It’s a concept that’s everywhere now in the rhetoric of the Left, and it’s really mostly the Left that uses it. And it has some purchase on actual strata within capitalism, but it also obscures important differences within those strata. And those differences are important for politics.

So I think both because it’s used so widely today and because it has its limits as well as its uses, it’s good to try to get some clarity on what the concept means and how it might be politically relevant.

We should start with trying to understand what they were attempting to convey and then judge whether or not their description of the concept captures what they were trying to do. What they’re trying to say is there’s a new stratum, broadly in what we call the middle class, whose function it is to essentially control and manage labor so that it can be exploited by capital. But then the actual language that they use is not really friendly to this motivation because what they say is that it’s people whose function is to reproduce capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.

Well, everyone reproduces capitalist class relations. It’s not just the managers. It’s anyone who participates in the system: the clerks, the truck drivers, the doctors, etc. It’s a kind of slippage into a functionalist language that gets in the way of actually pinpointing which strata you’re talking about and trying to get at what is problematic about those particular strata.

So let’s just alter their definition a bit, and I think it’ll be consistent with who they were trying to talk about. What they’re trying to talk about is salaried mental workers, people who engage in some kind of intellectual labor whose function is not to reproduce capitalism, but whose function is to manage the extraction of labor or to aid and abet in the extraction of labor in the sense that managers do.

If we’re looking at it from that standpoint, then we see what they’re actually trying to discuss are the layers that have emerged within the occupational structure that are not workers, but that are employed the way workers are. Nevertheless, whereas workers are exploited, these strata are more in the job of managing the workers and facilitating their exploitation. So they’re people who are hired by capital, like workers are, but who serve the interests of capital. That’s what they’re trying to convey.

First of all, is it a class? This definition is bringing together people who are employed as managers on the one hand: in corporations, in productive establishments, in hotels. Their job is clearly to work for the bosses. And then, on the other hand, there are the professionals, by whom they actually mean lawyers, surgeons, professors, people who work in the culture industry, and even some sections perhaps of the media industry. These are the two groups that the Ehrenreichs include in one category, the PMC. And their point is that they can both be included in one group because they’re both implicated in exploiting and controlling the working class. Now, is their claim actually true?

No, I think it was a conceptual error that they made in saying that professionals, simply by virtue of being active in the reproduction of capitalist culture, or in the reproduction of capitalist institutions, like legal agencies or hospitals, thereby are also complicit in the exploitation of labor. In my view, conflating professionals and managers, or saying that they are two sides of a similar functional duality, is basically wrong.

Think about what a professional is. What do we mean when we say somebody is a professional? It’s not a scientific term.

There’s a kind of basic folk wisdom about what professionals are. Typically, what people mean by professionals is people who have expertise that’s licensed, and who are in a career path of some kind, rather than just being wage laborers in day jobs, and who are paid in a particular way, which is they’re paid in a salary, rather than wage labor.

Mostly. Not necessarily, but yeah, mostly college-educated people, but who have identifiable skills, who are credentialed with those skills. Lawyers, doctors, engineers, technicians, professors, even people like nurses and school teachers will be called professionals in the ordinary lexicon. And the Ehrenreichs give no indication that they don’t mean those strata when they’re talking about the PMC.

With regard to managers, there’s no doubt. What managers do is perform certain functions of the boss. The boss delegates responsibilities to managers to oversee labor, and to make sure that they’re working at a pace and with the quality that the boss needs.

So managers are absolutely involved in the exploitation of labor. Some professionals are involved in that. If those professionals are managers, if those professionals are, say, engineers designing the blueprints for the machines to which the workers are going to be attached, you could make the case that they are part of the exploitation process.

I think it’s a stretch, but you could conceivably make that argument. But it’s very hard to make the argument that lawyers are part of the capitalist class or servants of the capitalist class simply by virtue of upholding the law, just because the law is functional to capitalism.

Similarly with professors, with teachers. Well, yeah, the capitalists need an educated workforce, so you’re educating them. And by virtue of that, you’re facilitating exploitation.

This starts to get very, very murky. Because actually, when you look at teachers, they’re basically working. They’re working for a living. They’re paid a salary, but they suffer a lot of the same vulnerabilities that what people who we would normally call workers suffer. Now professors, what are professors doing by educating people? Well, one good indication of the fact that they’re not servants of capital is that the right wing in every country is coming after universities.

