Professional-Managerial Class
Contextual Quote
"That is why the left is dying. The interests of the professional-managerial class and the working class—and, to use a non-Marxist term here for a second, the internal proletariat of the West—are now diverging to the point where the differences can no longer be papered over. You cannot try to “do both.” You have to pick a class, and live with the fact that you’ve just made an enemy out of the other class."
- Malcolm Kyeyune [1]
Discussion
1. Malcom Kyeyune:
"To brutally simplify things for the sake of brevity, the notable feature of many PMCs as political actors is a blend of political liberalism and cultural progressivism, merged with a political project aimed at increasingly subsidizing their own reproduction as a class—ideally by means of state transfers. The state should forgive student debt. The state should dabble in reparations. The state should hire “ideas people” to write up reports and think pieces about reparations. The state should create new racial justice commissions, or just generally create more jobs that can employ people who, by dint of belonging to this class, feel that taking a job at Walmart means that capitalism has failed and it’s time for a Revolution. The most radical, put-upon and economically insecure parts of this class today naturally gravitate toward the left, because the left is—no matter what leftists delude themselves by saying—a fairly focused, competent and credible class project. When Jeremy Corbyn came out of nowhere and became Labour party leader, it was a real grassroots movement that brought him there; a grassroots movement of students and people who either have ambition to move up the ladder or a legitimate fear of looming proletarianization, of falling down the social and economic ladder and finding themselves among the proles.
The particular form of “pro-worker” rhetoric these members of the PMC use mostly boils down to a sort of charity. “Vote for us, and we will give you higher benefits and free broadband,” Labour recently tried to tell the recalcitrant workers of the British north. It didn’t work. This mode of charity is hardly selfless—it would be a free gift from these PMC activists given to their precious salt of the earth proletarians. And like all gifts it would be reliant on the goodwill and generosity of the gift giver. Its main function would also be to feather the ever growing number of nests for this class of comfortable, university-educated administrators. And when some leftists begin seriously debating why racists should be denied medical care from the NHS, one starts getting a sense of just how much hierarchical domination their future “worker’s paradise” promises to deliver to actual workers.
The point here is not a moral one. After Labour lost, one exasperated member and activist despaired over how blind the workers were, how easily fooled they were by tory propaganda. “Don’t they see how evil capitalism is? How brutal and unfair it is?” this activist wrote. “I have many friends with good grades who are stuck working at grocery stores, stocking shelves.” Anyone who pretends to be some sort of materialist cannot in good conscience make fun of sentiments like this; it is completely rational for someone in that position to think that the evils of capitalism are somehow laid bare for the world to see when their friends are forced to stock shelves like a common peon in order to pay the rent. That the other workers at the grocery store probably find this way of thinking completely ludicrous and arrogant is obviously besides the point. Politically speaking, the fury and energy that proletarianization engenders should never be underestimated, because it causes political explosions. Jeremy Corbyn successfully challenged the political cartel that had been running Labour on the back of such a political explosion.
We should not make fun of the activist who despairs at the state of the world when good, solid middle class people with solid grades can no longer achieve the upper middle class lifestyle they were promised. It is however a basic political truth that a worker’s movement consisting of people who are angry at the prospect social and economic demotion—in other words, people who are fighting against the cruel fate of having to become workers—cannot ever succeed. Promising free broadband, or unlimited Space Communism, or some other weird fantasy world where getting angry at having to work like an average person is acceptable because nobody has to work won’t really change that.
On top of this, the more this class of people who are now tethering on the edge of proletarianization grows, the more parasitical they will become, must become. If the destructive spirit of unfettered capitalism decides that it no longer needs a large middle class, the only actor with the power to save this historically obsolete class is the state. The state can do this in two ways: either by redirecting a greater share of its economic resources towards subsidizing this class, or by using its power to reduce the costs involved in this class reproducing itself. It is here that a class conflict is probably inevitable between workers and PMCs. This is what creates a situation where you can have a debate between Cenk Uygur on the “left” saying, “If we deport the illegal immigrants, who will work in the chicken plants?” and someone like Tucker Carlson on the “right,” replying “Maybe the chicken plants should pay a liveable wage, even if it makes chicken more expensive.”
(https://www.thebellows.org/on-strasserism-and-the-decay-of-the-left/)
2. Lizzie Warren
"the upper echelons of the PMC inhabit a conflictual class position, which scrambles their thinking. Stocks, tantalizing promotional possibilities, and bonuses and benefits galore—who can blame them for believing their bosses are the good guys? The PMC resists a basic understanding of class conflict in favor of cohering as a social group around cultural and moral issues for simple material reasons.
Upper-PMC workers also need to believe in the “goodness” of their companies and the people who run them to do their jobs successfully. And the bosses are increasingly keen to confirm this belief, ever more interested in projecting to the public they’re on the right side of history. They care about Black Lives, feminism, democracy, mental health, and so on. Where marketing before surreptitiously sold sex appeal, today it peddles moral appeal, and a certain stratum of workers has been primed to accept the marketing as true.
The PMC understands that the world is in dire straits, and that they must commit wholeheartedly to doing something about it. Manic defenses rush in: grand activity triumphantly banishes doubt. An inflated sense of one’s own power masks the overwhelm of external reality. The goal is to stay busy all of the time—and not just busy in the traditional sense of productivity, but busy being a particular kind of human being. The economy of subjectification demands a continual, largely unconscious curation of a self that is engaged, committed, socially aware, and virtuous—precisely not the kind of person who would kill themselves for a job they hate at a company that is morally bankrupt. Nor the kind of person who would accept an easy, pointless job in exchange for a lot of money. Personal accommodation to corrupt social structures to make ends meet threatens their identity. “It’s just a job” no longer flies as an excuse.
The ethos of Silicon Valley encourages this form of omnipotent denial. Winners abound, and they are clear evidence that you can indeed have it all: the money, the status, and the virtue."
Key Book to Read
Washington Examiner:
"Catherine Liu’s polemical new book, Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, argues that the professional-managerial class-working class alliance was doomed from the start for the simple reason that the two classes’ interests are fundamentally opposed. As Liu states in the first sentence of the book: “For as long as most of us can remember, the professional-managerial class has been fighting a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but against the working classes.” Whereas Winant claimed that the declining economic prospects of the highly educated have created the conditions for solidarity with the toiling masses, Liu views this as a mirage. Although the professional-managerial class has been losing ground to the 1% in financial terms, it has also been hoarding another commodity, virtue, and using it to wage all-out war against its social inferiors."
(https://www.upress.umn.edu/press/press-clips/washington-examiner-the-dictatorship-of-virtue)