cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3190259
To me they’re like mere servants of the State, like Lenin talked about in “2. What is to Replace the Smashed State Machine?” in his writing “The State and Revolution”
Under Capitalism, they are its privileged knights that try to deflect and control, if not defend directly its image as “the only option”, who have their incentive in doing so, with their class status stake being in their duty to shepherd the means of production and its resulting benefits
However, they don’t own the means of production, as they merely manage it for the landholding, industrialist, and financier capitalists
On the other hand, under Socialism, while its privileges will be probably be done away, the PM class on its own would innovated upon, for their new duty of overseeing, managing, and reporting the collectivized cooperatives and state-owned enterprises…
Until the final stage of Communism arrives, I think they’re pretty handy
I say this, because I hear such disgusted sentiment in Hexbear against them
Note: I know a bit about the bazingo techbro culture that the PMC is associated with, please don’t criticize them solely on those vibes…
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Some of us have such disgust for the PMC because we are the PMC. We know our peers, and we’re frustrated with their seemingly unassailable, pigheaded lack of class consciousness.
This is the sense I get here, especially considering the number of donations to the Chunka Luta org I suspect come from that same disgusted crowd that seek to do something good with their privilege and comfort.
So as to the question “Are they inherently reactionary?” Well no, that suggests some inborn or innate characteristics which Marxism generally rejects. They are simply often acting out of concern for their own material class interests even if at the end of the day many of them are still being exploited precisely because of their lack of class consciousness or lack of solidarity with more precarious workers.
By inherently reactionary, I mean its within their class interests, so to speak…
Yep.
Business school is also very…enlightening
No, because there’s no clear definition of what a PMC is. Everyone has their own definition in mind, many would consider me a PMC yet I would consider the asshole managers above me PMC, some would consider the shift manager of a retail job PMC. The definition is way too loose to be useful and almost feels like am alternative for the “middle class” a class that does infact not exist nor has a concrete definition and is more a vibe.
The effects of exploitation are the same regardless of anyone in the working class. The difference being the effects of that exploitation have a delay to what would be considered PMC as opposed to those already maximally exploited. But it’s happening, companies all over the world are shedding staff with impunity, teams are downsizing, performance metrics being enforced. When I joined software dev I already jumped in at min wage tiny team and unpaid overtime. Where i am now the same is happening, downsizing of teams, increase of work, having to hold multiple roles and unpaid overtime. No one is immune to exploitation and the capital owners are too fucking greedy to not take everything from everyone. Just that PMC are somewhat easier to propagandise in the current moment cos they have enough money to have a smug sense of superiority. But thats not gonna last long.
Best materialist definition of PMC I can come up with is a wage laborer who makes enough that by saving money they can realistically see a path to joining the capitalist class within their working lifetime. You see a lot of these types try starting a company or moving into real estate in their mid-30s.
It’s an interesting point but even then not all PMC choose to join the capitalist class even if they have the means to do so. That’s why i overall hate the concept of PMC its hard to pin down a real definition that isn’t just pure opinion.
Im my head maybe a correlation between relative wages earned and opposition to organisation can be made ignoring the role but even then that doesn’t work for piss poor managers who also oppose organisation.
I think class traitor works just fine as a term for someone in the working class who actively opposes action that benefits the working class.
Wait a minute… I’m a shitposter what am i doing? PMC? More like POO MC amirite?
I think that when people’s needs are met and they simultaneously don’t feel overworked they often become
This class, although poorly defined, are usually status quo warriors because they seem to at least understand that the status quo is comfortable to them. Their aim becomes to oppose anything that might disrupt that comfort.
That’s not really what the term “PMC” means, what you’re describing is closer to “labor aristocrat”. Professional-Managerial Class actually refers to a type of labor being done, not the level of compensation. If you randomly had a barista that was making insanely good money for some odd reason they wouldn’t suddenly be a PMC.
Okay but your counterexample literally doesn’t ever happen???
I actually knew a woman who was a personal barista for private rich people events and she made nearly 6 figures. Is she a PMC?
