"The problems with PMC Theory" - Sam Badger (2025)

In 1976, Marxist sociologists Barbara and John Ehrenreich published two essays on what they called the “Professional-Managerial Class”, or the PMC. This class, they argued, is distinct from the classic Marxist categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat, as well as the old petit bourgeoisie of small businessmen usually associated with the middle class. This PMC is the new middle class, and though it shares many properties with the working class (like selling their labor for a living), it has distinct class interests as well as a sense of entitlement and elitism thanks to their education. The Ehrenreichs blame the conflicting worldviews and goals between the PMC and the working class for the failure of socialism to advance in the United States, the dominance of “progressive” politics over class politics, and the general state of degeneracy of the American political left. Today, many on the left (and some on the right) make use of the Ehrenreich’s category to blame the PMC for identity politics, “wokeness”, and other targets for criticism.

The Ehrenreich’s argument has a lot of strengths, as it does identify real political divergences and conflicts within the American left. This explanatory power has given the theory legs, hence its widespread influence in political discourse to this day. Yet the PMC is not a distinct class, but an agglomeration of skilled mental workers, managers, administrators, and the professional petit bourgeoisie. What the Ehrenreichs identify as a class is rather a cross-class cultural milieu, and the political issues they blame on the PMC is rather a conflict largely (but not entirely) within the working class. These internal class conflicts are not uncommon historically, and emerge from real divergences of interests.

The Category

The category of “PMC”, as the Ehrenreichs describe it, captures the educated professional elite of our society:

The PMC thus includes such groups as scientists, engineers, teachers, social workers, writers, accountants, lower- and middle-level managers and administrators, etc. — in all some twenty to twenty-five per cent of the U.S. population.

Most of these people sell their labor to make a living, which is the distinguishing feature of Marx’s proletariat. Though the chapter of Marx’s 3rd volume of Capital dealing with class was never finished, it’s pretty clear for anyone who has delved into his writings that the proletarian is the one who sells their labor to others who manage and profit from it.

Yet there is another important distinction in Marx’s work between productive and unproductive labor. Notably, this distinction was not invented by Marx himself (neither was the term proletariat or bourgeoisie, for that matter), but inherited from thinkers like Adam Smith. Productive labor in an economic sense is any labor which produces commodities for sale. Thus, to be productive isn’t simply about making something nice. Cooking food for the homeless and giving it out for free is “productive” in the sense that it makes something, but unproductive in an economic sense since it doesn’t make commodities. Is a teacher productive? If they teach in a private school, yes, because they produce the commodity of education. If they teach in a public school, no, because the services they offer are not commodities. Yet Marx, ever the dialectician, has to go complicate this distinction. Even if a teacher doesn’t directly contribute to the creation of commodities, they are a necessary step in the production process because they teach students how to be more productive and resourceful adults. Thus, from the point of view of an individual business, teachers don’t look productive, but from the point of view of society as a whole, the teacher is very much a part of the great proletarian machine of society.

The Ehrenreichs argue that the PMC doesn’t do productive labor but rather reproductive labor, which means, they serve the goals of social reproduction. They don’t produce commodities, but rather reproduce the whole ideological order:

… the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat has developed to the point that a class specializing in the reproduction of capitalist class relationships becomes a necessity to the capitalist class. That is, the maintenance of order can no longer be left to episodic police violence.

In their view, the PMC works in education, management, bureaucracy, engineering, and the production of culture because these roles are necessary to sustaining our social order. Its existence and expansion as a class is sustained largely by the state, which taxes the social surplus to hire these workers, but also by private institutions involved in these tasks.

Right off the bat, there’s a problematic hole in the theory. The PMC includes cultural workers, who do produce commodities. Movie studios hire college-educated individuals to write or edit screenplays which go on to become movies, and these movies in turn are then “sold” in the form of theater tickets, downloads, and so on. Thus, the “PMC” in this case is productive since they’re a necessary part of the creation of commodities. Moreover, every movie studio needs to hire a bunch of other people as well to make these movies. Many of these other folks are unambiguously “working class” like the janitors who clean the studios or the carpenters who build the sets. All of these people are involved in the production process of the movie, and all of them see their labor exploited by the studios in the process of movie production (hence the profits on these films).

