Book Excerpt, MY YEAR IN THE ONLINE LEFT: Class Division in Leftist Politics
My new book, My Year In The Online Left: Social Media, Solidarity and Armchair Activism, streets tomorrow. It’s meant as a “social media travel guide” for activists and casual observers of online political doings. This sample looks at the “inter-left class war”; it’s from a chapter titled The “PMC?” The “Brahmin Left?” The “Knowledge Worker Class?”
The paperback version can be pre-ordered at Barnes & Noble and many other outlets or ordered through your local bookstore; the paperback version will appear tomorrow on Amazon at this url: https://www.amazon.com/My-Year-Online-Left-Solidarity-ebook/dp/B0D485S8NT. Cheers!
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Your basic, off-the-shelf Marxist regards the proverbial “class war” as a conflict between two distinct classes, business owners (the bourgeoisie) and workers (the proletariat). Molds are made to be broken, though, and some leftist intellectuals believe it’s important to go a bit deeper and examine the hierarchical subdivisions that exist within the aggregate working class. That subject comes up now and then in Fifth Estate [independent] media discourse.
Anyone who’s ever put in a 40-hour workweek knows that most workplaces have pecking orders beyond the owner/worker dynamic. At the very top of the labor hierarchy is the upper management class, or “managerial class.” The latter term comes to us from the 1941 book The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World by James Burnham. A Trotskyist turned American conservative, Burnham described the managerial class as a subset of highest-level workers tasked with keeping businesses in business. They’re responsible for such things as handling the tasks associated with the technical direction and coordination of all production processes and components, including the workforce itself. According to Burnham, the managerial class is paid to perform all the workaday duties of business owners while not actually owning the means of production. In other words, unlike the owner class, the managerial class of Burnham’s day had precarity (job insecurity). They received nice paychecks but didn’t own the places where they worked.
Burnham reasoned that all the baked-in worker uncertainty and the absence of owner-level authority would someday drive the managerial class to, as Burnham admirer George Orwell (yes, that George Orwell) interpreted, “eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands.” It would be up to them to defeat the owner class, Burnham believed, because everyday workers were too disorganized to ever band together and pressure the ownership class into sharing profits with workers and such.
Burnham had become disenchanted with communism over the fact that the Russian Revolution had failed to produce a genuinely socialist work environment (in other words, one in which there are no class distinctions on shop floors, an environment where all workers share resources and profits). Instead, it had produced Josef Stalin’s bureaucracy, which joined the rest of the world in growing a new managerial class that controlled the means of production indirectly.
Burnham was by no means the only 20th-century figure to abandon the left over the betrayals of Stalinism. As trans activist Sybil Davis noted, Robert Oppenheimer became so cynical over it that he joined the right, eventually building the ultimate tool of capitalist “lesser evilism,” the atomic bomb.
Predictably, today’s right-wingers falsely prop up Burnham’s perfectly understandable rejection of Stalin’s “proxy capitalist” cabal of good old boys as proof that he was a born right-winger who never believed socialism could ever really work. Along with sneakily trying to conflate Marxism with “managerialism,” Charlemagne Institute editor Edward Welsch offered as evidence this Burnham quote: “The ‘managerial economy’ is the basis for a new kind of [exploitive] class society.” That’s true, of course, but come on, Stalin was the one leading the faux-socialist charge Burnham was complaining about, not Andrew Carnegie.
I view Burnham’s “managerial class” as nowadays being incorrectly lumped in with the “Professional Managerial Class” (PMC), the highly skilled, college-educated, politically liberal-centrist segment of the general labor force. That subset has been examined and written about extensively for decades, which, as you’d expect, has led to confusion over exactly what it is.
The husband-and-wife team of Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined the phrase “Professional Managerial Class” in a 1977 essay for Radical America. At the time, the Ehrenreichs viewed the PMC as an affluent group of laborers that included not just degreed, well-off specialists and assorted other professionals but also their upper management bosses. By that measure, there’s a truckload of gray area in the PMC distinction, which has made for much discussion fodder in academic and Fifth Estate circles.
