Obsessed With Scrambling to the Top

When Mills published White Collar: The American Middle Classes in 1951, he saw the kind of workers the UAW is now organizing through a rather dark lens. Influenced by the Frankfurt School, Mills thought the men and women who worked in publishing, on newspapers and magazines, and in corporate HR and PR departments the handmaidens of capital.

“The white-collar employee usually remains psychologically the little individual scrambling to get to the top,” wrote Mills, “instead of a dependent employee experiencing unions and accepting union affiliation as collective means of collective ascent.” These strata were so fixated on their status that even when they did join unions, they eschewed the very terminology of the labor movement, instead labeling their organizations “guilds,” “associations,” or some other phrase.

Famously, Mills had abandoned what he called “the labor metaphysic,” so he could write that “American labor, as expressed in unions, is now politically a set of pressure groups, and white-collar workers, especially when they join unions, increasingly assume the pressure-group kind of labor mentality.”

Unlike farmers and wage workers, Mills thought white-collar employees became a mass stratum within the polity too late to have even a brief day of autonomous militancy; their structural position and available strategy make them “reguarders” rather than movers and shakers of historic change. Their unionization was a unionization into the “main drift,” a phrase Mills used to describe a polity in which big corporations and the military set the agenda.

By the end of the 1950s, however, Mills came to see the world of cultural production and reproduction less cynically. By then, he had started writing about the “cultural apparatus,” which he defined as “composed of all the organizations in which artistic, intellectual, and scientific work goes on.” Mills was not interested in another study of the heroic intellectual but rather in the “cultural workmen” who have their own grievances and aspirations. In a spirit quite different from that of White Collar, Mills now argued that “we ought to repossess our cultural apparatus and use it for our own purposes.”

In 1959, Mills had a contract to write a book entitled The Cultural Apparatus. But I think it highly significant that he soon changed the title of this prospective study to The New Left because he now saw much progressive potential among those who labored and rebelled within that same cultural apparatus.

The Idea of a PMC — and the Controversy It Engendered

This brings us to the work of John and Barbara Ehrenreich, who in 1977 published in Radical America their celebrated set of articles on the “professional-managerial class” (PMC). They wrote: “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 Ehrenreichs thought this group made up perhaps 20 percent of the working population.

They were trying to figure out the class composition and future trajectory of the New Left of the ’60s, within which they had been enthusiastic militants. But the Ehrenreichs were not mere cheerleaders, because they could see that by the 1970s, a rather wide gulf had emerged between university-oriented New Leftists and the labor movement, while at the same time a section of that New Left generation seemed to be slipping into technical and organizational roles that made them part of bourgeois America. The Ehrenreichs wrote that the relationship between the PMC and the working class was “objectively antagonistic,” even as one could find PMC figures leading what was left of the socialist movement in the United States.

Barbara Ehrenreich had a PhD in biology, so she and her then husband took seriously the degree to which many in the PMC also sought to defend a sense of autonomous expertise and professionalism, a strand of thought reaching back to Thorstein Veblen and Lewis Corey. The Ehrenreichs were not merely following the Marxist labor theorist Harry Braverman, positing a “proletarianization” of the professions. Deskilling was not the problem, not even income stagnation. Instead, a loss of autonomy and the distortion and capitalist repurposing of their professionalism was beginning to transform PMC consciousness. Indeed, the Ehrenreichs noted that the PMC grew in size, strength, and even radicalism during its golden, expansive age, the twenty years from the mid 1950s to the early 1970s.

In recent years, however, the idea of the PMC, its potency and political alignment, has evoked furious debate, turbocharged by the increasing reliance of the Democrats on upscale, college-educated suburbanites while an increasingly large proportion of the blue-collar working class voted for Donald Trump and other Republicans. In the presidential primaries leading up to the 2020 election, the rivalry between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren seemed to encapsulate that trajectory.

For all her liberalism, Warren seemed to speak for those meritocratic, technocratic professionals whose culture, values, and influence advanced the class dealignment crippling Democratic Party prospects. Sanders, popular among some strata of the traditional blue-collar working class, embodied a more traditional, and radical, set of class politics.

When the pandemic struck just a year later, this division took on a deadly aspect: white-collar professionals were able to work from home; blue- and pink-collar “essential workers” were exposed to the virus in the factories, stores, hospitals, and transport facilities where they labored.

This assault on the PMC was backstopped from within the left academy. Cultural theorist Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders: the Case Against the Professional Managerial Class targeted the performative identity signaling found in the strata, while Lily Geismer’s Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party saw the influence of high-tech professionals in the Massachusetts of Michael Dukakis as instrumental in the rise of Reaganism and its successors. Along with other critics of modern liberalism, these authors had inadvertently aligned themselves with an older generation of neoconservatives who argued for the existence of a “new class” that had taken over the Democratic Party, abandoned the working-class, and celebrated a culturally cosmopolitan but economically neoliberal global order.

