Its a big club and you're not in it (well maybe YOU are, fucking redditors)
Woody Allen is the most bourgeois filmmaker I've ever seen. Can you name a single black person in his countless whitewashed movies about "iconic New York City"? There's the one sex worker named "Cookie". It makes sense that PMC class character would make even Jewish people hate their black neighbors as much as white nazis in suburbs...that actually explains a lot about Hannah Arendt's contempt for eastern European Jews in her holocaust revisionist journo propaganda lol
PMC is an incoherent pseudo-class because its parameters are poorly defined. People will use PMC to refer to pedophile academics and then turn around and use it to refer to people with communications degrees and blue hair because they’re mad at a post they saw on twitter (you fucking losers). Operationalize your terms and get back to me when you can do basic statistical analysis. It was already a shit analytical tool when Ehrenreich created it and it’s only devolved in popular usage since. Like at best you could use PMC as a blanket term for a coalition of similarly oriented class interests but there’s a massive gap between the petty-boug, the credentialed professional class(?), and corporate managers let alone where a pseudo-feudal group like academia fits in
There's a decent argument I heard in a book called How Capitalism Ends that makes a solid argument for the recognition of the Technocracy (and kind of the PMCs for similar reasons) as a separate class from both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in recent times, here's the excerpt:
Most of these traits are shared by the PMC as well
The book's decent but it's fairly anti AES (although it only comes up like twice in the whole book and for less than a couple sentences each time) and a little bit trot so tread carefully. Very good for getting new lefties on board with the economics of Marxism without having to have them buy into China good immediately.
I think this is a more functional analysis of what the PMC thesis is trying to get at but I would say it doesn’t cleanly map to a Marxist class definition and instead fits more cleanly with the ‘elites’ school of class analysis that posits a strata at the top of the classes that guide and lead them. These elites hoard wealth but also skills (like in your excerpt) and influence. The labor aristocrat thesis fits in with this as well wherein you have highly skilled proletariat who recognize their individual benefit from hoarding and then carteling their skill set away from other workers (trade unions bad actually). This hoarding behavior is also super prevalent in bureaucracies where chokepoints of expertise develop and allow individuals power beyond their station. I could see why the author would be critical of China or really any existing-socialist state as they’re very prone to this skill trap (see: late USSR).
My issue with the PMC thesis is that it’s underdeveloped, not that it’s completely off base
I have recently seen someone refer to Starbucks Barista's as PMC so I think at this point the term has lost whatever explanatory power it had to explain the actions of the Transitional Stratas of professional and lanyard groups in the labour aristocracy or lower PB.
This internet web forum has poisoned my brain so much that I thought the "PB" at the end of your post stood for "poop balls".
I consider PMC to mean Proles who think they are capitalists because they don’t see themselves as a true worker.
They don’t get that THEY DO NOT OWN AND CONTROL THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION.
That definition has nothing to do with any of the words that make up PMC though.
So it's just false consciousness? It doesn't describe a material relationship to the means of production? Because a whole lot of professionals and managers do see themselves as workers, especially in the United States where everyone with any job title considers themself working class.
Idealism
The middle conjunct at the end there is "labor aristocrat"