March 2020 and the Professional-Managerial Class

March 2020 is proving a world historical month for many reasons. One admittedly minor one: it seems to me this month has vindicated the importance of the PMC (Professional-Managerial Class). The great PMC debate raged in Fall 2019 in the height of clashes between supporters of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. While some deny the importance of this concept of class analysis, it seems March 2020 has made it clearer than ever why this concept is important for understanding class and political dynamics in contemporary capitalism.

First, the pandemic economy intensifies the real divide between the PMC and the working class. Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s definition of the PMC highlights “mental labor” as a key differentiation from the “working class” who tend to do more jobs based on manual work (incidentally, Nicos Poultantzas also argued “mental” labor is key to differentiating his version of the PMC: what he calls the “new petty bourgeoisie.”)

This crisis is revealing starkly how important the distinction between mental and manual labor actually is. Those of us PMC knowledge workers in academia, journalism, tech etc. get to work online at #StayAtHome, but there are now millions of “front line” workers in low wage service, health care, food supply, care, and other key sectors have either lost their jobs or had them deemed “essential services” to keep society running. Most of these workers are “manual” in the sense they actually have to move material stuff or people — whether its children, patients, harvesting crops, stocking shelves, or driving a truck.

This article in the New York Times explains where the divide is between capitalists, the “middle class” PMC, and the working class:

“…a kind of pandemic caste system is rapidly developing: the rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class marooned at home with restless children; the working class on the front lines of the economy, stretched to the limit by the demands of work and parenting, if there is even work to be had.”

Second, this seems like a long time ago, but on March 3rd (and in subsequent primaries) the PMC came out in droves for Joe Biden in the Democratic Presidential primary race. Although there is no exit poll data on income, and ‘education’ is not class in any Marxist sense, the Ehrenreichs associate the rise of the PMC with the vast expansion of higher education and the knowledge economy. Biden easily won college educated voters (if you combine Warren and Bloomberg with Biden college educated voters voted against Bernie 63% to 25%). Confusingly, Biden also won non-college educated voters 38% to Bernie’s 33% — which shows Bernie’s campaign itself is more PMC than we’d like to admit (However, the earlier races had exit poll data on income and the lowest income brackets all did vote for Bernie overwhelmingly).

Biden also (of course) famously crushed it with voters over 45. We don’t consider the generational aspects of the PMC much, but the Ehrenreich’s concept itself was forged in an era when the “boomer” generation was coming of age. It was the postwar era that saw a massive expansion of higher education and the rise of the “knowledge economy.”

The Ehrenreichs identified a particular class of people committed to education, meritocracy, and the centrality of knowledge/expertise in governing society that were predominant in the New Left 1960's movements.

As these professional class aspirants aged, they made more money, moved to the suburbs and increasingly became the base of the Democratic Party (as Lily Geismer and Thomas Frank argue, this shift begins in the 1980's). As much as Bernie Sanders wanted to realign the Democratic Party to be a working class party in the tradition of FDR, the brutal reality remains that the party is still a party of the aging and ideologically neoliberal PMC.

The 2018 midterms — where most success was in the affluent suburbs — also revealed the shifting class dynamics of the Democratic Party. As Matt Karp put it:

“the midterms confirmed that the Democrats have become — perhaps more than ever before in their two-hundred-year history — a party of the prosperous…Of the wealthiest forty districts, thirty-five of them just elected a Democrat; of the wealthiest fifty, that number is forty-two.”

The geographical center of this prosperous party — according to Karp — is Fairfax County, Virginia in the wealthy suburbs outside of DC. This is of course the very state where Biden’s massive and convincing win on Super Tuesday seemed to turn the narrative on the evening of March 3rd.

If anything, it is the GOP that is gaining working class voters as the Democratic Party becomes more affluent and cloistered in the “bubbles” of professional class life. This means the populist right — with its toxic cocktail of xenophobia and racism — is more likely to win over the disaffected working class than an increasingly affluent and professional class Democratic Party.

Of course, as critics have pointed out — including the Ehrenreich’s themselves — the PMC is itself shrinking through the decimation of career paths in fields like journalism, academia, and other knowledge sectors. The boomer PMC class project is a less a viable path for the millennial's and zoomer generations. For the younger voters who overwhelmingly supported Bernie Sanders, the PMC ideology of meritocracy and incremental technocratic policy appears woefully equipped to deal with an economy that simply doesn’t work for most people. It might take a decade or two, but the PMC Democratic Party is itself a castle made of sand. But, with the way everything looks, one might wonder if it will be too late to reverse the damage already done.