Its a big club and you're not in it (well maybe YOU are, fucking redditors) epstein

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

  • aaro [they/them, she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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:

    It’s important to note that the technocracy are not excluded from the proletariat because they earn too much money, or because they enjoy a large degree of autonomy in their work. It is the effective (though incomplete) control they exercise over productive assets by virtue of their technical knowledge that separates them from the proletariat. They make largely autonomous decisions about how and where productive assets will be deployed, and the expert knowledge which gives them the ability to do so puts them in a different relationship to both the means of production and to the bourgeoisie than that of the proletarian. At the same time, they do not enjoy the full range of ownership rights over the assets they control – they cannot sell or bequeath them for example. This limitation sets them apart from the petty-bourgeoisie.

    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.

    • jabrd [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      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