PMC: Professional Managerial Class
PMC: Professional Managerial Class
The Democratic Party "Clueless" will be the last to understand how they are to blame.
Today I heard a video with an interesting acronym used to describe a group of Nicki Haley supporters who disapprove of Donald Trump but prefer Haley.
The term PMC means "Professional Management class" and now includes a significant portion of the Democratic party, as Bill Clinton intentionally moved the Democratic party away from its Labor roots so that it could compete with the Republicans for corporate donations.
Clueless:
My theory is that this PMC faction is clueless about how things have changed in the last 40 years and given rise to Trump. They will be the last group to understand the real concerns of Trump voters, the grievances of the younger generations, and the failure of the US Neo-liberal Empire.12 The Democratic party has preferred to blame their unpopularity on "deplorables" and the interference of Russia, rather than question what the party stands for and their failed campaigns.3
My own circle:
As a college graduate who has worked as a computer programmer for 20+ years, I recognize that I too I am part of this PMC class and lot of people in my circle belong to the PMC, including many older generations at church.
PMC Awareness
What is your perspective on PMC's awareness of working and middle class non-professionals?
What is your understanding of the last 40 years of political and economic history?
What is your outlook for the future the attitude towards change? Would you prefer that the status quo not change significantly?
Research:
1) How The Professional Managerial Class Stand In The Way Of Progress
The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder: Catherine Liu
2) Virtue Hoarders
The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class with Catherine Liu
Meritocratic accumulation of “Virtue” Status, which promotes conformity and stands in the way of real change. It no longer wants real debate, redistribution or emancipatory change
The Mellon Foundation (founded by a robber baron) has ~ $1 billion fund and controls the humanities
PMCs are a proxy for the ruling class, working against the workers
The “New” left was dominated by the PMCs. They attacked the Ehrenreichs.
This well-compensated group was taking over liberal profession and bringing with it anti-working class attitudes
Barbara Ehrenreich left to become a popular writer
Academia rejected Ehrenreich’s thesis and many of her critics went on to academic careers (in economics?).
Economic Policy under PMCs proved Ehrenreich right
Obama bailed out the banks, not people, advised by Larry Summers (Harvard) and Yale
Covid PPP was spent on businesses. Little was spent on workers by comparison
3) On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich
Dissent Magazine, Alex Press interviews Barbara Ehrenreich
Conceived as ‘the middle class’ and as the supposed repository of civic virtue and occupational dedication, the PMC lies in ruins.” You add that “the PMC’s original dream—of a society ruled by reason and led by public-spirited professionals—has been discredited.” What happened to the PMC?
The “Deindustrialization” Hits Professionals:
Ehrenreich: I do think it’s been seriously smashed. In that article we wrote for the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, John and I talk about professions as basic and seemingly eternal as law, for example. That’s been undermined: law schools fake the number of their graduates who end up with jobs that are even related to the law. You of course know what’s happened to journalists; we don’t get paid. College teaching [has been] totally undermined by essentially minimum-wage adjuncts. So I would say that what happened to the blue-collar working class with deindustrialization is now happening with the PMC—except for the top managerial end of it, which continues to do very well and perhaps amounts to about 20 percent of the population.
.. We have to appreciate what has always been the raison d’être of the PMC. There is a service ethic, which can still be found among many professionals. There are also the usual number of corporate lackeys who will do anything they’re asked to, but the service ethic is something that is not appreciated enough.
Service Ethic
Nor do professionals themselves appreciate how much this sense they are doing something worthwhile is also a part of the consciousness of blue-collar workers. I have a truck driver friend who likes to point out that every single thing I get in the supermarket was delivered there by truck. Nothing works without people like him. And although it’s getting harder and harder to take pride in jobs like that, as they’re more minutely monitored or surveilled, we should be able to build on that and connect broadly through that sense of pride and craft.
.. The Democratic Party really let down the American working class in the nineties and thereafter: Clinton, Obama. People are right to be skeptical, though the forms that skepticism takes are all too often racist. It was so clear when Hillary Clinton was running, because she exemplifies PMC values—the technocratic aspect anyway: get a bunch of experts from Harvard and MIT in the same room and we’ll figure out a solution. And Obama did the same kind of thing: when he came into office, he called in televised, high-level meetings on the economy, and all the people around the table were businessmen.
Complete lack of Worker Rights:
After I wrote Nickel and Dimed, I was invited to speak to AFL-CIO leadership. It was a full room, maybe fifty people, in their big palace in Washington, D.C. And I was talking about the complete lack of rights workers have at work: speech, assembly, privacy—they have nothing. And the response was “Well, when they join unions they’ll have all those rights.” Bullshit! That’s not something unions have put forward. Unions didn’t fight, for example, pre-employment drug-testing—which I think is now becoming recognized as a major privacy issue. They were not interested in democratizing the workplace.