And they’re coming after universities because universities are one of the last remaining bastions of criticism and resistance to the ideology and to the practice of neoliberalism. So to my mind, there are two issues. One, it is pretty clear to me that simply by virtue of being a professional, you cannot be indicted in the reproduction of capitalism.

Secondly, there’s a deeper error, which is that professionals are an occupation or a cluster of occupations. And occupations are not the same thing as classes. Now, we’re not going to get into it too deeply today, but let me just make the case.

An occupation just describes the job that you have, the tasks that you carry out. But classes are not simply the tasks that you’re carrying out. Classes just describe the social relations in which those tasks are embedded.

So take the example of a plumber. A plumber is classically a petty bourgeois. He’s what you call an owner-operator.

He owns his own business and he operates his own business. Okay, that is a petty bourgeois, hence middle-class position.

He owns his own means of production and he does the labor.

So that’s why the term owner-operator is classically used to describe the traditional petty bourgeoisie, right? Shopkeepers are another example. But then if you’re a plumber, you could also be working in an agency that hires plumbers, a plumbing agency.

Well, now your occupation is the same. You’re a plumber, but your class has shifted from owner-operator to worker. You could also be somebody who owns a plumbing agency. Now you’re a capitalist, you’re a plumber, but you’re a plumber who employs other plumbers. So occupations and classes are two very different things, right?

With that in mind, let’s look at professionals. The same professional can be in different classes. A lawyer could be somebody who works in a legal agency, in a legal office, literally for a pittance. He could also be somebody who’s a partner and therefore employs other lawyers. And he could also be somebody who puts out a shingle and does his own legal business. So deciding what class he’s in, simply on the basis of his being a professional, is actually very tricky on Marxian grounds. So that being the case, it’s very, very hard to say that a professional is going to be part of the capitalist exploitation process, not just because most professionals are actually several arm’s lengths away from that, but also because professionals can actually belong to any class.

Extend the same logic to say teachers, to professors. It’s very hard to say who in a given occupation belongs to what class until you know the details of how that particular occupation is being carried out. So to put professionals in the same class as managers is foolhardy because a manager is just a manager.

There’s no such thing as a proletarian manager unless we’re talking about the very lowest levels of management. And everybody from mid-level management on up is going to be in some way or form beholden to or orbiting around capital.

It’s not the same with professionals.

Yeah. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s a random process where they could fall anywhere in the class structure. By and large, if you look at the empirical studies by people who deploy a kind of Marxist framework, by and large, most professionals fall into what we would call the middle class.

That is to say, people who are neither capitalists nor workers. And this is important because it means that they shouldn’t just be folded into being servants of the capitalist class. But what’s the number?

Fifty-five to 60 percent are in what’s called the middle class. The others, however, would tend to shade into the working class. And very, very few professionals are actually in the capitalist class.

So when we’re talking about professionals, we’re talking about the most skilled workers in the class structure, and then the kind of middle strata who don’t have the same kinds of vulnerabilities and are not subject to the same kind of domination that workers are, but who nevertheless are not in themselves involved in the exploitation and the management of labor. Equating them with managers is something of a stretch. So with the PMC, we’re talking mostly about the middle class, some sections of which, by virtue of being managers, are middle-class employees of capital who earn their living by aiding and abetting the exploitation of labor.

But then there are other elements who are actually quite removed from the exploitation process, like professors, like lawyers, like doctors.

That’s right. I mean, if you think of nurses as professionals, they are being exploited. If you think of teachers as professionals, they are essentially highly skilled workers.

So it’s a nebulous concept. And I’m not saying it’s useless, and we’ll come to what its uses are. But when you come to it the way the Ehrenreichs did, in seeking to indict it the way they did, you’re going to cast your net more widely than you should.

Well, this has to do with the way in which twentieth-century capitalism evolved.

So let’s go to the nineteenth century and what the class structure, classical class structure was. You had in a country like, let’s say England, or the late nineteenth-century United States when the agricultural transition has mostly been completed: what are the occupational structures looking like? The vast majority of the population is working for a wage.

A tiny section employs them as capitalists. And then there’s this middle stratum, which is called the petty bourgeoisie. They are shopkeepers, they are independent farmers, essentially people who own their own means of production, but do the work themselves instead of hiring other people to do the work. Literally, that’s why they’re called petty bourgeois. They’re small, but they own their own capital, as it were, right? There, who’s in the middle class is an obvious answer.

It’s these petty bourgeois, who are neither capitalists nor workers. They’re in the middle. They’re in between the two.

