Yves here. This post by albrt reviews and analyzes Barbara Ehrenreich’s seminal work on the Professional Managerial Class and how her views changed over time. To add a few thoughts:
1. It appears Ehrenreich depicted the fall in class mobility as happening earlier than it did (and this is not my opinion but reflected in US data on income mobility, which is a crude proxy). On the anecdata front, I not only have blue collar friends from my childhood who successfully made their way into the Professional Managerial Class, but I even hired a secretary who successfully moved up class-wise and not by virtue of marriage (her being way too smart and pro-active to stay a secretary helped, but in most organizations she would have become a well-paid executive secretary, a position she refused).
2. This analysis missed the critical change in the relationship of the C-suite at public companies and fund managers to capital. Ehrenreich would depict them as “not owners” and therefore Professional Managerial Class. But in fact, “ownership” is a bundle of rights. Public shareholders do not meaningfully “own” shares unless they have a controlling bloc. They are not privy to critical details of the company’s plans; they are too competitively sensitive to share with diffuse, anonymous shareholders. They do not determine the pay of any of the managers as a private company owner would. They cannot fire any executive or board member. They get dividends only when the company makes money and the board and execs feel like paying them out.
The picture is even more stark with asset managers. Let’s look at private equity. In the typical fund, the limited partners like CalPERS provide 97% to 99% of the money and the so-called general partner, the balance. Yet as we have seen with CalPERS, the limited partners get limited information about investee companies and have no say on general partner compensation. The Kauffman Foundation argued forcefully that it did not have to be that way and presented detailed reform in its classic paper, We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us.
One effect of the hollowing out of the position of actual capitalists is that someone is twice as likely to become a billionaire in asset management as in tech.
3. Ehrenreich has a significant body of work, so perhaps she covers more of its origins than I see in albrt’s recap. But to me, the origins of the Professional Managerial Class lie in Napoleon creating a professional bureaucracy and standardizing education across France so as to allow for the identification of bright young men from poor families could be tracked into the grandes écoles. In the UK, a big purpose of Cambridge and Oxford was to train smart and ambitious members of middle class to run the empire. Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy was published in 1958, again well before Ehrenreich, as was William Whyte’s The Organization Man, published in 1956. According to a review by Deborah Popper and Frank Popper, quhttps://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-admin/edit.phpoted in Wikipedia:
[The book] offered a new perspective on how post–World War II American society had redefined itself. Whyte’s 1950s America had replaced the Protestant ethic of individualism and entrepreneurialism with a social ethic that stressed cooperation and management: the individual subsumed within the organization. It was the age of middle management, what Whyte thought of as the rank and file of leadership, whether corporate, governmental, church, or university.
Now to the main event.
By albrt. Originally published at his website
This post attempts to apply principles about identity from previous posts to a current problem. I’m working my way around to tackling the concept of identity politics, but not quite there yet. To review:
Western cultures have assumed for a long time that individuals have something called an identity, but social scientists didn’t really start asking questions about how individual identity works until the mid-twentieth century. Erik Erikson had a lot to say about the development of individual identities, but he also pointed out that identity is not just an individual problem. Widespread identity issues tend to go hand-in-hand with social and political instability, when too many young people are not finding satisfactory options to build an identity they can live with.
Erikson said that identity takes shape in late adolescence (maybe into early adulthood if the process is difficult) based on multiple factors. Some of the most important are childhood experience, individual capacities, available ideologies, and available roles. Of these variables, ideology is a wild card because a new (or old) ideology can unexpectedly become available to the individual much more easily than any of the other variables can be changed.
Setting aside value judgments about particular ideologies and roles, Erikson (and most psych professionals since) thought it was important for an individual to develop a strong identity in order to be happy and productive. Having a strong identity does not mean you are locked in and can never change—in the post-enlightenment West, having the identity of an open-minded person should be a perfectly fine option. What matters is that you become comfortable and confident enough with your identity that you can stop behaving like an insecure adolescent and focus on adult things like personal relationships, community, or work.