By and large, Marxists tend to view the PMC as being no different than any other subset of the composite working class and thus they hold that any time spent arguing about them or their motives diverts attention from the only class struggle that matters, the one between business owners and workers. In fact, some say that despite fitting the PMC description due to having advanced degrees and such, some PMCs aren’t actually PMCs at all, such as low-paid public-school teachers. Workers in that group, Amber A’Lee Frost observed, “don’t actually manage their students so much as provide a service for them, and are managed almost completely by non-teacher administrations.”
Mostly, the fuss over PMCs revolves around the fact that, as a class, they gravitate to mainstream liberal establishment groupthink and that their unshakable faith in the Democrats and center-left media propagandists (MSNBC et al) is a deterrent to labor solidarity. Accurate as that may be, Frost contends that they’d support pretty much any worker-empowerment movement that gained real traction, given that the class is, as Frost puts it, part of “the cart, not the horse.” That’s a possibility; if a few MSNBC hosts were suddenly to shift their focus away from Donald Trump’s boundless horribleness and toward the myriad discomforts suffered by anyone who spends most of their waking hours working for a paycheck, there’s a good chance they’d take their low-fat salted-caramel cappuccinos and jump right on the bandwagon.
Like every other intellectual chew-toy eggheads chomp down on, the PMC is known by different names. Some refer to it as the “Brahmin Left,” a label invented by French economist Thomas Piketty, whose major claim to fame is his 2014 bestselling book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a 700-page doorstop in which he comes to the mind-blowing conclusion that people who come into huge amounts of money usually invest it to increase their wealth instead of donating it to orphans.
Since the passing of Barbara Ehrenreich (the most well-known of the couple), the tradition of analyzing and critiquing the PMC has been taken up by such figures as University of Pennsylvania professor Adolph Reed Jr. and Catherine Liu, a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Liu’s 2021 book, Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, expands on the Ehrenreichs’ ideas, characterizing the PMC as a class of elite, well-paid workers who “labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways.”
Farther leftists view the PMC as a toxic component of the “neoliberal problem” and maintain that the PMC’s role as the de facto “dictatorship of political correctness” is leading the country’s left wing in the wrong direction. PMCs focus their rage on symptoms of the system’s failure — issues of racial equality and such — rather than the political, economic, and legal causes of it.
Some would say PMCs are so content with their lot that they oppose any changes to the socioeconomic landscape. Their jobs are cushy, rarely if ever requiring them to perform manual labor. Life is good for them, so in the end, most PMCs don’t feel any urgent need to “join in solidarity” with the broad labor movement.
That’s a grave mistake on their part. In 2013, Barbara Ehrenreich revised her assessment of the PMC, conceding that times had changed since the 1970s. She noted that, as a class, the PMC is slowly being stripped of its power, a feeling with which workers in the US manufacturing sector have been agonizingly familiar for decades. She wrote, “[It] came as a shock to many when, in the 2000s, businesses began to avail themselves of new high-speed transmission technologies to outsource professional functions. Hospitals sent a growing variety of tasks — such as reading X-rays, MRIs and echocardiograms — to be performed by lower-paid physicians in India. Law firms outsourced document review, review of litigation emails, and legal research to English-speakers abroad. The publishing industry sent out editing, graphic design, and — for textbooks — even parts of content creation. Corporations undercut U.S.-based engineers and computer professionals by outsourcing product design and development.”
Note that Ehrenreich wrote those words long before the recent boom in artificial intelligence, which threatens to replace many professionals specializing in technical, artistic and other functions today. It’s inevitable that no matter how well-paid they are or how secure they feel, more and more PMCs will be stripped of their duties, which will be performed by automated processes or sent overseas to be handled by low-cost labor. And there’ll be nothing they can do about it. They are, after all, laborers, not capitalists.
In the foreseeable future, when the capitalists’ money-saving tanks really get rolling, the PMCs’ university pedigrees won’t save them from feeling the numbing dread of precarity. As is, many older tech workers are familiar with it. Like the janitor who knows there’ll come a day when they can’t bend down to snatch a piece of trash off the floor, the techie PMC has an “expiration date.” The moment they graduate from college, the clock begins counting off the minutes toward their degree’s obsolescence, when their skill set will no longer meet the needs of their managers. At that point they must either abandon their career or undergo extensive “retraining,” regardless of how little enthusiasm they have for doing so.