The example of movie studios undermines the claim that productive and reproductive labor can be clearly distinguished. For many Marxists like the Ehrenreichs, the “culture industry” engages in reproduction, not production, because the narratives, implicit values, and ideas of our social order are reinforced among those entertained. Movies reaffirm the ideological commitments, values, and practices of our society. Films like Birth of a Nation, Battleship Potempkin, Triumph of the Will, and Mr Smith Goes to Washington all served the function of normalizing certain forms of subjectivity. Thus, they do serve a role in ideological reproduction. However, they’re still creating commodities and hence are productive. So long as the movie is something I must buy the right to enjoy, I’ve consumed a cultural commodity as much as the person who eats a loaf of bread. In reality, there is no firm distinction between productive and reproductive labor, and it may well be the case that most labor in some ways does both. The bread produced by the baker is as much a necessary act of reproductive labor which keeps the workers fed as it is an act of productive labor which creates loaves. It is true that a much greater portion of reproductive labor is free for the consumer instead of commodified, but this is hardly true of all reproductive labor.

Rather than distinguishing the PMC as a distinct class, I would understand it as an agglomeration of at least two groups.

First, there is a managerial and administrative elite whose task is to oversee and supervise workers and production purposes, and to track whether relative metrics are being met.

Second, there is a great mass of people who are professionals such as nurses, clerks, accountants, journalists, doctors, teachers, professors, lawyers, writers, and others who are specialists. These professionals once largely worked either as employees in specialist firms, or as petty businessmen (petit bourgeoisie). Think of the doctor with the private practice, or the teacher at a small elite private school. Some worked in larger non-profit institutions like the state or large universities.

Importantly, these professionals could exist as one of several different classes. As Vivek Chibber points out, lawyers don’t fit a clear class category due to their profession:

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.

As Chibber argues in his interview, one important flaw with the PMC as a category is that it’s actually a cross-class category. It includes workers who do a job underneath people who own a business and also professionals who do their job as independent businessmen. One of Marx’s insights was to define class as one’s relationship to the means of production, not one’s income, and to treat income as a mere symptom of this more fundamental relationship. When we understand class in this way, we can see how different it is to be a professional who works independently and one who works under a corporation.

For the most part, these skilled professionals were able to get better wages than the rest of society because so few knew how to do the kind of work they could do. Moreover, by the 1900s an increasing share of these jobs began to require credentials - while it was possible in the 1800s for anyone with a bone saw and a passing knowledge of anatomy could call themselves a “doctor”, by the 1950s there was a complex, formalized system of credentials and licenses. The role of credentials is an important part of the PMC category as outlined by the Ehrenreichs.

Yet isolating credentialing as a central factor doesn’t tell as much as the Ehrenreichs might have thought. There are many credentialed professional workers who engage in various types of manual labor, from hair stylists and barbers to welders to masseuses to yoga instructors. Even taxi drivers and truckers need licenses. None of these groups engage in the management or reproduction of capitalism, rather they produce commodities (or at least commodified services like a yoga class).

The Fate of the Category

An important part of their argument is that the power of the PMC has grown with its demographic growth. Society needed more universities to train more PMC. As more universities have come into being, the power of the PMC has only grown, further driving the growth of more universities in a positive feedback loop:

The rebirth of PMC radicalism in the sixties came at a time when the material position of the class was advancing rapidly. Employment in PMC occupations soared, and salaries rose with them. The growth was so rapid that extensive recruitment from the working class became necessary to fill the job openings. (One early 1960s study indicated that no less than a quarter of the sons of skilled blue-collar workers and close to a fifth of the sons of semi-skilled workers were climbing into the PMC.) (1) It has become fashionable to argue that engineers, teachers, social workers and the like were becoming “proletarianized” — the fate Marx had predicted for the middle class. (2) But what was taken as a symptom of proletarianization, e.g., the expansion and bureaucratization of the university, was in many cases really a token of the rapid expansion of the class. The late fifties and early sixties were a golden age for the PMC, not a time of decreasing opportunities and compression into the proletarian mold.