But . . . this process sometimes goes wrong, especially at difficult periods in history. If a young person was having trouble building an identity and the issues became acute, Erikson called it an “identity crisis.” Such crises occur fairly regularly in young people, but they seemed to occur even more regularly starting in the 1960s and 70s. In the current version of Western culture, some people might even have incentives to interfere with the development of strong identities on a mass basis. They might want to manipulate the masses with all-consuming ideologies that substitute for a strong individual identity, or they might want to sell identity boosting products to insecure people throughout their lifetimes, and not just be limited to selling pop songs and weird haircuts to tweens and teens.
This brings us to the subject of today’s post—the social group widely known as the Professional Managerial Class (“PMC”), a group which has suffered a few different identity crises on a widespread basis. The PMC was christened by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in a 1977 article called The Professional Managerial Class in a small journal called Radical America. Radical America during this period did not contain a copyright notice and appears to be in the public domain, so I’m going to quote from the article very liberally. It’s a terrific article and cannot easily be improved upon 46 years later. You should read it.
Radical America assumes some degree of familiarity with Marxist ideas, so here is a superficial review for those who came in late. Marxists generally believe that society is divided into two classes: the owners of the means of production are the bourgeoisie, and everybody else who must sell their labor to survive are the proletariat. Marxists have always debated how to categorize people who seem to be in between. The most established category of tweeners is the petty (or petite) bourgeoisie, who in the 19th century were basically mini-capitalists such as shopkeepers, tradesmen, and small property holders.
The editors of Radical America introduced the Ehrenreichs’ PMC concept this way:
Various groups on the Left have either classified professionals and managers as part of the petty bourgeoisie or else have described them as part of the working class. But neither of these views is satisfactory. The term “petty bourgeoisie” is used as a catch-all for non-proletarian, nonbourgeois people . . . . Yet, the “petty bourgeoisie” properly describes the class of small owners, who have no chance of competing with the big bourgeoisie and are therefore doomed to dwindle in number relative to the population. Professionals and managers, on the contrary, are a growing segment of society.
The view that society consists solely of a huge working class and a tiny ruling class, however, defines “working class” so inclusively as to make the term strategically useless. . . . The experience of Left groups in recent years . . . should be ample confirmation of the immense cultural gap that separates the blue- and white-collar working class from the professional and managerial strata out of which a great many college-educated Left activists have come. . . .
In the first section of a two-part article, Barbara and John Ehrenreich postulate the existence of a new class which includes technical, professional and managerial workers in advanced capitalist society, a class antagonistic in certain ways to both capital and the working class. While we do not feel that the only alternative to a two class theory is one which proclaims this particular “new class”, we think the Ehrenreich’s analysis is important because it forces us to think more precisely about where the Left is coming from and what the class contradictions are in America today.
Even today it is not difficult to find examples of doctrinaire Marxists insisting that the PMC are nothing more than petty bourgeoisie, because many members of the PMC own houses, or something something. Contrary to the doctrinaire Marxists, I think the PMC concept adds a great deal to classic Marxist analysis. The Ehrenreichs started out:
The Professional-Managerial Class (“PMC”), as we will define it, cannot be considered a stratum of a broader “class” of “workers” because it exists in an objectively antagonistic relationship to another class of wage earners (whom we shall simply call the “working class”). Nor can it be considered to be a “residual” class like the petty bourgeoisie; it is a formation specific to the monopoly stage of capitalism. It is only in the light of this analysis, we believe, that it is possible to understand the role of technical, professional and managerial workers in advanced capitalist society and in the radical movements.
* * *
We define the Professional-Managerial Class as consisting 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.
Their role in the process of reproduction may be more or less explicit, as with workers who are directly concerned with social control or with the production and propagation of ideology (e.g., teachers, social workers, psychologists, entertainers, writers of advertising copy and TV scripts, etc.). Or it may be hidden within the process of production, as is the case with the middle-level administrators and managers, engineers, and other technical workers whose functions, as [Andre] Gorz, Steve Marglin, Harry Braverman and others have argued, are essentially determined by the need to preserve capitalist relations of production. Thus we assert that these occupational groups – cultural workers, managers, engineers and scientists, etc. – share a common function in the broad social division of labor and a common relation to the economic foundations of society.
