On the Supposed Professional-Managerial Class

 

Everyone thinks of themselves as being higher status than they really are. 

This is probably mostly true of people all over the world, and probably mostly true of people throughout history, but it's especially true in the contemporary United States.  According to a recent Gallup poll, 54% of Americans consider themselves middle class.  This is actually considerably down from historic levels - according to the same source, from 2002 to 2006, 61% of Americans considered themselves middle class - after the 2008 economic collapse this dropped sharply, and it has mostly held steady since then, sometimes rising a bit and sometimes falling.  Go back into the 20th century and the number was much higher.  Of course in reality, people who can afford to survive on their investments alone, without working, are the bourgeoisie.  Everyone else - everyone who, in order to live, either needs to work and receive some kind of wage or salary or pension, or who depends on government assistance - is working class.  That's easily 99% of the population or more.  The bourgeoisie is at most 1% of the population, and the haute bourgeoisie - the people who own controlling shares of all the major corporations on Earth - is a tiny fraction of that.  And even they never seem to be happy with what they have.  Elon Musk seems to be seething with resentment - towards whom, I'm not sure.  (Yes, there are "small business owners" (the petite-bourgeoisie), but they are a very small percentage and getting smaller, as giant corporations either buy out smaller businesses or compete them out of business.  And so many people are "moonlighting" - trying to run their own small business, while still working another job.)  As Noam Chomsky puts it, "We don't use the term 'working class' here because it's a taboo term.  You're supposed to say, 'middle class' because it helps diminish the understanding that there's a class war going on."

In some ways maybe that's a good thing.  If everybody thought of their own status accurately, people would probably be either driven to despair and depression, or to rage and violence.  Society would fall apart.  

So perhaps it's always been this way.  Maybe our prehuman ancestors, living in packs, evolved a gene that produced some kind of compound in their brains to delude themselves into thinking that they were higher-status than they actually are, so that they wouldn't tear each other to pieces.

That's the first reason people deceive themselves into thinking that they are higher-status than they actually are: cognitive dissonance.  Thinking of myself as low-status is uncomfortable and painful, so I will carefully edit my worldview, rejecting all evidence that points in that direction, to persuade myself that I'm actually doing okay.

Another reason is innumeracy.  Just as there are different levels of illiteracy, from being completely incapable of reading, to not having developed the habits of reading critically, there are also different degrees and kinds innumeracy, from being completely incapable of counting or doing even simple arithmetic, to much more subtle kinds of deficits.  People suffer from all kinds of cognitive biases and common errors about math.  There's an entire branch of study known as numerical cognition, and experts in this field point out that many humans use a mistaken understanding of large numbers known as the "segmented linear heuristic".  That is, we are notoriously atrocious at understanding large numbers.  A study found that around half of the people studied, when presented with a number line from "one thousand" on the left end to "one billion" on the right, and asked where "one million" falls on it, will point roughly to the middle - instead of way to the left, right next to "one thousand," where it belongs.  (If "a billion" is the right end of the number line, then "a million" should be 999/1000ths of the way to the left.)  We think of a billion being a bit more than a million, and a trillion being a bit more than that.  We don't realize that a billion is WAY huger than a million and a trillion is WAY huger than a billion - so much so, that it makes the difference between 12 and a billion almost irrelevant. Thus, when we think about "the billionaires," we tend to lump them all together, and to think of their wealth as more or less equivalent.  We don't realize that the difference between Elon Musk and an average billionaire is WAY huger than the difference between, say, the salary of a college professor and an unemployed homeless person living on the street.

A third is guilt.  We live in a guilt-based society, not (just) a shame-based society. There's an old Jewish joke, which has been retold by Slavoj Zizek: the deeply respected Rabbi stands before his congregation and cries, "Oh Lord, you are superior to everything!  Before you, I am nothing!"  Suddenly, the richest man in the shtetl stands up from his seat and cries out, "Oh Lord!  Before you, I am nothing!"  Then a random guy also stands up and shouts, "I, too, am nothing!"  The Rabbi and the rich man turn to each other and mutter, "Who is this guy, to claim that he's nothing?"

We all want to the rich man or the Rabbi in this story, not the poor man.  It's amazing how self-righteous people can be about their guilt - and they don't want it taken away.

Recently, there's been a lot of talk about the "PMC" - the "professional-managerial class".  One sees this especially online, in social media.  But there have been books written about it as well, such as Catherine Liu's "Virtue Hoarders: the Case Against the Professional Managerial Class."  Whenever people speak of the PMC, it's usually to denounce them, often in vicious, hateful, vituperative ways.  But there's something funny about all of this PMC-hate: almost all of the people who rail against the PMC also claim to be members of the PMC.  Thus, PMC-hate is usually a form of self-hate.  The paradigmatic example of a member of the PMC is a college teacher - and it is mostly academics who are using this term.  Catherine Liu is no exception: she may rail against the PMC on youtube, but she's a Yale-educated professor of film studies and French literature at UC Irvine where she is the director of the Humanities Center.

This concept of the "Professional-Managerial Class" is not new.  The term was coined by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in a brilliant essay in 1977, which was published in a collection entitled Between Labor and Capital in 1979.  Now, I love Barbara Ehrenreich, an unapologetic Marxist theorist who wrote several books over her career, including, most famously, "Nickled and Dimed: On (Not) Making It in America," (2001) a piece of investigative undercover journalism in which she lived as a waitress for a few months to understand the economic hardship of a service-industry job, and my personal favorite, "Bright-Sided," (2009) a scathing account of the American positivity industry, before passing away in 2022.  But as much as I admire Ehrenreich and that essay in particular, I have a few things to point out on this topic.  