No, they’re shepherds/caretakers of capital, they manage it for the true owners, and due to their owners’ incentives, they have a material stake for it under Capitalism
That’s more accurate definition///
Maybe accurate, not precise. You could argue endlessly about who counts as a shepherd or caretaker of capital, but can put an actual numerical value on the definition you’re replying to. Probably something like $150k/year.
some would consider the shift manager of a retail job PMC
The true proletariat 17 year old cashiers making $16 an hour need to rise up against their true oppressors! The PMC 26 year old making $19 and hour who mostly drives a forklift but also listens to customers complain that their coupons don’t work on the phone for 30 minutes straight!
Boomer who can’t use the self checkout: GET ME THE MANAGER
The manager:
Yeah, there’s definitely a late capitalist “managerialization” of labour at play here.
A century ago there were far fewer management roles and there’d be a better argument for a PMC distinction when there were the working masses in a factory or a mine and then a small handful of managers at most, although even then this is not a materialist take and I’d prefer to conceptualise it as a stratum within capitalist classes (much like the iffy “precariat” label) than as an actual class in itself.
These days the role of a manager is expanded to diffuse responsibility and accountability downwards - if your shift supervisor “manager” is the one who is the hatchet man who is essentially pushed into a position where they are coerced into enforcing unwritten policy on wage theft then the company gets all the benefits from wage theft while holding none of the responsibility for it because they can just blame the “manager” for violating written policy and fire them for it.
(Anyone who was worked entry-level jobs, especially in customer service and food service roles, knows that there’s the explicit written policy which is almost always in line with legislation but there’s implict policy which routinely violates labour laws, occupational health & safety laws etc. but this is just one example. Upper management creates conditions where it’s impossible to meet all the demands without cutting corners and yet they’ve figured out a way to wash their hands of any responsibility because it’s all implication and workplace culture but none of it is authorised by upper management or inked in policy proper.)
Then, as you’ve mentioned, today’s pseudo-manager can be exploited for unpaid overtime and all in exchange for a full-time job and a minor pay bump in their hourly rate, which invariably ends up either a wash or an effective pay cut when considering all the hours they work.
These days the role of a manager is expanded to diffuse responsibility and accountability downwards - if your shift supervisor “manager” is the one who is the hatchet man who is essentially pushed into a position where they are coerced into enforcing unwritten policy on wage theft then the company gets all the benefits from wage theft while holding none of the responsibility for it because they can just blame the “manager” for violating written policy and fire them for it.
I like this bit. Doesn’t help that most promotions in a company are only for manager roles. Now some managers are just dicks who absolutely enjoy the little power they hold but others I know are barely holding on by a thread and hate what they do yet are trapped because they made commitments through long term loans.
The only route made to try and escape poverty and wage labour seems to only be granted the gun to shoot your fellow worker on behalf of the capitalist for a few extra slices of bread.
I think its a topic worth writing about with proper thinking and research moreso to analyse the dynamics of the modern working class rather than pin a target on a group.
And really, this is just the tip of the iceberg of a phenomenon that I don’t think has a name yet.
This diffusion of responsibility downwards while still holding virtually all of the chips which is implemented alongside a sort of crabs-in-a-bucket model of managing people who aspire for more (or maybe just aspire for a decent education, home ownership, healthcare, and a reasonable retirement).
I know I’m being vague in what I’m describing but, as an example, this same sort of program has been carried out in lots of countries in the privatisation of retirement funds. It used to be that the company you worked for would pay for your retirement, then the government started taking up that role, and since then there’s a strong trend towards employee and/or employer retirement contributions going into mutual funds.
These mutual funds mean that the average prole’s economic wellbeing is inextricably linked to the performance of the stock market and yet with all of that responsibility comes virtually no power - BlackRock is probably the best example of how that power is still wielded at the top in the service of capital, even if it’s the workers’ funds ostensibly.
You want a good retirement, chump?
Well, you just have to sell your soul to the devil that is late capitalism and become increasingly involved in the exploitation of your fellow workers because the better the stock market does at extracting surplus value and screwing over the workers, the better your retirement will be but know that in doing so you’re enabling BlackRock buying up investment properties which only drives up the cost of living for all workers and which puts home ownership ever further out of reach for your fellow proles and for future generations. (Of course this is only a small slice of the market manipulation that a company like BlackRock engages in too.)
