From Real Life Magazine, July 12:
Nothing PersonalAttacking the “professional managerial class” is not a form of tech criticism
With the rise of digital technologies, increasing automation, and the offshoring of industrial jobs over the past century, a larger portion of the U.S. workforce has moved into management and the professions, including banking, academia, management, programming, legal and cultural work. According to Barbara and John Ehrenreich — who coined the term “professional-managerial class” (PMC) to describe these workers in two essays in the journal Radical America in 1977 — the percentage of American jobs that fit the category has gone from less than 1 percent in 1930, to about 24 percent in 1972, to about 28 percent in 1983, and by 2006, just before the Great Recession, to 35 percent. While not an exact proxy for professional-managerial work, 42 percent of the U.S. labor force worked from home full-time at the height of the Covid pandemic, while only 26 percent worked in-person.
What evolution of capitalism has brought this about? The past few decades has spawned many attempts to explain it. In the 20th century, besides the Ehrenreichs’ work that labeled the PMC, other explanations include now classic works of business administration, like Alfred Chandler’s The Visible Hand and James Beniger’s The Control Revolution, but also works like Gilles Deleuze’s famous “Postscript on Societies of Control,” Boltanski and Chiappello’s New Spirit of Capitalism, and Manuel Castells’s Rise of the Network Society. While texts like these traced similar trends, they generally stopped short of positing the existence of a new class with unique interests. (McKenzie Wark’s The Hacker Manifesto, which posits the rise of a “vectoralist class” that controls information rather than capital, is an exception). Yet recently, it’s the Ehrenreichs’ designation that has returned to debates about the implications of the past few decades’ shifts in technology, management, and capitalism. Invoking the concept of a “professional managerial class” necessarily poses specific questions: Does this class even exist as a cohesive entity? Despite not owning capital, how can it shape larger trends in capitalism? Has the rise of the tech sector and startup culture expanded its influence or merely its visibility? Finally, does its allegiances lie with capital or labor and how could they be shifted one way or another?
In the Ehrenreichs’ analysis, the workers who make up the professional-managerial class do not create goods or provide services themselves but instead maintain the complex systems of advanced capitalist production by managing people, finances, software, logistics, and information flows. They also work in relatively new fields like marketing and advertising, to produce and manage the consumer demand required to sustain industrialized production. Drawing on Marxist theories of monopoly capitalism, according to which the state and large capitalist entities work together to manage the economy, the Ehrenreichs argued that these workers constituted a third class that was neither the traditional working class nor the bourgeoisie but something mediating between them.
The PMC controls flows of capital and technology yet does not own the means of production itself, so its class interests are accordingly ambiguous and contradictory: Members of the PMC maintain their class privileges through credentialism and other forms of gatekeeping, and their efforts to make work more “efficient” often contributes further to immiserating laborers in the workplace. But their rationalization of production also contributes to rising average living standards and, in a certain light, could help move society toward doing away with capitalists altogether, eliminating their merely parasitic influence on production processes. (Hence the Ehrenreichs saw the Soviet Union not as a “dictatorship of the proletariat” but a dictatorship of the professional and managerial cadres.)....
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