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Rather than producing a new synthesis of class analysis and socialist politics, the two demarcated different phases of his intellectual career: class theories and empirical investigations of increasing scale and complexity preoccupied Wright through the seventies and eighties the ambitious international project of Envisioning Real Utopias and its satellite volumes consumed his energies over the next thirty years. footnote 2 Yet as Burawoy points out, Wright’s interventions in this discussion were somewhat paradoxical. Subsequent thinkers, from Sorel to Wright and Burawoy’s ‘sociological Marxism’ and beyond, have pondered whether these layers could unite in an anticapitalist coalition. As Bernstein observed in 1899, capitalist society does not simply produce class polarizations, but a host of intermediate positions as well. The strong point in this account has always been its explanation of the rhythms of capitalist production its weak point was its sociology of class formation. The factory and, later, the large corporation contained the cell form of the planned society to come, while the working class provided the social muscle for its achievement. The scientific analysis of capitalist development was thus intimately linked to the socialist political project. At the same time, capitalism was producing a new class, the industrial proletariat, with the capacity to establish another form of social production based on democratic planning-and with a keen interest in so doing. footnote 1 What is the relationship between capitalist development and the project of socialism? In the classical Marxist schema, the competitive and unplanned nature of capitalist investment meant that manufacturing overproduction would result in periodic, and perhaps worsening, crises. I n ‘a tale of two Marxisms’, his stimulating critique of the life-work of Erik Olin Wright, Michael Burawoy raises a crucial question for the left.