The Ehrenreichs highlighted the inherent antagonism between the proletariat and the PMC:
We should add, at this point, that the antagonism between the PMC and the working class does not exist only in the abstract realm of “objective” relations, of course. Real-life contacts between the two classes express directly, if sometimes benignly, the relation of control which is at the heart of the PMC–working-class relation: teacher and student (or parent), manager and worker, social worker and client, etc. The subjective dimension of these contacts is a complex mixture of hostility and deference on the part of working-class people, contempt and paternalism on the part of the PMC.
The interdependent yet antagonistic relationship between the working class and the PMC also leads us to insist that the PMC is a class totally distinct from the petty bourgeoisie (the “old middle class” of artisans, shopkeepers, self-employed professionals and independent farmers). The classical petty bourgeoisie lies outside the polarity of labor and capital. It is made up of people who are neither employed by capital nor themselves employers of labor to any significant extent. The PMC, by contrast, is employed by capital and it manages, controls, has authority over labor (though it does not directly employ it). The classical petty bourgeoisie is irrelevant to the process of capital accumulation and to the process of reproducing capitalist social relations. The PMC, by contrast, is essential to both.
The Ehrenreichs recognized that some job categories (they used the example of nurses) can be hard to classify. Some nurses do hard, dirty work with few supervisory responsibilities while others manage whole departments. The Ehrenreichs also recognized that 98% of nurses at that time were women, and “their class standing Is, in significant measure, linked to that of their husband.” Because the boundaries are not always obvious, the definition is important – the PMC is defined by its role in “the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations” rather than production of necessary goods.
This definition solves a number of otherwise difficult problems. For example, doctrinaire Marxists (like the ones linked above) may struggle with the role of teachers because teachers don’t own their means of production, so they don’t easily fit within the petty bourgeoisie label. Yet most teachers take pains to distinguish themselves from proletarians, and to discourage their students from becoming proletarians. If the PMC is defined by reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations, then teachers are obviously central to the PMC mission. The core of their job is to determine what class each member of the next generation will belong to, to teach them how to relate to the other classes, and to encourage young proletarians to become members of the PMC if they seem to have the ability.
If you care a lot about doctrinaire Marxism, it is possible to analyze the PMC as petty bourgeoisie by reifying the concept of social capital, and arguing that the PMC are owners and purveyors of this valuable social capital. The idea has merit, and potentially explains some things such as the reactionary tendencies of the PMC when defending their socio-political turf. I don’t necessarily reject the idea that the PMC acts like a petty bourgeoisie because it holds social capital, but I think the idea provides us with less analytical firepower than the Ehrenreich framework, at least for the issues I am trying to get at right now.
The idea of a buffer class between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was certainly not new with the Ehrenreichs, and earlier writers recognized that some of the members of this class were not strictly limited to owners of land or small businesses. As Lenin wrote in 1920:
The divergence between “leaders” and “masses” was brought out with particular clarity and sharpness in all countries at the end of the imperialist war and following it. The principal reason for this was explained many times by Marx and Engels between the years 1852 and 1892, from the example of Britain. That country’s exclusive position led to the emergence, from the “masses”, of a semi–petty-bourgeois, opportunist “labour aristocracy”. The leaders of this labour aristocracy were constantly going over to the bourgeoisie, and were directly or indirectly on its pay roll. Marx earned the honour of incurring the hatred of these disreputable persons by openly branding them as traitors. . . .