Yet the reality since they first proposed the PMC category has been quite different. As university education expanded, the value which a university education brought went down. More and more people were getting college educations, not only within the United States but other nations across the developed world. This was done because college educated workers received higher incomes, and a more educated workforce therefore would equate to a more affluent population. However, if we consider the other side of the coin, the logic starts to break down. The college educated workers were better paid because there were fewer of them, giving them more bargaining power and making the competition for their jobs far more labor-friendly. Capitalist firms were fine with paying higher taxes to fund more college education because it increased this supply of qualified workers. This is a logical market response; as the supply of these workers increases without a commensurate increase in demand, their market value goes down. This makes sense if we consider the supply of Americans will college degrees:

To some extent, the Ehrenreich’s theory was premised on the continued growth of demand for those they called PMC. This was a trend that had remained pretty steady, as they noted, since the industrial era of the 1800s. As a more technologically sophisticated and productive (therefore affluent) society, the modern economy requires increasing numbers of educated workers to function. Yet like so many economic trends, this couldn’t continue indefinitely.

The bloated labor market for educated professionals came about with the reduction in wages and benefits. This can be seen in the university system where the Ehrenreichs worked. As the number of qualified PhDs went up faster than the number of professors they required, universities and colleges were increasingly able to reduce the number of well-paid, full-time tenure faculty in exchange for underpaid adjuncts who often have to work at multiple schools to make ends meet, and are never given enough classes to qualify as full-time. This has led to an inexorable proletarianization of academic labor, as even those lucky enough to find full-time faculty jobs now face competition from the adjuncts.

Moreover, as the supply of these professional workers increased, the threat that underpaid professionals could go on to start a private practice went away. While some professionals like university professors never had the option of starting a private practice (nobody is going to pay for stand-alone philosophy courses that don’t lead to them getting real credentials), people like doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, and others had the option of striking it alone if they’re underpaid. The option to become petit bourgeois gave professionals bargaining power. Yet this option is simply not a realistic one for most.

Barbara Ehrenreich acknowledged these trends in a later interview with Dissent Magazine, noting how the only group of PMC who retained their privileged status in the economy were upper management and administrative staff:

Press: In your 2013 reflection on the PMC, you write, “The center has not held. Conceived as ‘the middle class’ and as the supposed repository of civic virtue and occupational dedication, the PMC lies in ruins.” You add that “the PMC’s original dream—of a society ruled by reason and led by public-spirited professionals—has been discredited.” What happened to the PMC?

Ehrenreich: I do think it’s been seriously smashed. In that article we wrote for the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, John and I talk about professions as basic and seemingly eternal as law, for example. That’s been undermined: law schools fake the number of their graduates who end up with jobs that are even related to the law. You of course know what’s happened to journalists; we don’t get paid. College teaching [has been] totally undermined by essentially minimum-wage adjuncts. So I would say that what happened to the blue-collar working class with deindustrialization is now happening with the PMC—except for the top managerial end of it, which continues to do very well and perhaps amounts to about 20 percent of the population.

