A friend of mine shared this post with me, knowing that I had been an undergraduate student of yours back in 1991, when I talked my way into your year-long Marxist Sociology grad seminar (team taught with Joel Rogers). My friend knew this fact about me because I spoke of that class often, as it was so crucial to my own intellectual and political development. I am now teaching seminars on Marxist theory myself (Marxist literary and cultural theory, as I ended up becoming an English professor). I don't know what else to say; I just wanted to offer you another data point indicating how successful your writing and teaching have been in extending and expanding the liberatory power of Marxist thought and practice. I consider myself tremendously lucky to have spent time learning from and with you.

Thank you Erik.

Dear Erik. You’re critical and at the same time optimistic Marxism has shaped many of us. In Sweden, the Left Party, as well as the Youg Left, class analyses is to a huge extend influenced by your. Your class analyses has therefore been debated all over the county, in all from small basement where young activist first encounter the world of Marxism, and are given a language for things they have felt, to congresses, where we have tried to explore how your class analyses can be combined with an analyses of racism and patriarchy. We thank you, for creating theories that have we could translate to politics, and analyses of the everyday of capitalism.

We will continue the struggle for the real utopias, and the right for all to share and experience them.

The sprit of your work, enthusiasm for life and optimism will be with us.

Dear Professor Wright,
I have not met you face to face but I have met you in your papers and books many and many times. Right now in front of me are three books you wrote. I am deeply saddened to read about your health condition. I would like to let you know that you and your family are in the thoughts of many and many people, people you know and people you do not know. Hug! Hug!

I still,recall the excitement reading Class Crisis & the State with friends during my time in the late 70’s at Ohio State. Years later it figures you would again rise to the challenge in this final chapter. May we all be as strong as you...

Dear Erik,
Words cannot express the unbearable grief I feel in my heart. Borrowing a poet's words,

Of the moon
all that’s left is a stain upon the window

Of all the waters in the world
this single drop on my cheek

Thanks for everything, Erik!

Warmest,
Maryam

Erik, I'd just like you to know that I'm going to talk to my Sociology class about you tomorrow, and say to them that if everyone read writers like yourself the world would be a better place, and read a passage from The Sociological Imagination
Ian

Dear Erik,


The news about your illness shocked and moved me. I only spent some months in Madison, where I joint your Class Analysis seminar. It was the fall of 2006. And then we met again in the two-week Real Utopias seminar you gave the following year in Berkeley, where I did another short-term visiting stay. But the mark you have left on me is immense.


Since I read the post where you announced the closeness of the end, I have mulled over that: how is it possible that the misfortune of someone with whom you have had little personal contact affects you so much? Reading your blog posts and comments has allowed me to feel part of a wider community of people who have had the good fortune to have met you, even if it was only fleetingly.

I have been reflecting on your great influence in my life, reviewing its track in the stuff that I have written (or planned to write), but also in my teaching work, where there are always shmoo, interrogations, 2x2 tables and the great advice of your mother with which you opened Classes.

However, beyond the deep influence of your ideas or arguments (and the pleasure I have always obtained by reading them), what has marked me forever is your intellectual honesty –that requires us to confront the best arguments of our adversaries and to acknowledge the limits of our reasons and evidence–, as well as your kindness and generosity –even if they were effortless!– with other colleagues and students, including a shy Spanish visiting student with a rudimentary English.

The Real Utopias project embodied these facets: it represents a refreshing, realistic and hopeful way of raising the prospects for socialism in our time. But, above all, it invites us to face reality with intellectual honesty and strategic debates without political sectarianism.

The enthusiasm, the brightness and the love that gave off what you did has always been an inspiration.

The moving wisdom with which you face these weeks is another lesson, not only to deal with death but also with our lives. We will miss you, compañero, but your echo will resound for a long time.

Un abrazo fuerte from Madrid.

I of course thank you for being that kind of intellectual, writing, engaged stardust you have been for a long life. But I also thank you very much for writing about life as it is when the end is - well I don't know, near? Or just apparent? These words have a specific quality for me, who might not have understood what this will eventually mean, to us all. Thank you, from Gothenburg, Sweden.

You are the best inspiration and role model a leftist and humanist aspiring person can have. The world will be worse off without you, but we will keep reminding it about your brave and sharp thinking! <3 From Stockholm sweden