* * *
The abolition of classes means, not merely ousting the landowners and the capitalists—that is something we accomplished with comparative ease; it also means abolishing the small commodity producers, and they cannot be ousted, or crushed; we must learn to live with them. They can (and must) be transformed and re-educated only by means of very prolonged, slow, and cautious organisational work. They surround the proletariat on every side with a petty-bourgeois atmosphere, which permeates and corrupts the proletariat, and constantly causes among the proletariat relapses into petty-bourgeois spinelessness, disunity, individualism, and alternating moods of exaltation and dejection. The strictest centralisation and discipline are required within the political party of the proletariat in order to counteract this, in order that the organisational role of the proletariat (and that is its principal role) may be exercised correctly, successfully and victoriously.1
Lenin was grouping all the tweeners together, but it seems pretty clear some of the people he was describing were the predecessors of the PMC. Another pre-1977 view comes from George Orwell’s 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier (Harcourt Brace ed. 1958), where he discusses his own upbringing in the “lower-upper-middle class”:
Practically the whole family income goes in keeping up appearances. It is obvious that people of this kind are in an anomalous position, and one might be tempted to write them off as mere exceptions and therefore unimportant. Actually, however, they are or were fairly numerous. Most clergymen and schoolmasters, for instance, nearly all Anglo-Indian officials, a sprinkling of soldiers and sailors,2 and a fair number of professional men and artists, fall into this category. But the real importance of this class is that they are the shock-absorbers of the bourgeoisie. The real bourgeoisie, those in the £2000 a year class and over, have their money as a thick layer of padding between themselves and the class they plunder; in so far as they are aware of the Lower Orders at all they are aware of them as employees, servants, and tradesmen. But it is quite different for the poor devils lower down who are struggling to live genteel lives on what are virtually working-class incomes. These last are forced into close and, in a sense, intimate contact with the working class, and I suspect it is from them that the traditional upper-class attitude towards ‘common’ people is derived. Wigan Pier at 124-25.
* * *
In such circumstances you have got to cling to your gentility because it is the only thing you have; and meanwhile you are hated for your stuck-up-ness and for the accent and manners which stamp you as one of the boss class. . . .
The analytical leap that the Ehrenreichs made was not the recognition that a buffer class existed, or that it was often antagonistic to the working class. The big leap was to point out that the composition of the buffer class had changed in an important way since the 19th century, and as a result the PMC was experiencing spectacular growth rather than dying out as Marx had expected the petty bourgeoisie to do. The Ehrenreichs wrote in some detail about the development of the PMC over time.
The role of the emerging PMC . . . was to mediate the basic class conflict of capitalist society and create a “rational,” reproducible social order. . . . Many people, of all classes, subscribed to parts of this outlook and stood to benefit one way or another from the Progressive reforms which were associated with it. For our purposes, the striking things about Progressive ideology and reforms are (1) their direct and material contribution to the creation and expansion of professional and managerial occupational slots; (2) their intimate relation to the emergence and articulation of the PMC’s characteristic ideologies; and (3) their association with the creation of characteristic PMC class institutions (such as professional organizations).
* * *
The introduction of modern methods of management was a reform which was understood by contemporary observers to be part of the overall Progressive cause. In fact, scientific management first became known to the public as a tool for the Progressive attack on corporate greed: In the “Eastern Rates” case of 1911, the Interstate Commerce Commission turned down an increase in railroad rates after scientific-management expert H. Emerson testified that proper management would cut a million dollars a day off the cost of rail shipments.
In short, the PMC is defined by its expertise, and the Ehrenreichs described how belief in expertise was raised to the level of an ideology.
Erik Erikson summarized his working definition of ideology as “a highly charged attitude rooted essentially in a general need for a world view coherent enough to attract one’s total commitment and to render forever unnecessary the upsetting swings in mood and opinion which once [in adolescence] accompanied identity confusion.” Erik Erikson, Life History and the Historical Moment at 258 (W.W. Norton 1975). Ideology in this sense does not need to be expressly political, it just needs to be convincing enough to form a solid foundation for adult relationships and effort. So how satisfactory was the PMC ideology from an individual identity standpoint? The Ehrenreichs were alreadu noting signs of trouble in 1977:
Paul Sweezy has argued that the basic test of whether two families belong to the same class or not is the freedom with which they intermarry. The children of PMC members do overwhelmingly tend to marry within the class; marriage “‘down” to the working class or “‘up” to the ruling class is comparatively infrequent. In line with the frequency of intermarriage, the class exhibits a substantial degree of intergenerational stability: children of PMC families are more than twice as likely as children of working class families to themselves enter PMC occupations.