This suggests the aforementioned bifurcation in the class category they proposed. Where professionals are increasingly dragged into the working class, administrators and managers take up a different role in the economy as direct mediators between the ruling class (the state and capitalists) and the workers. The responsibility of the administrator centers on metrics and implementing policies to meet those metrics. For instance, a university administrator pursues the metric of reducing student dropout rates because the state government has decided to prioritize that goal. They do so because their university is competing with other universities for state funds and rankings, as well as more enrollment. Administrators are necessary because, as corporations, private enterprises, and state governments continue to expand, owners and the state are increasingly removed from the day-to-day affairs on the ground. Since it’s impossible to monitor each individual worker or consumer at a large scale, stakeholders require generalized metrics to determine how successful and efficient their enterprise is. Thus, the administrator exists to maximize the efficiency of the workplace, and they get a cut of the gains from increased efficiency. Yet they also benefit from a conflict of interest, since to some extent the administrators who determine and monitor the metrics of the first place, and therefore their own success. Thus, administrators and upper-level management necessarily have social and economic leverage that distinguishes them from the professionals and other workers who are subject to these metrics.

Skilled and “Unskilled”

As I argued in a recent blog post, the category of unskilled labor has more to do with convention, and most if not all labor requires at least some bare minimum for skill. Yet what this convention does capture is that most people have certain skills. A professional driver in 1910 was a skilled worker, but a rideshare driver today isn’t, because most people know how to drive.

What the Ehrenreichs identify as a class distinction is rather a skill distinction. Mental labor requires certain skills which require sufficient levels of education in the relevant field. Accountants must be great at math, and philosophy professors must be able to reproduce Kant’s categorical imperative in a lecture. These skills generally come through a university education today, though this wasn’t always the case. As we’ve seen, this meant more bargaining power for professionals in a time when education was less common, but decreasing bargaining power as the rates of university education go up.

We see this today with coders. Between the Clinton and Obama years, there was this presupposition among political elites (as well as the wider public) that we needed more coders. The boom industry was tech, and there simply weren’t enough Americans able to string together lines of python or html. Workers hit with deindustrialization here told to learn to code, as this would simultaneously get work for the unemployed and also find more workers for the growing tech industry. Yet by the 2010s, there were plenty of coders and it became a decreasingly lucrative option for workers.

This is very similar to process which we saw among artisan workers during the 1700s and 1800s in England, as highly skilled forms of labor were replaced by machines. Where a highly skilled tailor was required to make a coat in 1750, by 1850 a series of machines manned by low-skilled workers could make the same coat in a fraction of the time. This de-skilling of labor through the machine (and its subsequent impact on workers’ bargaining power) was a central grievance behind the Luddite movement of the early 1800s in England.

Yet we also see the reverse process, as “blue collar” skilled labor like welding or electrical engineering go up in value because there aren’t enough people with these skills to fill all the job openings. Today, many are telling college students to drop out and get some technical degree in some form of skilled manual labor. In other words, the privilege that the Ehrenreichs identified in professionals to leverage their knowledge and credentials for better wages is a property of skilled labor in general, not mental labor in specific.

The PMC and cultural conflict

What is true is that there’s a deep cultural divide between mental and manual laborers. Those who go to university imbibe various values and ideas from their new setting, from the postcolonial intersectional feminist analysis taught in their anthropology class to the open-mindedness and appreciation of cultural diversity one habituates from simply living among students from across the globe. Professionals who imbibed these values often end up irritated by the real or perceived ignorance of those with less education. This creates political conflict that can destroy any chance for solidarity between these groups.

For instance, debates around “wokeness” and anti-racism in the workplace produced this kind of backlash during the 2010s. College-educated students imbibed certain ideas in their classes, like racial privilege, intersectionality, and identity politics. They often translated these academic theories into a kind of moralistic dogma, and many ended up using that dogma to stand in moral judgement of more socially conservative rural white workers. I think far too much is made of this culture war and its effects, much of it was as much an outcome of social media algorithms as real-world struggles.

In this presentation of events, it was the PMC who were clearly in the wrong for being shrill and judgmental. This definitely seems to be the implication of what the Ehrenreichs wrote of the struggles in their own time, and the heavy-handed elitism of the PMC. These professionals (and students trying to become professionals) looked down their noses at the uneducated proletarians. This is certainly all too true in many instances, yet the story on the ground was actually more complicated. For instance, during the Vietnam, the “hard hat riots” occurred where conservative white construction workers were pitted against anti-Vietnam protesters. Many of the Vietnam war protesters were students training for professional jobs, and the patriotic and pro-war sentiments of the workers were used to split them off from the anti-war protests. Pro-war populists tried to use this tension against the anti-war mayor of New York. How are we to interpret the hostility many American proletarians felt towards the anti-war protesters? Is it to think that the workers are in the right and the anti-war protesters are in the wrong?