Now, what happens in the twentieth century is there is a shift in capitalism in two specific ways. One is that the privately owned shop is increasingly overtaken by the multidivisional corporation, large corporations. And these corporations really are a late nineteenth-century arrival, as Alfred Chandler described in his classic works.

Late nineteenth-century capitalism gives rise to the multidivisional firm. Now, the first thing this does is it changes the constraints on owners. If you’re running a small operation of your own, your own little factory, you’re hiring twenty, thirty, forty, fifty people.

Classically, you have your office up above, you’re staring down at them, and you can see who’s working hard, who’s not. You can do your own management, or you hire in some of your family members, your friends, and they do management for you. But now suppose you’re the Ford Motor Company or Chevrolet, you’re hiring fifty, sixty, one hundred thousand workers.

The River Rouge plant had, I don’t know how many tens of thousands of people working in it. You can’t manage them yourself. So management is now delegated to a small army of people. Now, once you do that, you have actually created a stratum that did not exist before, the stratum of managers.

Once you’ve created these people, and you’re going to hire, say, three hundred of them in your firm, you want to know who you’re going to hire. So you seek credentials. You want to be my manager. Well, how do I know you’re any good? This creates a demand for a credentialing process where people can say, well, I actually studied management. I actually know, I’m turning it into a science. And this science of management actually came about in the first decades of the twentieth century.

So what we’re talking about here is a stratum within the middle class. It isn’t a class — it’s a stratum within a class. But the managerial stratum is born. And it is, as the Ehrenreichs say, specifically born to oversee the exploitation of labor. These managers become an integral part of twentieth-century capitalism in very large numbers in a way that they simply were not in the nineteenth century. On this, the Ehrenreichs are right — that as modern capitalism develops, they call it monopoly capitalism, because in the 1970s that term was used.

I’m not fond of that term. Let’s just call it modern capitalism. As the huge firms of the twentieth century are developing, you get a demand for a managerial stratum that’s trained.

That creates business schools. Business schools now generate an army of these managers, and their job, their actual profession is to oversee the exploitation of labor.

Yeah. They have a story about how the professions come about. Some of it is, I think, defensible, some of it is not.

Here’s the basic core of it, which I think is defensible, which is that alongside the rise of the modern corporation, you also have massive, massive increases in productivity. That creates a gigantic, what’s called social surplus, right? That essentially means taxable incomes and taxable wealth that go into the state, and that then go into also creating a kind of a service economy around people who have money.

You get private tutors, you get teachers, you get doctors, you get lawyers who are being hired by the firms.

Yeah, and essentially what they’re doing is they’re projecting, I think, this section of the postwar occupational structure, as you’re saying, the insurance companies and the health care companies who are serving the working class and the needs of managers, they project that onto the professional class as a whole. That’s where I think the problem is. But you’re absolutely right that they do attribute this role to the postwar economy, this role of hothousing the rise of professionals.

Essentially what they’re doing is saying that twentieth-century capitalism is very different from nineteenth-century capitalism in that because of the enormous corporations that are taking over the economy and because of the rise of economic productivity, you are getting strata within the middle class that did not exist before. And what binds these strata together is how they’re paid, they’re all salaried, is the fact that they’re all credentialed, they’re all highly educated. And then thirdly, I think, wrongly saying, they’re all involved in the exploitation or the management of labor somehow.

My view is a chunk of them are, certainly most of the managers are, and some section of the professionals are, but most professionals actually are not. Most professionals are actually quite removed from capital and its needs, and some of them are actually highly skilled workers. But their story, I think, is in essence correct, that the rise of these credentialed, salaried professionals, it’s a twentieth-century phenomenon, and it’s connected to these two factors, these massive undertakings and the existence of taxable income and high levels of private income, which create demand for entirely new specializations and entirely new forms of services provided to people inside the economy.

Very little, actually. This is where, you know, my view is different from a lot of Marxists. My view is that capitalism is maintained, and if you want to call it consent, consent to capitalism is maintained simply from the dull compulsion of economic relations.

The media works around the edges. I think, I agree with Chomsky, the media’s main function is to placate the upper classes, is to create consensus within the more educated people and give them their marching orders. How much it actually affects working class people, the truth is, nobody knows.

There’s almost no quantitative assessment of the role that media plays in generating consent. And that’s because it’s almost impossible to come up with the right questions that might elicit the kind of information you need. I think that this whole idea, it comes from the Ehrenreichs, it comes from Althusser, this notion that there’s something called the ideological state apparatus. I mean, it exists. Media exists. They try to propagandize. Absolutely.