First, the tone of the Ehrenreichs' original essay, "The Professional-Managerial Class" is quite different than what usually swirls around the internet about the PMC these days.  All you hear nowadays is denunciation and hatred of the PMC.  But from the beginning, the Ehrenreichs' point was more nuanced, in some ways more conciliatory, and more interesting: instead of trying to rile up industrial and service workers to seethe with rage against the PMC, the Ehrenreichs were trying to say that the PMC and the industrial and service workers would have to critically examine, understand, and work with each other so that they could join forces to fight against the capitalists.

Second, the Ehrenreichs followed up "The Professional-Managerial Class" (1977) with "Death of a Yuppie Dream: The Rise and Fall of the Professional-Managerial Class" (2013) in which they make quite a different case.  [Read it here.]  While, in 1977, the Professional-Managerial Class "seemed ascendant," now they claimed that "much has changed," and since 1980((!) only one year after the publication of their original essay!) things have "looked less rosy" for the PMC, and indeed it had come perilously close to ceasing to exist altogether, if it had not already passed the point of no return.  So it is quite ironic that the term "PMC" has only come into common usage in the past ten years or so, after the very originators of the term had already declared its "death".

This brings us to the third point: all this talk about the "professional-managerial class" depends on the lack of a coherent definition of class.  Classically, bourgeois society has been understood as divided into two classes: on the one hand, the bourgeois class, i.e., those people who own the means of production (the factories, workplaces, etc.) and can survive on the profits from these investments alone, meaning that they do not have to work (whether they chose to work is another story); and then on the other hand, everyone else - a gigantic mass of people sometimes referred to as the "proletariat".  Now of course we can further divide people up into all kinds of smaller groups, based on all kinds of factors - income, other economic data, ethnic origin, gender, education level, "high brow" vs. "low brow" aesthetic taste in consumption, all kinds of breakdowns on the level of culture, and so on.  But do any of these constitute class per se?  For a long time, Marxists and anarchists have questioned the existence of a professional-managerial "class."  And by the time they wrote their 2013 essay, the Ehrenreichs agreed.  All of a sudden, the Ehrenreichs now insisted that "College educated workers continue to thrive as a demographic category.  But a demographic category is not a class."  [emphasis theirs]

A fourth point, and to my mind the most important of the four so far: the very concept of the "professional-managerial class" confuses two things, and it's right there in the name - the "professional" part, vs. the "managerial" part.  Of course management has existed for a long, long time.  And indeed we have quite detailed historical records of the management practices of, for instance, the 18th century.  [You can look at some of Matthew Boulton and James Watt's records here, in the British National Archives.]  So it seems strange to assert that a management class has only arisen in the 20th century.  On the other hand, you have professional workers - that is to say, workers that, in order to achieve their (usually salaried) position, needed to get an education.  These two groups intersect like a Venn diagram.  Not all people in a position of management got an education, and not all people who have an education are in a management position.  Of course there are people who are both, but it's not at all clear that they constitute a majority.  There are plenty of people who got a degree and are still working crazy hours for low pay and no benefits.  To make things more complicated, there are also entry-level salaried positions (i.e. non-management) - not to mention managers, for instance in the service sector in all kinds of franchises, who are still making an hourly wage.  No doubt about it, class analysis is hard, and complicated.  It's true that Marxism doesn't really offer a comprehensive or even entirely coherent model for class analysis - so we'd better get to work coming up with a better one.

(By the way, in that same book in which the Ehrenreichs published there original essay, there was another essay, by Erik Olin Wright, who has for the past several decades been trying to do class analysis in a far more sophisticated way.  I highly recommend reading his work.)

(It's also worth pointing out that, even before the Ehrenreichs, there was James Burnham, with his own, quite different ideas, articulated in his 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution.  But that, too, is a subject for another essay.  And we might mention in passing Cornelius Castoriadis and the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, with the division of society into "order-givers" (dirigeants) and "order-takers" (executants), which, too, must be considered, especially as it influenced important thinkers like Guy Debord.  But we're going off on a tangent at this point.)

Back to the "PMC" thesis.  In response to the sudden rise of the term "PMC," some old-school Marxists have been asserting that there's no such thing as the professional-managerial class, and that the people who are getting dubbed with the PMC label are actually petit-bourgeois.

But they're both wrong.  Catherine Liu is wrong to think that a new class has emerged, the PMC.  But old-school Marxists are also wrong to think that teachers are petit-bourgeois.  Teachers in colleges are not petit-bourgeois.  They are, at best, workers, and are quickly slipping into the subproletariat.

Plumbers and electricians - some of them, anyway, are petit-bourgeois.  They are small business owners.  That is, they are owners of the means of production - some small part of it, anyway.  And quite often, they make higher salaries than college teachers.  These "PMC" people are lower class than plumbers and electricians. 

Everyone with any common sense already knows this.  Whenever a grandma hears that their grandchildren are going to school to pursue an art degree, literature degree, philosophy degree, etc., their response is usually: what do you do with that kind of degree?  You're going to be flipping burgers.  That's what they say.  And they're right!  A bachelor's degree is an entry to a proletarian service job - but also, saddled with debt.

So-called PMC people may be "culturally elite" - or they might like to think of themselves as culturally elite, or they may hate themselves as culturally elite, or they may enjoy hating themselves as culturally elite... but they're workers.  Proletarian workers.  Whereas plumbers and electricians and contractors are - some of them, anyway - petit-bourgeois.

I hear somebody out there whining, "But they have cultural capital! Wah, wah, wah!"   Sorry, but cultural capital is a myth.  It doesn't count for shit.  Especially in Trump's America.  If anything, "cultural capital" counts against you: it makes you a target of the storm troopers.

You're a prole.  Get used to it.