Barbara Ehrenreich herself was taken aback by this PMC condemnation, calling it an “ultra left slur” in an interview with Jacobin’s Alex Press. Ehrenreich had never thought that the PMC was itself a progressive force independent of the classical working class; moreover, she was an early, forceful voice pointing out the increasing precarity of a strata that might be growing in numbers but hardly in wealth and power. In Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, published in 1989, Ehrenreich argued that expertise — the currency of the professional — cannot be passed on to their offspring or allies, like wealth or property. Hence, the constant “fear of falling,” exacerbated from the mid-1970s onward by the more general economic disruptions that bedeviled middle-class professionals in that era.

Those leftists critical of the PMC have largely ignored the proletarianization that was stratifying and debasing this strata. But even more wrongheaded was their assumption that this new class, whatever its obnoxious cultural and social presumptions, was itself in the political or economic driver’s seat. That remained the entitlement of big capital, whose hegemonic power enjoyed exponential growth after the 1979 Volcker Shock and the fall of the Berlin Wall a decade later.

The Ehrenreichs may well have contributed to the confusion by identifying a new professional-managerial class. It was professional, but hardly managerial. The mislabeling, in 1977, might well be excused because in the early postwar years the word “managerial” could still conjure an anti-capitalist construct. James Burnham’s 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, envisioned the displacement of old-line capitalists by a new managerial stratum, probably authoritarian, but with some New Dealish coloration. John Kenneth Galbraith was more sanguine when in 1967 he postulated that a new technostructure was coming to rule the corporation and sideline the profit motive. Though a fierce opponent of Berkeley’s free speech movement, the University of California’s Clark Kerr shared the same perspective as Galbraith on where corporation and campus were heading.

The Ehrenreichs shared none of this post-capitalist fantasy. They understood, as early as the late 1970s, that even if the Democrats were moving in the wrong direction, that was hardly where the Ehrenreichs themselves were going when they searched for a way in which the energy and elan generated within the PMC might be linked to that of the traditional union movement and a progressive transformation of both the cultural apparatus and American capitalism.

They wrote, “The possibility of building a mass movement which seeks to alter society in its totality depends on the coming together of working-class insight and militancy with the tradition of socialist thinking kept alive by ‘middle class’ intellectuals. The left, which is now predominantly drawn from the PMC, must address itself to the subjective and cultural aspects of class oppression as well as to material inequalities; it must commit itself to uprooting its own ingrained and often subtle attitudes of condescension and elitism.”

While some of this sounds like the “political correctness” that became such a right-wing target in the 1990s, the reality of what the Ehrenreichs proposed is actually found in the UAW today: an alliance of cultural apparatus academics, writers, and researchers with the classic proletarians found in the auto industry.

When, at a Labor Notes conference in April 2024, UAW president Shawn Fain lauded the handbooks published by that post–New Left publishing collective, he was confirming the validity of what the Ehrenreichs hoped might develop, at least among the most progressive leaders of the union movement and the most committed elements of the PMC.

The PMC’s Cultural Front

When historian Michael Denning wrote The Cultural Front in the 1990s, he was reaching back to the 1930s and 1940s to find a usable past in which progressive cultural workers and Popular Front partisans were building institutions and creating artistic works that linked them in an organic fashion to the world of industrial unionism. Shannan Clark’s 2021 The Making of the American Creative Class picks up where Denning left off, demonstrating in a very concrete fashion how Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)–inspired knowledge workers battled for power, dignity, and income within the broadcast studios, news magazines, publishing houses, architectural firms, and research institutes of that era. His book is a richly researched history of white-collar unionism that confirms the work of Denning, the Ehrenreichs, and Mills, which saw the cultural apparatus as a terrain of struggle.

Clark’s book is both a nuts-and-bolts labor history and a study of the cultural and aesthetic experimentation of those workers who absorbed and advanced Popular Front culture in New York in the 1930s and 1940s and sought to sustain it well into the postwar era. His study of the progressive creativity as well as the political economy of those who labored in the mid-twentieth century cultural apparatus demonstrates that there was no contradiction between the effort to maintain, advance, or even control the content of their work, the professionalism that represented a key element of their identity, and the militant brand of CIO-inflected white-collar trade unionism that flourished in a city that was then the world capital of cultural production and its distribution.

By recapturing the fight that so many of these professionals waged within and against the Luce Publications and CBS, at film studios and newspapers, even in the increasingly repressive Red Scare years of the early-postwar era, we can see how an earlier generation of radical unionists prefigured and perhaps offered a bit of guidance to Mancilla and his comrades as they seek once again to organize the nation’s cultural apparatus.