How to Build a Coalition:
Press: Some of the tension you lived through is being reproduced now. There’s a questioning of how white-collar workers build a coalition with working-class people, and the question of how these workers’ identities factor in comes up a lot; it can complicate things. Surely part of the reason you were originally grappling with the concept of the PMC was because of the problem of this inwardness, or individualism, that professional-class people were hung up on. After all, it’s the nature of the PMC that it will be constantly articulating itself, reflecting on itself, and so on—that’s their job. But it can get in the way of building power.
PMC Dismissiveness:
I had invited a group of working-class people from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who I had become close to. About six or seven of them drove from Fort Wayne to Detroit, and they were mostly laid-off foundry workers: stereotypical white men—though, actually, not all of them were white. I was closest with one of them, Tom Lewandowski, who created a workers’ organization and was the head of the Central Labor Council in the Fort Wayne area. [At the event], they talked about what they were facing in the recession. And then some woman in the room who was an adjunct professor suddenly says, “I’m tired of listening to white men talk.”
I was so aghast. Of course, it was a big setback for my friends from Fort Wayne, who were humiliated. I advised Tom not to get into settings where he would be subjected to that ever again. There has to be a way to say to such people, look, we know you probably aren’t doing great as an adjunct, but have some respect for other people’s work and their experience, and recognize that they are different from you in some way. I’ve just had too many encounters like that, which are kind of heartbreaking.
PMC Contempt:
I think what that requires from the PMC, first of all, is a little humility. Listen to people. That goddamn adjunct professor should’ve thought about what it is that foundry workers do all day, and used it as a learning experience if nothing else. It’s a problem, and I’ve seen it in among union people, too—not an expressed contempt for their members, but a willingness to use “ordinary workers” as exhibits of sorts: “Okay, now we’re going to have so-and-so speak about her experience trying to get some control over her schedule,” but after that, they shut them up. It reminds me of a time I got really mad at one union person and told her “Hey, they’re the ones who are going to lead this movement. You can help, but that’s all.”
4) DEATH OF A YUPPIE DREAM
The Rise and Fall of the Professional-Managerial Class, 1977
By Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich
More profoundly, the PMC’s original dream—of a society ruled by reason and led by public-spirited professionals—has been discredited. Globally, the socialist societies that seemed to come closest to this goal either degenerated into heavily militarized dictatorships or, more recently, into authoritarian capitalist states. Within the US, the grotesque failure of socialism in China and the Soviet Union became a propaganda weapon in the neoliberal war against the public sector in its most innocuous forms and a core argument for the privatization of just about everything. But the PMC has also managed to discredit itself as an advocate for the common good. Consider our gleaming towers of medical research and high-technology care—all too often abutting urban neighborhoods characterized by extreme poverty and foreshortened life spans.
Should we mourn the fate of the PMC or rejoice that there is one less smug, self-styled, elite to stand in the way of a more egalitarian future? A case has been made here for both responses. On the one hand, the PMC has played a major role in the oppression and disempowering of the old working class. It has offered little resistance to (and, in fact, supplied the manpower for) the right’s campaign against any measure that might ease the lives of the poor and the working class.
On the other hand, the PMC has at times been a “liberal” force, defending the values of scholarship and human service in the face of the relentless pursuit of profit. In this respect, its role in the last century bears some analogy to the role of monasteries in medieval Europe, which kept literacy and at least some form of inquiry alive while the barbarians raged outside. As we face the deepening ruin brought on by neoliberal aggression, the question may be: Who, among the survivors, will uphold those values today? And, more profoundly, is there any way to salvage the dream of reason—or at least the idea of a society in which reasonableness can occasionally prevail—from the accretion of elitism it acquired from the PMC?
In the coming years, we expect to see the remnants of the PMC increasingly making common cause with the remnants of the traditional working class for, at a minimum, representation in the political process. This is the project that the Occupy movement initiated and spread, for a time anyway, worldwide
5) Rethinking Class in the 21st Century
The Professional Managerial Class and their politics
with Dan Evans and Catherine Liu
6) The PMC Is Not a New Class
Jacobin BY D. W. LIVINGSTONE
Professional employees and middle managers are both increasing proportions of the class structure. Nonmanagerial professional employees, or “knowledge workers,” now represent the fastest growing part of the nonmanagerial labor force; they are also the most highly organized, experiencing worsening working conditions and increasing underemployment. They are centrally involved in many social justice and environmental protest movements against capitalist offensives. But they face many obstacles and romanticizing them as “the new working class”..