But the idea that this plays a key role is just, I think, gobbledygook. Let’s put it this way: In the nineteenth century, the huge media industry barely existed, and capitalism was plenty stable. And it was stable because every day people have no choice but to get up and go to work, and they create the ideologies around them that enable them to do it.

Part of it is theoretical. They do have this theory that says that everybody who is a professional is in some way managing working-class labor or working-class culture, working-class consumption, working-class housing, and thereby is part of the entire apparatus of social control. But if you read their essay, it’s very funny. It could have been written today.

Their experiences on the left, and you’ve been around the Left now, and I’ve been around for forty years. It hasn’t changed.

Yeah, exactly. Here’s a professor supposedly on the left, and when Ehrenreich brings a worker to a meeting, all the professor sees is the whiteness and the maleness, and you don’t see the fact that they’re a worker.

Why? This is where the essay is really brilliant because in the final parts of the essay, after having located where the professionals are in the economy and the roles that they play, they then get to a very interesting observation. And I think that is the truest part of the essay, and it is equally true today as it was back then, which is they say that even though the professionals are in some way beholden to capital . . .

Now, I don’t agree with that, but let’s just take that as their premise. Sure. Here comes the truth. They say even though they are, they end up seeing themselves as anti-capitalist. And this is the puzzle of the PMC. Now they, because they’re materialists, another swear word for today’s left, they try to come up with an explanation of the social conditions that hold together this contradiction.And the social conditions are this — that the professionals, even though they are linked up with capital, their immediate conditions of work are ones in which they have a great deal of autonomy, day-to-day autonomy from capital. Professors are the best example of this, but so are scientists. They have autonomy from it.

And because they have this expertise, their credentials, their PhDs, their degrees, they also feel that they have real insight into how the world works in a way that these vulgar moneymaking capitalists who are just concerned with the bottom line do not. So their first instinct is to want to displace capital. This is what the Ehrenreichs say was the impetus for the rise of the apparatchik class and these technicians who became the new ruling elites inside Soviet-style economies.

They see that as the kind of end dream of the professional class to displace capital and become the new ruling class. But of course, that’s only possible through a revolution. Inside capitalism, they quickly find they can’t displace capital.Their entire conditions of existence depend on a healthy economy, on the profit motive, on everything moving forward smoothly. So instead of trying to displace capital, what they do is have a cultural contempt for capital because of their brilliance and their snootiness and all this business. So they are, for the Ehrenreichs, servants of capital, but also have a disdain for capitalism.

Now, where do you find this the most? You find this among academics the most. It’s not that they’re trying to displace capital, but they share capital’s contempt for ordinary working people because they don’t have the PhD or the grad student’s sophistication, their love of fine wine, because they have social attitudes that might be backward or something like that.And so that creates an incipient kind of combination of a radicalism rhetorically, because capitalism is gauche. It is driven by things that you learn in universities are bad — domination, exploitation, and such things. But at the same time, you carry your instinctive professional disdain for the unwashed masses and you bring that into the Left, which is what they experienced. Really, if you look at the essay, it’s the last part of the essay that you can tell motivated the rest of it.

Or aspiring professionals, like students.

It’s pretty clear, I think. Whatever was true in the mid-1970s, when they wrote this essay on the Left, is ten times worse today.

In the 1970s, there still was the echo of a labor movement. There still were trade unions. There still was this understanding that if the Left is going to revive itself, it’s going to come through the activity and the organization of working people.

Today, I would say that’s a minority position among people who call themselves leftists. It’s even a minority position inside left organizations, the newly arising left organizations. And I think that’s entirely attributable to the very factors that the Ehrenreichs laid out.

It has to do with the social composition of the Left, and this duality of being rhetorically radical, while substantively having disdain for working people and a suspiciousness of the kinds of demands that working people are attracted to and attracted by. That’s more true today, I think, than it was back then.

It is not clear to what extent that is actually the case across the economy. A lot of these analyses come from anecdotal evidence, from experiences in particular sectors. I mean, it’s certainly true in the university sector.

There has been a gradual proletarianization of what it means to be a professor. It is certainly true in sections of tech, in engineering. But you want to be careful about drawing conclusions about the economy as a whole.

Because the thing about capitalism is, while it de-skills and destroys certain occupations, it also creates new ones constantly, including new professional occupations. If you look at the studies that have been done of the size of the professional class, what’s called “experts,” in traditional class analytical frameworks, it’s grown over the past forty years, not shrunk. The fastest rates of growth in the economy and the occupational structure have actually been among what’s called the expert classes.