What the hard hat riot reminds us is that it’s about much more than just snobby intellectual elites looking down on salt-of-the-earth proles. That doesn’t mean it’s about wise scholars observing the ignorance of the uneducated masses, either. Rather, there are numerous smaller conflicts between groups of workers based on cultural grievances, the meddling of self-interested political leaders, and proximate, local interests not general class interests. We see conflicts between: citizen and non-citizen workers; rural and urban workers; Anglophone and Hispanophone workers; black workers and white workers; extractive workers (miners, etc) and indigenous peoples; agricultural and industrial workers; and so on. In most of these conflicts, we cannot assign “the working class interest” to one side or the other. Rather, both sides are fighting for more narrow, local grievances like their own jobs or living standards. Sometimes the conflict just comes down to mutual ignorance and cultural stereotypes, like so much resentment between rural and urban workers.

This is one place where “intersectional” analysis can actually be quite useful in helping us to see the other cultural and political forces at play in dividing workers amongst themselves. The only way for these various conflicting groups to find any kind of liberation is to unite in solidarity. Environmentalists and coal miners can only defeat the fossil fuel industrialists by working together, and this requires a combination of dialogue, solidarity, and imagination to conceive of a project that meets the needs of both communities. Otherwise, the industrialists will just be able to pit these two groups against each other, such that neither group can achieve its goals and we still have tons of carbon emissions and lots of exploited mine workers.

The Ehrenreichs seem to want this kind of dialogue, solidarity, and imagination themselves. They decried the inability of the workers and the PMC to work together, attributing the failure of the New Left of the 60s and 70s to this failure. Later, Barbara Ehrenreich would go on to decry how “PMC” had become a kind of slur in leftwing spaces, as various Marxists try to burnish their working-class credentials by bashing opposing ideas as “PMC”:

I’m surprised and taken aback by what I got from [Gabriel Winant’s] article. I got the sense within DSA, for example, “PMC” has become a slur of sorts?

… It’s interesting, but I hate to see “PMC” turned into an ultraleft slur. We’re going to have to work together! You’re probably college-educated yourself.

The problem is, by raising a cultural difference produced by different levels of education to a class difference denoting fundamentally distinct interests and practices, the concept of PMC inevitably heightened the divisions between mental and manual workers instead of facilitating a deeper alliance. The Ehrenreichs site an uncomfortable experience trying to bring together professors and workers in the 70s and invited some white workers to present their perspective:

John Ehrenreich and I had a New American Movement (NAM) chapter that often met in our house, and it was interesting in that it had such a mix of people by class—not, unfortunately, by race, but by class. There was a clump of people who were warehouse workers, who were involved in an organizing drive, and then, at the other extreme, there was a full professor and his wife. So it was fascinating and also terrifying to watch the interactions.

I think I in particular was very sensitive to these things because of my own background. My father had originally been a copper miner, and the other men in the family were railroad workers and other miners. But I had gone to college and gotten a PhD, so I was also a card-carrying member of the PMC. I could see the tensions rising. The professor and his wife, who became very dominant in the group, had a lot of contempt for the more working-class people. It was cringeworthy. To me it was important that people get along. We wanted a movement that would include the college teachers and the warehouse workers.

It didn’t work out. The professor and his wife walked out. First, they denounced me personally—they brought a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book, which they read aloud from, only whenever Mao was denouncing liberals, they would say “Barbara.” It was just bizarre, and it was painful at the same time.

