Professional-Managerial Class

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= "people who manage capitalism and share the same values as the capitalists, but they themselves aren’t actually capitalists". [1]


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 [2]


Description

Adam Tooze:

"The PMC was a term coined in 1977 by Barbara and John Ehrenreich. The term designated the rising mass of college-educated white collar professional and managerial workers whose ambiguous role in modern Western politics the Ehrenreich’s were trying to explain.

Being neither manual workers, nor owners of the means of production, these groups do not occupy clear-cut positions within a Marxist class schema. As a result, skeptics continue to question the “C” in PMC."

(https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-336-trumps-victory-in-2024)


Characteristics

Cadell Last:

"McKerracher furthermore claims that DiAngelo and her analysis, while pointing out things that should be spoken about more openly, is in her active performativity, exhibiting all of the entitled characteristics of the PMC (which certainly has nothing to do with issues of race, but of class). What are these PMC characteristics? McKerracher outlines a list of five crucial points:21

  • Leftist who are over-represented by people who don’t have any real contact with physical or manual labour, or working class life in general
  • Intellectuals and bureaucrats who are out-of-touch, self-righteous, and self-congratulatory
  • Class of people who get attached to “floating signifiers” without any concrete connection and “virtue hoarding” of their self-defined goodness
  • People who exhibit a meritocratic entitlement due to their university education, and are insulted by the concept of physical labour
  • A general morality that tells in words rather than shows in action, as well as manipulates others rather than reasons in open discussion


However, McKerracher also suggests that this problem of PMC culture versus working class culture, is not only or exclusively a Leftist issue, but is also expressed by the Right. While Leftist PMC’s tend to relate to the working class via the logic of mimicking expert authorities to become a good and deserving one; the Right PMC tend to relate to the working class via the individualistic ideology of pull yourself up by the bootstraps.22 McKerracher theorises that both of these paths, Left and Right class issues, are political dead ends and that:

- “both sides have no serious plan for a future wherein families, communities, and individuals have the timenergy to discover talents, develop non job-related skills (like the violin, or a second language), or become anything beyond a worker or middle manager.”

This whole analysis of the way that contemporary Leftist politics uses race as a tool to structure all divisions in society, and especially as a way to eradicate a real class analysis, is something that has had a huge impact on my life, personally and practically. I am a * trigger warning * white man who also happens to come from a poor working class background. There are no people in my immediate or extended family who continued schooling into higher education, and I thus I had no familial models or guidance towards a path of success in higher education. While I could easily transfer my working class work ethic into the higher education domain, the path was indeed difficult, and at time seemed like a mistake or an impossibility."

(https://philosophyportal.substack.com/p/stakes-for-timenergy-theory)


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."

(https://damagemag.com/2022/01/19/inside-the-mind-of-the-professional-managerial-class-part-five-elite-betrayal/)


The PMC and the 'Trumpian' reaction

1. Adam Tooze:

"In the 1960s and 1970s many professional and managerial people contributed to social movements that were clearly progressive. Furthermore, for the vast majority of folks who count themselves as progressive this alignment has a deep logic all the way down to the present day.

As Gabe Winant, one of the sharpest observers of the contemporary scene, noted back in 2019 in N+1:

For all the cynicism and compromises that professional pretensions engender, professional labor (i.e. the labor of the PMC, AT) does carry a utopian seed—in the impulse to create and disseminate knowledge, to care for the sick, or to defend the rights and dignity of the democratic subject.

And yet what is also undeniable is that in the late 1970s and 1980s large and powerful parts of the PMC broke with any association with classic, working-class. left-wing politics, rooted in the trade union movement. Instead, they provided their support to the agenda of neoliberalism. Despite its endless critiques of the state and its rhetoric about markets, actually existing neoliberalism was the latest iteration of PMC politics. Neoliberalism was a managerialism.

The effect was a twofold entanglement.

A large part of service and professional work became marketized and corporatized. This polarized the PMC category itself into winners (e.g. highly paid legal professionals) and losers (e.g. adjunct teacher in universities or public school teachers in Red states). Some speculate that the PMC is losing all coherence and will eventually realize its common interest with the working class, a hope that has persisted for half a century.

At the same time, despite this polarization, mainstream public and corporate life, from the elementary school and creche to the commanding heights of large-scale corporate capitalism took on many of the values championed by the most vocal members of the PMC, including, for instance, Sheryl Sandberg-style corporate feminism and class-blind Diversity Equity and Inclusion initiatives.