Idk. It’s like a sort of pseudo-enfranchisement or something.
If you take a historical long view of this, what’s playing out right now is what the evolutionary socialists and fabianists had always desired - the gradual evolution of the economy so that everyone has more representation in power structures and economic processes. Except those types have always overlooked the fact that the house always wins; the interests of the bourgeoisie and capital didn’t just concede ground and allow for people to actually have more power, instead it simply rearranged the order of things so that more of the burden of responsibility could be shifted onto the proles with little-to-no changes to the overarching power structure.
This is also what happens a lot in prison systems with the most obvious example being of “kapos”; comprador Nazi concentration camp inmates who turned on their fellow inmates to become functionaries of the concentration camps themselves, overseeing stuff like forced labour for tiny concessions and no ability to influence the power structure itself (i.e. the kapo had authority over fellow inmates so they had some measure of power to speak of but their ability to influence any change in the system of concentration camps or Nazi Germany itself was entirely non-existent.)
…maybe it could be called coopting workers into being the henchmen for capital, or something?
hokum terminology that’s as vibes-based and unhelpful as ‘middle class’.
I mean, it is a technical term that describes its role within
That being said, I guess it has to be more specific…
Yes but generally no one uses it according to its technical term. PMC specifically defines people who have an active role in the management of capital but no ownership, or atleast direct ownership of the capital they manage. So like my lab manager is a member of the PMC. How people often use it though is just anyone who is a knowledge worker or has some advanced degree, so because i work in a lab a lot of people refer to me as part if the PMC even though i am just a lab technician because i do a realitively complex job for a reasonable amount of compensation. Now that I think about it people basically use PMC to mean labor aristocrat, but even then labor aristocrat is a kind of vague terminology because it is also often used just to mean “workers I don’t like/disagree with.” I guess whatbi am saying is that it is a useful term in an actual academic debate, but like it us usually just used as a slur, like when morons online call baristas PMC’s because they have a college degree.
As to your original question, I would say ‘no’ not inherently reactionary, but definitely conservative and 100% liberal. Their material interests are based in their place within the structure of capitalism so they would seek to maintain it. That being said, there is definitely a tendency to break towards passivity in the face of reaction when the system is threatened.
Generally the heart of reaction in the liberal social formation is the petite bourgeois and the security service. These are the people who’s direct experience with the exploitation of capital, and enforcement of capital social relations, as well as their precarity, breeds the sociopathy required for fascism.
most people do not use it according to its original discription, or their prescriptions are completely out of step with that analysis. here’s an article that basically explains the development/discourse on the term (but concludes its still worthwhile in its original form)
but even when you go to the effort of making that original, well-defined argument for PMC, i’m still in favour of the older concepts that don’t have to do strained taxonomies of contradictions rather than simply describing them
I see “professional managerial class” as a liberal term rather than a Marxist one, and I don’t think it’s particularly useful to start a discussion around.
I don’t find categorizing certain strata of the working class for the sake of categorization to be meaningful. The ultimate point of distinguishing different strata is to provide a general guideline of prioritizing which strata would be more receptive towards agiprop and should be a prime target for being organized. With this in mind, it should be clear that workers earning minimum wage or less would be more receptive towards building worker power through worker organization than a bunch of overpaid clerical workers all other things being equal. However, to say that the so-called PMC (really labor aristocrats) are inherently reactionary is to say that all forms of labor aristocrat organization must be dismantled because reactionaries should be deprived of political power, which comes out of organization. In other words, to say labor aristocrats are inherently reactionary is to say that a software dev union should be treated in the exact same way as a pig union or a Pinkerton branch or an oil cartel or the MIC, which would be an absolutely wild thing to say. You definitely could have a hypothetical software dev union that proves itself to be reactionary to the point where the Pinkertons beating the shit out of those union members are the lesser of two evil, but as a general rule? Of course not.
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From the original definition of the PMC in an article where the term and acronym was first coined:
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.
