cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3190259
To me they're like mere servants of the State, like Lenin talked about in "2. What is to Replace the Smashed State Machine?" in his writing "The State and Revolution"
Under Capitalism, they are its privileged knights that try to deflect and control, if not defend directly its image as "the only option", who have their incentive in doing so, with their class status stake being in their duty to shepherd the means of production and its resulting benefits
However, they don't own the means of production, as they merely manage it for the landholding, industrialist, and financier capitalists
On the other hand, under Socialism, while its privileges will be probably be done away, the PM class on its own would innovated upon, for their new duty of overseeing, managing, and reporting the collectivized cooperatives and state-owned enterprises..
Until the final stage of Communism arrives, I think they're pretty handy
I say this, because I hear such disgusted sentiment in Hexbear against them
Note: I know a bit about the bazingo techbro culture that the PMC is associated with, please don't criticize them solely on those vibes...
I don't find categorizing certain strata of the working class for the sake of categorization to be meaningful. The ultimate point of distinguishing different strata is to provide a general guideline of prioritizing which strata would be more receptive towards agiprop and should be a prime target for being organized. With this in mind, it should be clear that workers earning minimum wage or less would be more receptive towards building worker power through worker organization than a bunch of overpaid clerical workers all other things being equal. However, to say that the so-called PMC (really labor aristocrats) are inherently reactionary is to say that all forms of labor aristocrat organization must be dismantled because reactionaries should be deprived of political power, which comes out of organization. In other words, to say labor aristocrats are inherently reactionary is to say that a software dev union should be treated in the exact same way as a pig union or a Pinkerton branch or an oil cartel or the MIC, which would be an absolutely wild thing to say. You definitely could have a hypothetical software dev union that proves itself to be reactionary to the point where the Pinkertons beating the shit out of those union members are the lesser of two evil, but as a general rule? Of course not.
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From the original definition of the PMC in an article where the term and acronym was first coined:
The article would go on to list a hodgepodge of jobs ranging from classic labor aristocrat jobs like engineers to middle management types who don't actually own the means of production (I'm guess this is what you're alluding to in your comment) to "workers concerned with the production of ideology" like teachers, social workers, psychologists, and entertainers. This is why I despise the term PMC. It's a trash term that absolutely no one uses in its original definition, which honestly already kinda sucks. In practice, people use it to mean some kind of labor aristocrat working in a white collar job like a software dev or HR manager even when not every labor aristocrat works a blue color job and not every white collar worker is a labor aristocrat.
Notice the hyphen in "professional-managerial" that people today omit. It's very intentional by the original authors. They don't mean managers who work in a professional settings constituting its own class, but professionals and managers together constituting its own class. So, the PMC (professional-managerial class) is simply PC (professional class) + MC (managerial class). They have a table which lists the numbers of certain sectors of the PMC, the sectors being
engineers
manufacturing managers
social, recreation, and religious workers (other than clergy)
college faculty
accountants and auditors
government officials and administrators
editors and reporters
It's basically laborers who do intellectual, administrative, and supervisory work. Like, arguably every single white collar worker would count as a PMC, which the article seems to be pushing although I haven't gone through the whole thing.
Yeaa stepping out of this because even the original term has never been defined well
The idea to include professionals that necessitate the reproduction of capitalist culture and relations is good but a lot of the roles they include are kinda weird and don't fit imo like nurses
Should scientists be a part of this? Or is it just academics?
Ugh, for real. Case in point, how Zizek uses it here.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231203014629/http://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n02/slavoj-zizek/the-revolt-of-the-salaried-bourgeoisie