John Ehrenreich

He's got people like Smithers.

as is sort of lackeys and then you have like a couple of professionals and then you have uh this sort of manual working class people like you know your homers and and and lenny and things like that um but no that's massively changed since the 70s and 80s a huge de-industrialization um capitalism is totally global you know we've sold off all our industries everything's owned um by international firms you know i don't even know if there are like national capitalists but you know firms have got more complicated huge amounts of money into advertising um massive expansion of the state bureaucracy um massive expansion basically of service work and not many people working in what we might call productive work like manufacturing making commodities more and more people are involved in circulation of those products selling them and more more people involved in like your health your health care is one of these i think the biggest biggest single employer in wales at the moment like working in health and social couch is crazy you know a lot teaching um public sector i mean if you look at some of the stratification analysis you've just got about a million different types of occupations and like you know any attempt to theorize all this is necessarily going to be imperfect because there's a huge amount of uh work experiences more and more people bounce between jobs so it's really just like trying to find a heuristic which can act as a shorthand to explain that that's my caveat but i think that the way to understand this you've got to theorize this bloated middle class so i think on the one hand you've got the professional managerial class which is the you know your key standards of this world is a theory that's Barbara and John Ehrenreich came up with in the 70s, and this idea that you have basically a group of people that are essentially managing the state on behalf of capital, you know, and they can work as social workers, they can work as teachers, they can work as sort of managers in industry.

I mean, we won't necessarily get into some of the problems of that theorization because you're grouping together professionals and managers.

But let's say it's people who have sort of almost got like a supervisory or technical role, doctors even, people who are very well remunerated culturally, uh tend to be sort of hived off um live in nice semi-detached tasteful you know leafy suburbs uh you know traditionally but then i think that below that sort of group um you have essentially a group of people that defy easy categorization.

Yeah, so I came at this from a different direction.

I was a little bit familiar with, as you say, with the work on the PMC by Barbara and John Ehrenreich and, you know, the kind of decades of debate that that, you know, I guess first they were responding, as you say, to the kind of difficulty of the classical Marxist or Marxian analysis of, you know, what to do with professionals, but then kind of laying out this new sort of schema for thinking about how professionals and white-collar workers fit in.

So I was a little bit familiar with that.

But really, I came to this as a reporting exercise, just as a highly empirical proposition.

Uh, for the record, my own view of this, we can discuss this, is that this is total nonsense.

But there's this other version of PMC theory that comes from Barbara and John Ehrenreich, who are thinkers who I have a lot of respect for.

Those are the people who first coined the term.

And people like my friend, uh, Catherine Liu, who teaches here, uh, who's sort of continued in a very Ehrenreichian vein.