The Professional Managerial Class

The PMC critique is something that sounded intriguing to me at first, and I do think Barbara Ehrenreich’s intentions in identifying this phenomenon were onto something. The technocratic managerial approach to society is something that I am also highly critical of. But I have seen this critique used as a bludgeon for stamping out anything smacking of “wokeism.” Ironically, in inventing a new class that has no place in orthodox Marxism, it is used to reify the most vulgar forms of class reductionism.

No one exemplifies this more than Catherine Liu, author of Virtue Hoarders. She claims that this Professional Managerial Class, to which she readily admits that she as a Yale-educated professor herself belongs, has alienated the working class and divided it against itself by emphasizing ideas like intersectionality, privilege, settler colonialism, etc. It’s nothing I haven’t heard a thousand times before from a certain set of leftists to downplay oppressions based on race, gender, sexuality, and so on. But it has a certain way of insinuating that highlighting these oppressions is itself a product of a certain privileged class.

I think there are definitely legitimate issues that are highlighted here. There is a certain woke style of communication that is very insular and alienating to outsiders. I don’t find it always helpful or appropriate to ask someone’s pronouns, and that calling someone “privileged” is not the best way to build solidarity. I think intersectionality as a framework can often obscure the systemic nature of oppressions and treat them as independent axes rather than mutually constitutive. But Liu’s complaint seems to be that it’s bad to point out that members of the working class can still be part of an oppressive class, which they absolutely can.

Her dismissal of settler colonialism is particularly telling. She claims that it obscures the class hierarchy among the settlers and that their working class needs to be regarded as oppressed as well. But the Israeli proletariat is very much involved in the displacement and oppression of Palestinians. Settler colonialism is in fact a class phenomenon precisely insofar as gives a certain set of workers a stake in the system by giving them another class of people to expropriate and dispossess.

Like Catherine Liu, I suppose I would also qualify as PMC. I didn’t go to Yale like her, but I am college educated, and I have spent the last decade in the public and nonprofit sector. Unlike her, I have also worked in blue collar jobs, including one in a warehouse. As a sociology major, my college education did include learning certain norms around racial and gender discourse that might be characterized as PMC, but I didn’t actually internalize those norms until I became radicalized and got involved with activism. There I was confronted for the first time with my privilege as a white cishet guy, and went through a long process of unpacking that privilege and learning to listen to perspectives of other groups and not take for granted a variety of privileged assumptions I’d carried with me my whole life. I became “woke” as they say today (at the time, the term was SJW), and for a while, I could frankly be rather annoying about it. There were a lot of ideas I absorbed at the time that I have become critical of since then, and there were even some that sat uncomfortably with me at the time. But it was a big reality check for me to have to step back from a bunch of hegemonic baggage that I’d carried around unconsciously, and I’m glad for having gone through that phase.

One insight that was once brought to my attention once by a black anarchist was that the problem with class reductionism is not that it reduces everything to class but that it has too reductive a concept of class. Race, gender, sexuality, and other vectors of oppression are all ways that people are classed under state capitalist hegemony. Class is as much social and political as it is economic, and regimes of power will construct different forms of class in order to accumulate power toward a favored elite.

I do think the technocratic management of society is crucial to understanding how capitalist power operates in society, and something like a PMC is critical to its operation. Working in social work has if anything made it all the more obvious to me how this system operates. Ironically, one of the biggest critics of this system was Michel Foucault, whom these anti-PMC types seem to hate. I think a helpful form of PMC critique comes from David Graeber, in works such as Bullshit Jobs and Utopia of Rules. A lot of white collar jobs are essentially neo-feudal forms of patronage, where bureaucracies dole out positions that aren’t particularly productive but which ensure a kind of fealty to the system, despite the people themselves being miserable in these jobs precisely because they know they’re bullshit, all the while resenting those jobs that are productive, feeling that their own higher salary is deserved precisely because they’re so miserable in their meaningless jobs.

Managerialism is one of the primary ways that power circulates in capitalist society. People who have little power themselves are tasked with the management of others below them, and often cling to that power so as to feel some sense of agency in their lives. This is the same way that racism and sexism and other forms of oppression work. Power circulates by classing people into positions where they have some degree of power over others that they can hold onto. We do ourselves no favors by simplifying class and treating workers as some undifferentiated mass. We have to unpack the various ways in which power is distributed within class in order to build real solidarity that doesn’t just take a certain ideal type as representative of workers as a whole. The working class includes black and brown people as well as white people, queer and trans people as well as cishet, and real working class solidarity requires that their concerns be addressed and not merely sidelined.