The outcome in electoral terms in the US from the 1990s onwards was an increasing alignment of the Democrats with College-educated voters, an alignment that was particularly strong for women and minorities. Figures like the Clintons and the Obamas personify this coalition.

By 2008 this corporate-PMC synthesis made a large and tempting target for populisms of the left and the right. These populisms pitted “the people” against an elite bloc that was more often than not personified, not by oligarchs or the owners of the means of production, but by members of the PMC. Perversely, the much remarked upon resentment of working-class voters, particularly men, triggered by new patterns of inequality and disadvantage, vented itself in the first instance on elementary school teachers and social workers, often women, who found themselves grouped with “beltway liberals” in the crosshairs of right-wing populist vitriol.

In the US the bugbear of the right was the Democratic establishment at all levels. In Europe the EU and its bureaucratic institutions have made a tempting target for right-wing populism. It is not by accident that international and transnational agencies like the UN, EU and NATO come under populist anti-PMC attack. Domestic PMC-led technocracy has its global analogues. And as the Biden administration has demonstrated the commitments on the part of liberal establishment to those institutions are selective but durable.

Trump and Brexit in 2016 were early breakthroughs for the new anti-PMC politics."

(https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-336-trumps-victory-in-2024)


2. Leighton Woodhouse:

"Elite cultural capital has changed over time, but a rough index of what it includes at any historical moment can be gleaned from the curricula of a given era’s most prestigious schools. In the postwar years, an elite American liberal-arts education was informed by the pretensions of European aristocrats, with an emphasis on the classics and the kind of fine art that hangs in the permanent collection of the Met. Now it’s more likely to include political treatises by twentieth century anti-colonial intellectuals and social theory by queer deconstructionists. In either case, it constitutes the cultural erudition that enables the well-educated to fit into elite circles.

The trophy of elite cultural capital accumulation is the educational credential. It bestows upon its recipient an officially sanctioned status, like a title for a member of the landed gentry. And like an impoverished English aristocrat with a Sir before his name, it’s a rank one can cling to even in the absence of that ultimate status marker, material wealth.

Generally speaking, members of the elite are relatively affluent in both economic and cultural capital. But the composition of one’s portfolio matters. Within the ruling class, Bourdieu regards those who are far richer in cultural capital than economic capital as structurally subordinate—in his words, “the dominated fractions of the dominant class.” Those with the inverse mix—who are rich in money but don’t necessarily boast the most illustrious educational credentials—are the dominant fraction of the dominant class.

Politics today is the struggle for supremacy between these two segments of the elite.

The economically rich seek to convert their monetary riches into political power by bankrolling their favored candidates (or themselves) in elections and by extending the rules of the free market—the arena in which they are hegemonic—into every facet of human activity. The culturally affluent aim to consolidate political power by constraining the influence of the market to purely economic activity, thereby limiting their rivals’ domain of activities, while proselytizing a vision of government led by professional technocrats. Thus, the rich tend to gravitate toward economically libertarian political ideologies, while the credentialed embrace progressive politics that favor the power of government institutions run by experts.

Neither fraction, however, can openly acknowledge these class interests, even to themselves. In a democratic society, one’s political aspirations have to be cloaked in the language of the greater good. Thus, the rich contend (and sincerely believe) that the market serves the best interests of all of humanity, while the credentialed are convinced that increasing the power and reach of the technocratic state is how you improve the lot of the poor and oppressed, rather than their own. Each fraction sees clearly through the pretensions of its rival, while extending none of the same skepticism to the self-flattering ideology that upholds its own worldview.

For decades, this competition has animated the culture wars of Silicon Valley, with the venture-capitalist class dismissing the value of formal education and lionizing the self-taught entrepreneur-turned-billionaire, while their left-wing critics malign the tech titans as power-hungry political interlopers and champion the moral authority of activists and non-profit organizations. The latter had a voice in the Biden administration. Now, under Trump, it’s the billionaires’ turn.

For the last eight years, Silicon Valley’s recent MAGA converts have convinced themselves that the civil service and the intelligentsia it represents are the real elite that runs America, first as the Deep State undermining Trump in his first term, then in the actual seat of power under Biden. Now they have their chance to bring the dominated fraction to heel. And as befits their class, they are exacting their revenge with the swagger of a corporate raider, wielding spreadsheets as weapons and breaking the enemy’s will to resist with the shock and awe of mass layoffs.

It’s a war on the elite, by the elite. But that doesn’t mean the working class has no stake in it. When even the worst of parents divorce, the fallout is still suffered by the children."

(https://www.compactmag.com/article/doge-as-class-war/)

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)


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