 Wright rejects Marxist responses which either deny the gap between the polarisation account and empirical reality, or assimilate these new social groups to the petit-bourgeoisie. Instead, his own early approach abandons the assumption that the class locations of individuals are mapped in a one-to-one relation to the actual class structure of capitalism. Rather than assuming that individuals are only ever capitalist, petit-bourgeois, or proletarian, Wright suggests that some occupy positions that have “a multiple class character; they may be in more than one class simultaneously” (1985: 43). Those individuals occupy “contradictory class locations”; or, more precisely, “contradictory locations within contradictory class relations”.