Like my base assumption is that she's wrong. If you think the PMC is an actual class then you're also only one step away from 🤡
https://twitter.com/jacob__posts/status/1367492298783744001?s=19
Like my base assumption is that she's wrong. If you think the PMC is an actual class then you're also only one step away from 🤡
https://twitter.com/jacob__posts/status/1367492298783744001?s=19
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Yeah, it's weird. It's like they're saying the petite bourgeois don't exist. Like waving your hand at the slave-farmer and the slave-overseer and saying "There is no difference". Then just lighting a pile of Piketty's "Capitalism in the 21st" on fire and insisting modern finance capital hasn't materially altered the way wealth and power change hands.
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:this:
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Modern finance capital has changed the nature of centralization of the heads of these firms, but the mode of production has not changed. The petite bourgeois still exists, they're not the PMC and PMC is generally a term for one group of petite bourgeois to try and distance themselves from another group of petite bourgeois who have more cringe affects. Actually examining how managers fit into production, their role in the finance capital era, is a worthwhile endeavor. PMC as a concept approaches instead the cultural norms and signifers, grouping together members of the proletariat with petty bourgeoisie due to "professionalism".
It identifies a class tier that comes out of corporate governance. One that is fills some necessary managerial role within Capitalism, both socially (creating the illusion of upward mobility) and economically (by quite literally managing lower-tier workers). A culture surrounds the class, and that episode was mostly poking fun at the attempts to market to people within the class through status symbols. But this thread seems to confuse Chapo-as-Observational-Comedy with the PMC-as-class-tier.
People are only able to indulge in these cultural consumerist fetishes because they have surplus disposable income. And they have that income because of their class status. And they have that class status because they fill a necessary position in the capitalist class hierarchy.
That the fetishes the class adopts are so absurd is something the Pod is making jokes about. Much in the same way they love to make fun of proletariat movie propaganda coming out of the Evangelical community.
I never had an issue with the premise of the episode itself. My issue is that it's not a useful class identifier or analysis, by leftists like Amber when she's doing more serious writing outside of comedy podcasts, and that it combines the necessary managerial role, something that was already observed in Capital by Marx as the stock corporation grew and became fully realized in 20th century shareholders management, and where petty bourgeois would work better to refer to them, with "professional", which is based around the culture shared of similar educational setting to the managers and similar basic cultural outlook and affect. It's not that the culture surrounds the class, it's that PMC assumes there's a coherent class there when there isn't. Proletariat members of the PMC (which exist because of the innate focus of the concept on culture itself as class) are not able to indulge in the cultural consumerism, do not have that class status or relation to production. It's entirely fine to criticize superstructural things-that's a large part of the podcast, after all. Managerial class would work better, since that's the vital part of it as class in relation to production.
The episode itself shows some of its actual utility though-for some professionals, themselves well off, to try and pretend they're not actually professionals and anything like the peers they criticize.
Amber.
I'm getting some serious "We Live In A Society" vibes off this line.
You're not allowed to say PMC because Marx didn't use those exact words 150 years ago. Apparently.
Your take is dumb and you should feel bad
All your takes are bad and you should stop posting.
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Class is defined by relation to property, wage labor, and the mode of production. The proletariat are those that are almost or entirely propertyless, obliged to sell their labor for wages. Petty bourgeious often is associated with small business owners, but can include those that do wage labor but don't have a substantial immediate concern if they were to lose their job, the middle class is the modern equivalent basically. It's not a hard and fast thing and there is a general trend, outside of great moves like the shift towards stocks and pensions tied to mutual indexes and finance capital, that results in the proletarization of the petty bourgeois. Other classes have been eroded in time-peasantry no longer exist in a great deal in most countries, lumpenproletariat still exists as well.
PMC can refer to a general group-it's issue though is the tying together of managerial positions and proletarian positions like nurses, whose relation to production is considerably different, due to cultural signifiers. Some people in the Chapo sphere like Matt are aware of this, but take the position that since America is so devoid of material politics, that it's a useful lens to analyze how partisan politics works in the US, and attempts to break from electoral politics like the nascent left and the tensions within it.
Finally, a good post!
ok now that you’ve laid claim to your precious jargon term “class”, rich people are fucking evil
Sure, they are and I often call them evil myself on a whim even if it's imprecise and moralism and not useful class analysis. PMC doesn't refer well to rich people either, it's used by some college educated professionals to refer to other college educated professionals who have more annoying cultural affectations, whether they're actually poorer or richer or more powerful or less. Insult rich people then if you're talking about them, or professional liberal culture if it's the lib telling you to if you don't vote you're a bad person.