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…

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    7·
    6 months ago

    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

    • engineers

    • manufacturing managers

    • social, recreation, and religious workers (other than clergy)

    • college faculty

    • accountants and auditors

    • government officials and administrators

    • 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.