The problem is this: Because professors dominate intellectual production, especially on the left, there is a tendency to project what’s happening in their sector onto the professional class as a whole. And I don’t think you can say that there has been a general trend toward proletarianization.

The actual size of the working class has held steady for about sixty years now in the United States.

Now, that being the case, I think there’s an underlying argument there that is correct. The Ehrenreichs made the point that as the twentieth century progressed, you got this growth of a new section of the middle classes, the new salaried class. And that’s growing alongside the continued existence of the traditional petty bourgeoisie, the small shopkeepers and the owner-operators.

Now, what that means is even though the professionals are not a class, and there are different classes within what we call professionals, it is the case that around 50 to 60 percent of what we call professionals are middle class. Now, that means any labor movement, any socialist movement that grows in the twenty-first century is going to have to win over large sections of what we call the professionals. Because workers, on all the analyses that have been done today, in the past, I’d say thirty years, manual workers, blue-collar, unskilled workers, don’t comprise more than, say, 40 percent of the occupational labor force.

And even if you bring in skilled workers, we’re talking about 60 percent. So the unskilled and skilled working class is the biggest class in the economy, but it is not the overwhelmingly preponderant class. There are still anywhere from twenty-five to thirty, maybe even more, members of the occupational structure that are nonworkers and non-capitalists.

And you’re going to have to come up with a political program that appeals to them. So even though it may be overdrawn to say that they’re all being proletarianized, some of them are, but then they’re also being professionalized at the same time. The capitalist economy is always doing both things, and it’s a question of which one is the dominant tendency at any given moment.

After two hundred years, what we can confidently say is the middle class ain’t going away. As long as there’s capitalism, it’s going to generate professionals, and it’s going to have a space for petty commodity production, for what we call the petty bourgeoisie. Any socialist movement that’s going to be successful cannot confine itself to blue-collar or unskilled workers. It also has to extend beyond them.

You know, there are scientific concepts, and there’s what philosophers call folk concepts. When you look at folk concepts, you have to look at what people are trying to convey through them. Now, there might be certain folk concepts that are just crazy, like angels, or God, or something like that.

They explain certain things, but they’re literally just fictions. But then there are folk concepts that are overlapping with the scientific concepts, and they do a good enough job that they’re not doing active damage. I think PMC is such a concept.

If you look at the criticisms on the Left of the influence of the PMC, the people who they’re talking about, the strata that they’re talking about, someone like Catherine Liu, who writes brilliantly on the PMC and the way in which virtue signaling has overtaken political analysis, we know who she’s talking about, and those people actually exist. I wouldn’t want to say “stop using the concept” because the same way that the Ehrenreichs used it, you know who they’re talking about. I think they were analytically flawed in the way they used it, but what they did with it made a lot of sense.

I wouldn’t want to have people fill out a form before they were allowed to use the concept, and I wouldn’t want to say this is as useless as angels or demons or something like that. So no, I would not have strictures against it. What I would say is this, that because of the way in which it obscures real divisions and different sorts of emplacements within the economy, we want to be careful taking a sweeping negative view toward it for two reasons. One is the professional class strata are, in fact, in different classes, and some of them are people you’re going to want to organize.

Some of them are people who are actually being exploited. Teachers and nurses were a great example of this, I thought. The second reason is that even the nonworkers, the middle-class elements, there are those within them that can be won over to a social-democratic or even a socialist program.

And so you want to make sure that whatever program you’re designing is one that can hegemonize these groups. I think the key is this: What you cannot have is a left in which what we are now folk-calling the PMC sets the terms, in which it has hegemony, because that is the Left we have today.

And it is one that is anathema to most people outside the college-educated classes, right? So I think the key here is not to expel them from the Left. The point is that you have to have a left whose horizons, whose vision, and whose culture is set by working people, people who are not college educated, are not trying to move upward into the professions.

As long as you can attract them to the Left, you will have a fighting chance at actually achieving power. The Left today, because it is the Left that the Ehrenreichs described fifty years ago, is one that has very limited appeal. And that reflects the hegemony of the groups that they were indicting.

I think that is something to be retained. And there are very, very brilliant, and I think useful critics on the left today of that culture. And the way they use PMC, the way they see inside the PMC that’s objectionable is something that every socialist should be objecting to.

And I do think there’s a very rapid process of learning that is making the younger leftists see just how limited, and how self-referential, and how backward a lot of this PMC leftism is.