Certainly, the ultra-left dogmatism of the professor presented in the story is insufferable and weird. Certainly, when she wrote this she was thinking it was indicative of a broader cultural phenomenon she had experienced in other settings. Yet it’s not clear that it’s a product of anything distinct to the PMC, or professors as a whole. This anecdote does reveal a sad truth, that many professors get caught up in weird ideological dogmas that are barriers to engaging with the wider community. Yet again, this can be explained by a simple cultural distinction.

We can see how the cultural source of this division plays out as increasing numbers of college-educated workers are thrust into working-class jobs, especially in the service sector. As there simply aren’t enough professional jobs for people with degrees, many have to spend some time in these working-class jobs. For some who never find a position in whatever they trained for, it becomes a career. The trope of the blue-haired feminist barista who got a Bachelor’s in the humanities is a silly stereotype, but its true that many of these educated workers bring their collegiate values to their workplace. They do not suddenly stop being “woke feminists” because they have fallen out of the professional class. What’s interesting, then, is the cause of their politics isn’t just a distinct set of interests that come out of being a professional, however much that is a part of their self-conception1 ; much of it is simply a product of their socialization.

Is the PMC why there’s no socialist movement?

The most popular critique of the PMC on the left today (and the one which led Barbara Ehrenreich to rightly decry its use as a slur) is blaming the professional-managerial sectors for the dominance of liberalism over socialism on the left. The thinking goes that the interests of the PMC is squarely rooted in sustaining the current system but making it better, motivating a politics of recognition over a politics of wealth redistribution. The PMC are not interested in taking over the means of production, but merely changing our culture to be more egalitarian and inclusive. The Ehrenreichs never went this far, and thought that the PMC’s interests were served by uniting with the working class. Yet we can see how a hyperbolic and histrionic reading of their argument might lead to the conclusion that the PMC is primarily interested in making people feel “seen”.

The politics of recognition is a part of the radical intellectual tradition on the left going back at least to Hegel. Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic is, in part, a story of recognition as the master demands recognition from a slave he has dehumanized. Since the master has reduced the slave to his object, the master cannot recognize the slave as a real human subject, but by reducing the slave to a mere object the slave cannot grant the master recognition either. This logic informs many leftwing critiques of patriarchy, racism, and other hierarchies. By objectifying women, men cannot recognize their humanity, and women likewise are barred from forming fully human relationships with men. By objectifying black people, white people cannot recognize their humanity, and so on.

The struggle of recognition has a legal dimension, which is eliminating laws that make oppressive hierarchies de jure, such as the civil rights struggle against Jim Crow laws. It also has a cultural dimension, which means eliminating biases in the stories we tell. A not-unproblematic example of this would be the so-called “first black superhero” movie Black Panther.2 African Americans rightly did not feel recognized in the cultural output of Hollywood, and making more inclusive movies with black actors and black stories was seen as a solution. Finally, it has a workplace representation dimension, where some workplaces are deemed hostile to workers of a certain identity. Both Affirmative Action and DEI were policies intended to implement this (whether they were successful in this, or even good ideas in the first place, is not an issue I care to discuss here …)

The argument goes that the PMC are interested in this form of recognition instead of economic goals because they are relatively insulated from the dangerous workplace conditions, economic precarity, and exploitation of the working class. For this reason, they forego economic radicalism in favor of social radicalism. Despite criticizing the PMC as a class category, Chibber still offers a modest endorsement of this thesis that the higher education and wages of professionals lead them to a form of political radicalism devoid of class politics:

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.

Chibber’s argument is that the PMC category might not meet the standards of a “scientific” Marxist category of class, but it does capture legitimate cultural tendencies in the educated elite and therefore works as a “folk concept”. In his view PMC denotes a general population that tends to be more interested in identity politics and virtue signaling because of their higher social status and insulation from the worst aspects of the job market.