Moreover, the class is characterized by a common “culture” or lifestyle. The interior life of the class is shaped by the problem of class reproduction. Unlike ruling-class occupations, PMC occupations are never directly hereditary: The son of the Chairman of the Board may expect to become a successful businessman (or at least a wealthy one) more or less by growing up; the son of a research scientist knows he can only hope to achieve a similar position through continuous effort. Traditionally, much of this effort has come from the women of the class. Since, according to psychologists, a child’s future achievement is determined by the nuances of its early upbringing, women of the class have been expected to stay home and “specialize” in childraising. Both sexes, however, are expected to perform well in school and attend good colleges, for it is at college that young men acquire the credentials for full class membership and young women acquire, in addition to their own degrees, credentialed husbands.
As a result of the anxiety about class reproduction, all of the ordinary experiences of life – growing up, giving birth, childraising-are freighted with an external significance unknown in other classes. Private life thus becomes too arduous to be lived in private; the inner life of the PMC must be continously shaped, updated and revised by – of course – ever mounting numbers of experts: experts in childraising, family living, sexual fulfillment, self-realization, etc., etc. The very insecurity of the class, then, provides new ground for class expansion.
The PMC is capable of expanding at the expense of the other two classes by constantly identifying social and technical problems, and creating new experts to solve them. That gives the PMC a class interest distinct from the interests of either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. The cultural component of capitalism is precisely the product that the PMC is in charge of producing under the Ehrenreich definition, so to some extent they should control their own destiny. But it isn’t a durable product so it needs constant care and maintenance.
The “anxiety about class reproduction” has only grown since 1977, and the “insecurity” has blossomed among PMC offspring. The Ehrenreichs noted in a 2013 follow-up article:
But the PMC was not only a victim of more powerful groups. It had also fallen into a trap of its own making. The prolonged, expensive, and specialized education required for professional employment had always been a challenge to PMC families—as well, of course, as an often insuperable barrier to the working class. If the children of the PMC were to achieve the same class status as their parents, they had to be accustomed to obedience in the classroom and long hours of study. They had to be disciplined students while, ideally, remaining capable of critical and creative thinking. Thus the “reproduction” of the class required a considerable parental (usually maternal) investment—encouraging good study habits, helping with homework, arranging tutoring (and SAT preparation), and stimulating curiosity about academically approved subjects.
KLG, in a guest post at Naked Capitalism, expressed this feeling a little more bluntly in a review of Catherine Liu’s The Virtue Hoarders: the Case Against the Professional Managerial Class:
The “good enough” mother and father are likely to produce a human being who will grow into a mature adult who is at one with the world. The perfect helicopter parent often produces fear and misery, which with lucky outcomes will not lead to catastrophe. But few of those bathed in the backwash of that rotor, however outwardly successful, are likely to ever be fully independent.
I have no children and very few opinions about children, so I will not predict how the youth of today are likely to turn out, but I will say that perfectionism honed through an often arbitrary meritocracy does not seem like an easy ideology to integrate into a strong individual identity, at least for a human. Perhaps Chat GPT will eventually do better at it.
Aside from the operational part of the PMC ideology that instructs how to be a good professional, there is also the political or philosophical part that describes what PMCs believe would be normatively good outcomes for society. The Ehrenreichs assumed that the normative part of the PMC ideology would be rational as the Ehrenreichs understood rationality in 1977—something along the lines of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Instead the PMC gradually moved more and more toward the neoliberal version of rationality—something along the lines of “him who grabs the fastest gets the mostest.” In her book Fear of Falling, the Inner Life of the Middle Class (Harper Perennial ed. 1989), Barbara Ehrenreich wrote that her theme was “the retreat from liberalism and the rise, in the professional middle class, of a meaner, more selfish outlook, hostile to the aspirations of those less fortunate.” Fear of Falling at 3. It is not clear to me that this was inevitable, but it certainly happened among the PMC in the United States and it seems to have metastasized to much of the Western world.