7) Inside the Mind of the Professional-Managerial Class, Part Five: Elite Betrayal
Lizzie Warren
8) Identity and the Professional Managerial Class
Naked Capitalism, By Yevs Smith
This gets right to the heart of what has happened in American politics since 1980. The bourgeoisie figured out that they could kneecap the smart alec PMC experts politically with a caricature that is really not all that much of a caricature. The PMC are the bossy gatekeepers that everybody hates, and they have lost most vestiges of their (real or feigned) mid-twentieth century concern for the welfare of the proletariat. The current PMC pretty uniformly regards the working class as deplorable.
PMC Managerialism Equated with “Socialism” by the Right
As the Ehrenreichs pointed out in 1977, “[e]very effort to mediate class conflict and ‘rationalize’ capitalism served to create new institutionalized roles for reformers – i.e., to expand the PMC.” The essence of the PMC ideology is a giant jobs program for bureaucrats and experts, not socialism that would benefit the poor or subsistence workers. If you substitute “PMC managerialism” for the word socialism in right-wing rhetoric, then the proletarian/deplorable reaction to a lot of things starts to be a little bit more understandable. Every issue that is dear to the PMC, from climate change to forced diversity, can be interpreted by the working class as just another excuse for the PMC to boss the working class around (and possibly also to boss the capitalists around a little bit if the PMC succeeds in imposing new rules and government departments to enforce the rules).
PMC = Reproduce Capitalist Culture and Class Relations
Per the Ehrenreichs’ 1977 definition, the PMC consists of “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.” The PMC has identifiable class interests and is at least somewhat conscious of itself as a class. The position of the PMC has some inherent challenges and contradictions based on class interests that are inherently adverse to both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
.. The PMC ideology is enervating for many people, and aspiring PMC youth cannot count on achieving satisfactory roles even if they comply with all the practical and ideological demands.
PMC make more rules, creating More PMC jobs
Third, the PMC is minimally organized as a class and acts in its own class interest only in the very broadest terms. It is second nature for the PMC to view creating more rules and more PMC jobs enforcing those rules as the solution to every problem, but the PMC appear to have no competent class leadership or strategy to keep the proliferating PMC jobs from being devalued and proletarianized. They are being squeezed economically, and we are going through a phase where neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat is listening to the PMC’s expert pronouncements. In fact, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat seem to be uniting behind, of all people, the anti-expert, Donald Trump!
PMC CONTRIBUTION TO DOWNFALL
Fourth, as Erik Erikson explained, a mismatch between the expectations of young people and the ideologies and roles being offered to them goes hand in hand with instability. Based on the PMC’s current inability to reproduce itself effectively and its increasingly antagonistic relationship with the proletariat, the PMC may be contributing more to the downfall of a balanced and prosperous capitalist order than to reproducing it.
9) Radicalizing the Professional-Managerial Class
Tech Insider
From Occupy Wall Street to the rise of Bernie Sanders to national prominence as a champion of the working class in 2015, American politics has once again been jolted into an arena of battle and reconciliation between the ruling class and workers. The intrinsic contradictions of capitalism, exposed once again.
However, the attack on another economic class has escaped scrutiny. Perhaps it is because no one has underestimated this attack more than the target class itself— lulled into cursory yet soothing material comfort by their rulers. This is the professional-managerial class (PMC), the managers of the affairs of the ruling elite.
The Second Class War
Much has been written about this class, also aptly dissected by historian Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal. The PMC executes the orders of the owners of society — running corporations, making investments, executing industrial programs, writing policy, negotiating trade deals, deploying weapons, researching, implementing oil extraction projects, reporting news, organizing media production schedules, planning finances for health insurance companies, executing state policy by managing coups, and of course, keeping the workers in line, among many other matters — all in a day’s work.
The factors that normally extinguish any class consciousness within the PMC and maintain tranquility are quite straightforward:
Education
Those who rise up the ranks are ‘well-adjusted,’ specialized and indoctrinated into the ways of industry and capital. As the Trilateral Commission, from which the Carter administration was largely drawn, put it in 1975, “education is a system of indoctrination of the young.” As covered before, between using education to generate obedience or freeing from the tyranny of the present, capital and prevalent power systems prefer the former. Those that excel in such an academic format are those who conform well and follow instructions diligently. Those who do not are rejected by the labor markets.
Of course, creativity of thought is important— but only within the bounds of further boosting the class interests of the ruling elite. Innovations to increase more profits, scientific breakthroughs with applications that investors will like, financial engineering to boost market value. Creative routine.
Media
As covered before, the narrow range of debate and information that the PMC mainly subscribes to further maintains discipline of thought, perpetuating secular religions like
free markets,
American exceptionalism
humanitarian foreign policy and so on.
