Editing Underclass (section)

===Focus on economics===
Marxian sociologist [[Erik Olin Wright]] sees the underclass as a "category of social agents who are economically oppressed but not consistently exploited within a given class system".<ref name="Interrogating">{{cite book|last=Wright|first=Erik Olin|title=Interrogating Inequality: Essays on Class Analysis, Socialism and Marxism|url=https://archive.org/details/interrogatingine00wrig|url-access=limited|year=1994|publisher=Verso|location=New York, NY|isbn=0-86091-633-2|pages=[https://archive.org/details/interrogatingine00wrig/page/n31 48]}}</ref> The underclass occupies the lowest possible rung on a class ladder. According to Wright, the underclass are oppressed. He believes this is because they are generally denied access to the labor market, and thus they cannot rise above their status easily but also thus are "not consistently exploited" because the opportunity for their economic exploitation is minimal for the classes above.

Unlike the working class, which he believes is routinely exploited for their labor power by higher classes, the underclass in Wright's view, do not hold the labor power worthy of exploitation. Wright argues his highly doctrinaire opinion of class malevolence that:

{{quote|The material interests of the wealthy and privileged segments of American society would be better served if these people simply disappeared…The alternative, then, is to build prisons, to cordon off the zones of cities in which the underclass live. In such a situation the main potential power of the underclass against their oppressors comes from their capacity to disrupt the sphere of consumption, especially through crime and other forms of violence, not their capacity to disrupt production through their control over labor.<ref name="Interrogating"/>}}

This quote partly concerns the spaces and locations for the underclass and reflects the leftist view of the other classes as acting against the underclass in unison, as opposed to other sociological views seeing class actors behaving as individuals reacting to individual incentives within society.