, to produce a remission, defined as no longer detectable cancer. The chemo in this phase has a newly approved slow-release formulation that mutes the side effects while still being effective. So far, no nausea and no hair loss. If I get a full remission, then I move on to step 2. If not, repeat step 1.

Four to six weeks of recovery from the chemo. If the cancer recurs in that period, go back to step 1. If not, on to step 3. Getting information about the recurrence of my cancer requires bone marrow biopsies. As a psychologist friend said, alluding to rat studies, I wouldn’t press a bar for it.

The stem cell transplant. This involves finding a match from a registry of 27 million donors worldwide. As I understand the process, there are eight specific genetic markers, so a perfect match is eight for eight. One doesn’t need a perfect match to survive, but it reduces the chances of graft-versus-host disease. Assuming an adequate match is found, then my entire immune system gets wiped out—not just the cancer cells, but everything. This is the kind of powerful, high–side effect chemo that I associate with chemotherapy. This is going for broke. If the transplant fails, then that’s it. This is like getting a heart transplant: once the old heart is gone, the new one is what you have. With a good match, then the success rate is pretty high. All of this involves another month in the hospital.

Following the transplant hospitalization, we will have to live in Milwaukee fairly close to the hospital for forty-five days because we will have frequent outpatient appointments, and there is a significant chance of infections requiring rehospitalization during this period. The big sources of catastrophe are infections and graft-versus-host disease. More bone marrow biopsies. This, more or less, takes us to the end of the summer.

If I make it through #4, then we can return to Madison, with lab work being done in Madison, and periodic trips to Milwaukee for clinic visits for six months or so.

By sometime next spring, back in the saddle!

I am now in the midst of step 1 of the treatment. As the lemming said in free fall halfway down the cliff, So far so good. When I wrote this to one of my students, he replied immediately to suggest that fortunately there was a trampoline at the bottom of the cliff. I’m feeling hopeful, and even optimistic, but of course there are so many ways this can be derailed that I also try to be cheerfully realistic. What I absolutely will try my best NOT to do is let the prospect of dying in the next few months contaminate the time while I am alive. We all die. That’s not news. And the one thing I know for sure is that while I am alive, I’m not dead.