I think there’s some value to Chibber’s argument, but it has its limits. First, manual laborers are themselves diverse, and while heterosexual white workers might not care about the politics of recognition, those who are minorities might. For example, working class African Americans of an older generation have voted repeatedly for moderate Democrats like Hillary Clinton who engage in the politics of recognition over candidates like Bernie Sanders who engage more noticeably in economic radicalism. For another, working class women have as much interest in eliminating sexual harassment in the workplace as professional women, and for every actress attacking Weinstein during the Me-Too moment there were plenty of working-class women with similar grievances against their bosses. Thus, it’s not clear to me that we can reduce identity politics to the interference of especially educated workers, and some of the grievances are legitimate even if the theoretical understanding of these grievances is often questionable.

Moreover, the death of economic radicalism in America has impacted manual and mental labor alike. We forget that the norm in the 1990s was a form of neoliberal centrism accepted both by workers and professionals. When the anti-NAFTA protests hit the United States, it brought an interesting alliance of workers and professionals together in opposition, but this opposition was ultimately too small, irrelevant, and politically divided to do much. The zeitgeist after the fall of the Soviet Union (really since the death of FDR) was resolutely anti-communist and fearful of any kind of economic radicalism. Most Americans were simply sold on the power of the free market, consumerism, conspicuous consumption, and the bold new world of technological capitalism. In such a setting, it was inevitable for many to rally around a politics of recognition that promised radicalism without challenging the perceived wisdom of liberal economics.

Finally, plenty of professionals complain as much if not more about the language policing, identity politics, and focus on recognition as the working class. They find it just as alienating, especially if their college education was at a more conservative school, took few humanities or social science classes, or if they received their education in an earlier time. How many times have we heard old, white, educated men complain that they “just don’t know what men are allowed to say anymore” lest they offend a woman they’re hitting on or a black coworker they’re telling a racy joke to. As much as “PMC” HR staff like to hassle employees with “woke” sexual assault trainings, many other “PMC” like to complain about these intrusions on their workday. Again, this suggests that divisions on the politics of recognition have more to do with other cultural commitments and personal experiences than specific class distinctions.

Conclusion

The PMC as outlined by the Ehrenreichs is not a class category, and it simply fails to capture what the category of “class” should. It conflates administrators and upper management with professionals, and therefore people who set metrics of productivity and manage workers with those who engage in the mental side of productive labor (if one still insists on being snarky about this group, perhaps a better term would be “Professional-Managerial Subculture”, or “PMS”). It does capture a real cultural difference between workers with a professional education and those without, but those cultural differences are not absolute and carry over whatever class these people end up inhabiting. Nor are they even the most important cultural differences separating workers today. I would say the divisions between citizen and migrant labor and between urban and rural labor are at least as significant as the one between those with and without a university education.

The Ehrenreichs were making a good-faith effort to overcome the division between mental and manual labor through their intervention. In many ways, their effort was admirable, and they drew many useful conclusions. Yet because it rests on a mistaken distinction, they only fueled the divisions they were trying to overcome. Today, it’s been reduced to a cheap insult which different factions of left-wingers to bash other left-wingers. It’s used as an ad hominem that simply distracts from anything interesting, and fuels divisions that rightwing populists can exploit. Moreover, the ironic truth is that most of the people attacking other people for being “PMC” are themselves “PMC”, and seem to be projecting their own anxieties as much as they are making a serious criticism.

I would argue that mental and manual laborers ought to see themselves as sharing a fundamental class interest, and that both are characterized by their exploitation. Ultimately, we’re all increasingly exploited by an aloof and arrogant class of owners, from Peter Thiel to Larry Ellison to Elon Musk to Donald Trump, as well as the countless other investors on Wall Street. Mental and manual workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your shared chains!

• 1Of course, many of these baristas retain their ambition for “something better”, and that does separate them from other workers who know they will be doing this for the rest of their lives, but all too many know full well that in this job market, this is as good as it gets.
• 2For one thing, Wesley Snipes would like a word with whoever decided Black Panther was the first black superhero movie. For another thing, perhaps our symbol of emancipation shouldn’t be a fictional king of a traditionalist monarchy.