By 1989, Ehrenreich maintained that the PMC had achieved class consciousness, aware “of being a class among others, and, ultimately, of being an elite above others. . . . [T]his emerging self-image has led to . . . the adoption of the kind of political outlook appropriate to an elite, which is a conservative outlook, and ultimately indifferent to the nonelite majority.” Fear of Falling at 11. Yet “[i]f this is an elite, it is an insecure and deeply anxious one. It is afraid, like any class below the most securely wealthy, of misfortunes that might lead to a downward slide. But in the middle class there is another anxiety: a fear of inner weakness, of growing soft, of failing to strive, of losing discipline and will.” Id. at 15.
By this point Ehrenreich had also changed her definitions, writing about the professional middle class and defining the class in terms of education rather than economic and political function. Her powers of observation remained sharp and her descriptions of propaganda, prevailing narratives, and shifting allegiances are well worth reading, but she largely abandoned the insights that made the original 1977 article so useful. Interestingly, the Ehrenreichs originally argued that the PMC could not be considered part of the petty bourgeoisie because the PMC was growing, while Marxist doctrine called for the petty bourgeoisie to be squashed and proletarianized by competition from the big-time capitalists. But in their 2013 article, the Ehrenreichs argued that substantial portions of the PMC were being squashed and proletarianized after all.
By the time of the financial meltdown and deep recession of the post-2008 period, the pain inflicted by neoliberal policies, both public and corporate, extended well beyond the old industrial working class and into core segments of the PMC. Unemployed and underemployed professional workers—from IT to journalism, academia, and eventually law—became a regular feature of the social landscape. Young people did not lose faith in the value of an education, but they learned quickly that it makes more sense to study finance rather than physics or “communications” rather than literature. The old PMC dream of a society rule by impartial “experts” gave way to the reality of inescapable corporate domination.
While it is true that some professions have suffered setbacks, the PMC as the Ehrenreichs originally defined it continues to expand as professional qualifications are demanded of more and more of the American workforce. The Ehrenreichs recognized this in their 2013 article, but they argued that college educated workers had become more of a “demographic category” than a class capable of making history by participating in a materialist dialectic. The Ehrenreichs seemed to have lost track of their original PMC definition—if you want to know whether college educated workers are part of the PMC, the question to ask is whether they are engaged in reproducing capitalist culture and capitalist class relations rather than producing necessary goods? I would say mostly yes. Certainly not very many of them are working on farms or moving to China where most of the factories are now located.
The fact is, the PMC is continuing to grow in numbers, but it is not achieving socialism, and it is also not achieving the liberal/neoliberal dream of enlarging the PMC’s share of the economic pie or delivering good economic outcomes to all the little PMCs who work hard and hew to the PMC line. The PMC ideology was difficult for many people to incorporate into a firm identity to begin with, and now it is failing outright because the credentialing process does not reliably produce acceptable role opportunities for individuals.
So how did the PMC go wrong? They’re still the buffer between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but they seem to be losing a lot of the practical and political power they once had, and many of them are losing ground economically, especially the younger ones. For one thing, at the same time the PMC was struggling with identity issues, they were running into a buzz saw of political opposition. As the Ehrenreichs wrote in their 2013 article:
The right embraced a caricature of this notion of a “new class,” proposing that college-educated professionals— especially lawyers, professors, journalists, and artists—make up a power-hungry “liberal elite” bent on imposing its version of socialism on everyone else.
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.
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).
Of course, there are many compelling ways of describing the political and economic divisions in the United States today. Chris Arnade (and Lambert at Naked Capitalism) have used a classroom analogy to characterize the friction as being between “back row kids” and “front row kids.” This certainly has some truth to it, but (as Lambert acknowledges), it leaves the bourgeoisie out of the picture. I think the PMC class analysis gives us a more detailed framework, providing more insight into widespread motives, actions, and consequences. I plan to keep plugging away to demonstrate the usefulness of these concepts, but today’s post needs to end somewhere.
So what have I learned from writing this down?
First, calling the PMC a class is analytically useful. 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.
Second, the ideology and reproductive strategy of the PMC for the last 30 years has created additional challenges for individual members of the PMC. 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.
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!
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.