The article would go on to list a hodgepodge of jobs ranging from classic labor aristocrat jobs like engineers to middle management types who don’t actually own the means of production (I’m guess this is what you’re alluding to in your comment) to “workers concerned with the production of ideology” like teachers, social workers, psychologists, and entertainers. This is why I despise the term PMC. It’s a trash term that absolutely no one uses in its original definition, which honestly already kinda sucks. In practice, people use it to mean some kind of labor aristocrat working in a white collar job like a software dev or HR manager even when not every labor aristocrat works a blue color job and not every white collar worker is a labor aristocrat.
Notice the hyphen in “professional-managerial” that people today omit. It’s very intentional by the original authors. They don’t mean managers who work in a professional settings constituting its own class, but professionals and managers together constituting its own class. So, the PMC (professional-managerial class) is simply PC (professional class) + MC (managerial class). They have a table which lists the numbers of certain sectors of the PMC, the sectors being
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engineers
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manufacturing managers
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social, recreation, and religious workers (other than clergy)
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college faculty
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accountants and auditors
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government officials and administrators
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editors and reporters
It’s basically laborers who do intellectual, administrative, and supervisory work. Like, arguably every single white collar worker would count as a PMC, which the article seems to be pushing although I haven’t gone through the whole thing.
Yeaa stepping out of this because even the original term has never been defined well
The idea to include professionals that necessitate the reproduction of capitalist culture and relations is good but a lot of the roles they include are kinda weird and don’t fit imo like nurses
Should scientists be a part of this? Or is it just academics?
“workers concerned with the production of ideology” like teachers, social workers, psychologists, and entertainers. This is why I despise the term PMC
Ugh, for real. Case in point, how Zizek uses it here.
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So thats what they mean when they say PMC. But I will continue reading PMC as “private military contractor”.
They’re only inherently reactionary if they’re DSA Karens.
Yes. Seeing the amount of abuse and overwork my parents endure as blue collar workers, and working in retail and manual labor myself during school, I would choose being a useless PMC sitting in a cubicle for 8 hours any day.
The software industry is notorious for being the most cocky and often times most privileged out of the ‘ordinary’ careers, so suggesting to organize is taboo.
PMC employees are also not immune to being exploited, especially at junior levels. Not unheard of for junior lawyers, bankers, consultants, etc to have heart attacks or literally drop dead from overwork.
I’m not trying to draw an equivalence since blue collar workers are exploited in more physically harmful ways and don’t have the eventual benefits of high wages. However, while fatcat PMCs who do nothing all day certainly exist, for each one of them there are dozens or hundreds of junior workers killing themselves to climb the ladder.
new duty of overseeing, managing, and reporting the collectivized cooperatives and state-owned enterprises
Technocratic management techniques often serve to obfuscate and justify the real world impacts. You’d need to do a lot of re-education
Also most of those techniques, at least in the IT sector, are pseudoscientific bullshit based on nothing but nice sounding buzzwords.
Did I overexaggerate their role’s necessity or something?
Also, I’m pretty sure I said something about their privileges necessarily being reduced… (i.e. high salaries, stock options, and work) from the previous ancien regime
No, it depends on the state. Although you will have to purge the previous bureaucracy.
Chicken and egg situation. It’s more likely that reactionaries are drawn to those positions if they lack capital to live passively off of but enough wealth, borrowed or inherited, to pursue professional training and education.
PMCs in politics are more likely to be reactionaries since they understand their social and class privileges stem from capitalist exploitation and status quo power relations rather than creating mass politics. e.g: Corbyn’s Labour camp undermine him to his own detriment, or Kyrsten Sinema being a social worker before being a US senator.
Ironically, it is these people that also make revolution possible and happen. These professionals are compensated so well because they are the very administrators of capital, of empire, of the machines of production, distribution, and consumption. If they lose faith in the system, not necessarily by a crisis of conscience, but by which means they no longer see a viable future for themselves and their kin/progeny/colleagues, then revolutionary moments gain the possibility of becoming realized and fulfilled.
Which is why the state also increases its own powers to monitor, spy, and repress when targeting dissidents and enforcing internal discipline.
yes they is
yes and i think we should all be killed
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Sorry, I’ll rephrase it…
In what material stake and relations to the means of production do bourgeois proletarians differ from labor aristocrats or PMC?
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