Workplace Propaganda
Employers work hard to maintain PMC satisfaction and sense of purpose. Just as all politics are moral as explained by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, all economic activity is for the betterment of the world. If it is profitable, it is somehow doing something good in the world.
Speculating against the currency of a country collapsing due to US sanctions? It is simply rebalancing the world currency markets for everyone’s sake. That it is lucrative is simply a coincidence.
Recklessly profiteering off of fossil fuels during an ongoing climate catastrophe? It helps power the world and makes the Earth spin. That it is lucrative is simply a coincidence.
Privatizing public technologies and syphoning wealth of the commons in the smartphone market, violating privacy, exploiting global resources, dodging taxes? It is connecting people and making the world a better place. That it is lucrative is simply a coincidence.
And so on.
Workplaces are routinely bombarded with “emotionally potent oversimplifications.” For instance, tech bosses hold all-hands meetings to spout lofty ideals about the wonders of their work — erasing externalities, societal consequences and of course, where the wealth created by the work is going. When the room clears, the same bosses monitor the employees’ devices, screens, emails and on-site activities to understand sentiments and manage them.
Finance heads take a different approach. Instilling a competitive, cut-throat environment for various sales/brokerage targets, the PMC here is given purpose and kept in line through the relentless pursuit of wealth, or as Adam Smith put it, “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” The occasional weekend on the boss’s yacht gives ideas about what to do with the wealth once extracted.
Material Comfort
Material benefits are the most obvious reason. Intrinsic to belonging to this economic class is the ability to live a comfortable life.
Moral
The inability of the economic and political system to acknowledge well-researched, active phenomena like climate breakdown further challenges the legitimacy of the ruling class. As I covered in Anthropogenic Climate Change: The Size of Our Solutions Does Not Match the Size of Our Problems,
Thoughtless hyper-industrialization, renegade waste of energy and resources for profits combined with an oligarchic political system have yielded the perfect storm, wherein the systems responsible for creating the problems are never challenged. While the engines that created the conditions for climate breakdown continue unabated, the same engines prohibit any decent evaluation of the core problems and possible solutions.The private media is virtually silent on the emergency. Schools continue to thump the theology of markets and indefinite ‘growth,’ while industry continues to propel corporate expansion for higher profits, producing greater waste and pollution.
To the extent some members of the PMC can defy the soothing effect of material comfort and convenience, there is an emerging sense within this class that it is morally reprehensible to not only tolerate a destructive anthropogenic phenomenon of global scale, but accelerate it in the name of ‘development’, ‘growth’, ‘prosperity’, or ‘jobs’ or whatever the word of the day is to replace the word ‘profit’ in press briefings.
The Radicalization Project
The central claim here isn’t that there is an awakening that defies centuries of socialist theory about class. Instead, at this stage of extreme wealth and income inequality, environmental degradation that the wealthy prepare for by purchasing luxurious doomsday bunkers, the fate of the PMC is becoming tied to the working class.
PMC APPETITE FOR CHANGE: ELIZABETH WARREN:
Elizabeth Warren has attracted members of the PMC who want technocratic solutions to these systemic problems. Sure, her analysis of the problems and hence, the solution space are severely deficient. Nevertheless, the desire amongst the affluent, highly educated PMC for “big, structural change” through economic reforms is undeniable.
Influx of the PMC in Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) meetings is another sign of this class’s availability to be engaged by the multi-racial, multi-cultural left movements and coalitions in a cogent and strategic manner. Members of the left and class defectors alike must take up the PMC project. It is not a small feat. But the potential payoffs are tremendous.
It is tempting to think that as economic conditions deteriorate further, the PMC will invariably break. This is not an acceptable tactic, as it is not a tactic at all. During this deterioration, millions of working class allies and the poor would be decimated, as they already have. Further, the goal of the project is to ultimately begin dissolving these class boundaries — through not just economic reconfiguration, but a cultural and a spiritual one as well. The defection will drive further defection, creating the conditions for mutual aid instead of mutual struggle, and social reconstruction.
One can rightly ask why go through all this trouble. Why not abandon the PMC and consider it in alliance with the rulers, as they are. We surely could.
I personally think it would be a strategic mistake, ignoring increasingly fertile ground for revolution. The PMC remains a central repository of ruling class legitimacy and preponderance. If it swings, it’s game over.
Footnotes:
US "DYING EMPIRE Led By Bad People" Say Young Voters
The fact that the Democratic Party wants to hold a virtual DNC convention indicates that they seem to understand they have a problem, but still the President persists in the belief that he can continue with the status quo and just dismiss the critics because who else are you going to vote for?