It’s “professional managerial class”, but its popular usage seems to have started when podcasters began feeling anxious about being middle-class - I don’t believe there’s anything it describes not already encapsulated by the term petit-bourgeoisie.
The middle-class is classified by its relative security compared to the proletariat/working class; a fired journalist usually just goes to work for another middle-class job (or starts a Substack, I suppose), whereas a retail worker faces pauperdom. The reason why the two classes are distinguished is because they have different interests - the middle-class usually entreates the working class to push for policies that ensure its continued existence, as it is constantly under threat of expropriation by the big-boug, whereas the working-class is compelled to associate together and push for its own interests.
This manifests at first in the already-combative elements such as striking for higher wages/reduction of the working day/organization in to unions and such. This is also why communists do not impute this-or-that form of organization in to the proletariat at the outset (think of the various theories floating around about rejecting trade unions wholesale - sections of the proletariat do associate through them, the issue is to overcome these limitations) or think it’s a matter of “raising class consciousness”. Communist consciousness is mediated by & develops through practical struggle and the association that results from it. It requires development, thus time.
The Communist Manifesto:
The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.
This also relates back to the middle-class; Marx earlier in the section refers to "economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind." More directly, explaining the social position of the petty-boug:
In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.
That's not to say the middle-class can't join the fight for communism, and of course, during actual revolutionary situations, these demarcations are not so clearly delineated. It's rather that the lack of immediate need their class position produces means they do not feel the same passion for fighting that the proletariat possesses; there's a line in The German Ideology about the mood of the middle-class being worry/fear of losing their social standing. The PMC category, as much as I've seen of it, seems to be an academic term devised back in the 60s/70s and does not describe anything petty-boug doesn't already. As I mentioned earlier, it tends to be used by self-conscious middle-class people - I don't see any use for it, nor is this somehow the emergence of "a new class" so-called 'Marxists' (who always seem eager to prove some 'new development Marx never foresaw', like the cliffhanger of a Disney movie trailer) claim it to be.
It’s “professional managerial class”, but its popular usage seems to have started when podcasters began feeling anxious about being middle-class - I don’t believe there’s anything it describes not already encapsulated by the term petit-bourgeoisie.
The middle-class is classified by its relative security compared to the proletariat/working class; a fired journalist usually just goes to work for another middle-class job (or starts a Substack, I suppose), whereas a retail worker faces pauperdom. The reason why the two classes are distinguished is because they have different interests - the middle-class usually entreates the working class to push for policies that ensure its continued existence, as it is constantly under threat of expropriation by the big-boug, whereas the working-class is compelled to associate together and push for its own interests.
This manifests at first in the already-combative elements such as striking for higher wages/reduction of the working day/organization in to unions and such. This is also why communists do not impute this-or-that form of organization in to the proletariat at the outset (think of the various theories floating around about rejecting trade unions wholesale - sections of the proletariat do associate through them, the issue is to overcome these limitations) or think it’s a matter of “raising class consciousness”. Communist consciousness is mediated by & develops through practical struggle and the association that results from it. It requires development, thus time.
The Communist Manifesto:
This also relates back to the middle-class; Marx earlier in the section refers to "economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind." More directly, explaining the social position of the petty-boug:
That's not to say the middle-class can't join the fight for communism, and of course, during actual revolutionary situations, these demarcations are not so clearly delineated. It's rather that the lack of immediate need their class position produces means they do not feel the same passion for fighting that the proletariat possesses; there's a line in The German Ideology about the mood of the middle-class being worry/fear of losing their social standing. The PMC category, as much as I've seen of it, seems to be an academic term devised back in the 60s/70s and does not describe anything petty-boug doesn't already. As I mentioned earlier, it tends to be used by self-conscious middle-class people - I don't see any use for it, nor is this somehow the emergence of "a new class" so-called 'Marxists' (who always seem eager to prove some 'new development Marx never foresaw', like the cliffhanger of a Disney movie trailer) claim it to be.
Id say a majority of people called PMC are labour aristocrats, only the actual managers are PMC, not a doctor or a code monkey.