Professional–managerial class

They're racist." They, you know, is, is quite a, yeah, strange...

Um, before we move forward, I w- I'd like you to explain the PMC sort of theory.

'Cause I, I didn't, uh, you, you coined this.

Is that, is that right?

Well, let's park that one.

Park for now, 'cause I do want to ask about going ahead later.

But I, on this sort of PMC thing, sort of there's this kind of liberal left.

I, I find that element confusing and disorientating sometimes, and I think you have done quite a good job at articulating that.

Workers' governments would nationalize oil and gas and plan for energy on the basis of human need and ecological necessity, not private or imperialist nationalist diversions and bullying.

Pages twelve to fourteen, The PMC Is Not a Social Class by Rhodri Evans.

The term professional manag- managerial class, PMC, was coined in 1977.

Barbara Ehrenreich, who coined it, thought that by twenty nineteen the class had been seriously smashed, i.e., dispersed into a variety of skilled white-collar worker occupations at one end and into full-on corporate managements at the other.

However, since then, discourses targeting that professional managerial class as the main or a main enemy of the working class have spread.

Catherine Liu's twenty twenty-one book, Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, makes a case from a socialist left.

Her book is a squib, a polemical flourish against people in talking PMC positions with progressive politics which, um, amount to little more than virtue signaling, which, quotes, "To the majority of non, uh, college-educated people appear as pedantic, hypocritical, and punishing." End quotes.

Liu assuredly writes against those who think or operate as if they think that being a member in good liberal standing of the talking sections of the PMC is to be emancipatory enough.

Um, another has been to say that the relatively simple class map you get in Capital, which is the same I was assuming in the argument earlier, has to be substantively revised.

This is where PMC theory comes in.

The idea is there's this professional managerial class in between the two.

And there are two different lines of thought there that often get mixed up together.

First, there's a thread of thinking about professionalized, bureaucratized layers that sort of run the machine for the capitalists, um, that goes back to at least James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and really has roots before that, which says that maybe what you've actually got is a three-sided class war between workers and capitalists and this, you know, elite PMC group.

And that, uh, the PMC could easily displace the capitalist class as the new ruling class.

And, you know, maybe according to some versions of this, this is what happened in the Soviet Union.

And maybe, and this is what the sort of more intellectual side of contemporary right populists, uh, tend to think, that's kind of happened under contemporary corporate capitalism.