Let’s not forget academia, as long as we’re gazing into the blackest depths. For years, the tradition of tenure has been under assault by “free speech”-thumping conservatives. One upshot of that has been the widespread replacement of full-time faculty by low-paid adjunct professors, which resulted in double-digit declines in full-timers being offered tenure. That trend has prompted many non-tenured educators to give up their careers.
Meanwhile, for employees in Burnham’s “managerial class,” the line between worker and capitalist is blurring. While precarity continues creeping up on the PMCs, the managerial class is fast transcending any “proxy capitalist” designation. Increasingly, they’re workers who double as board members, turning Burnham’s prediction of “the takeover of capitalism by the managerial class“ on its head. As Ehrenreich explained, “College-educated professionals seem to have been fully integrated into their corporate enterprises — to the point where stock options have effectively transformed middle- and upper-level executives into ‘owners.’”
Economic precarity isn’t the only thing affecting PMCs negatively. Critics assert that PMCs become increasingly alienated just for blithely enjoying the peace that comes from their being culturally “woke” (and well-off). “People getting woke in twenty-first century industrialized societies often experience themselves as profoundly disconnected from others,” wrote author-activist Cynthia Kaufman in 2019. “Coming to consciousness in a toxic culture of individualism and consumerism can make it difficult to find the next necessary steps to unraveling structures of power: engaging in effective action.”
I’d submit that genuine, effective action won’t come without solidarity among all workers. Toward that, Liu doesn’t fully concur with Frost’s contention that the PMC would ever join the rest of the working classes under any circumstances (if the lower classes would even have them). It’s all uncertain, I’d say, considering that the PMC has snubbed the lower classes for so long that Trump and his army of alt-right Borgs had no trouble assimilating them. “I think the alt-right appeals to working-class alienation and anger,” Liu told me. “The PMC is alienated but uses self-discipline and liberal false consciousness to channel their outrage into hatred of working-class people, whom they see as irrational. The working class is the disorganized majority [my emphasis], and they respond to the status quo by rejecting liberalism and even democracy, which they see as hopelessly corrupted by special interests.” So what’s the bad news? “They’re not wrong.”
Culture war issues seem to have a dangerously narcotic effect on PMCs, distracting them from their own precarity. The result has been that they appear to be more concerned with matters of decorum, such as Donald Trump’s unsightly presence in the political arena, than the fact that his ascension was a cartoonishly predictable by-product of the system itself. Meanwhile, as they brandish the word “fascism” at anything they don’t like, one irony escapes them: The system under which they thrive was initially put into place by the same sort of propaganda apparatus (and, more to the point, blindly supported by the same sort of liberal mindset) that didn’t simply allow Benito Mussolini to come to power but, as economist Clara Mattei has posited, actively encouraged it. Thus, many — by no means all — PMCs are ideologically adrift, imagining themselves to be “morally responsible citizens.” Placing their faith in the mainstream media and adhering to the “capital order,” they remain completely distracted from or willfully oblivious to the increasingly lopsided class war between the First and Third Estates.
Denying their own exploitation by getting into wars of words with people on the internet does allow PMCs to feel as if they’ve helped to accomplish something from time to time, such as when this or that minority figure is “allowed” into the upper echelons of the system by securing a position of power. Such victories — ”the first trans person on such-and-so-state’s Supreme Court”; “the first Black mayor of this former Jim Crow city” — are, of course, important advances. Still, some dismiss those rare “individualist capitalism” wins as Band-Aids affixed to mortal wounds, providing nothing more substantive than a fleeting opportunity for all the other members of the lucky person’s demographic to celebrate for a moment before going back to their labors and economic uncertainty.
It can certainly seem as though persuading liberals to join with the more socialist left would be as difficult a task as convincing white, working-class Fox News addicts that Donald Trump isn’t really their friend. A lot of liberals will never forgive Bernie Sanders for what they perceive as his followers’ having a hand in Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 presidential contest (it was actually overconfidence that did her in; Clinton assumed she had the states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan locked up but lost them all by not spending enough campaign time in them). Moreover, some liberals are as opposed to socialism as card-carrying right-wingers. Their disdain for anything that appears vaguely Marxist assuredly extends to the class struggle. In my online travels, I quickly found out that liberal PMCs hate talking about their class’s socioeconomic advantages more than just about anything. Where the socialist’s battle cry is “No war but class war,” the liberal’s is “Don’t engage in both-sidesism,” meaning “don’t foment conflict between different left-leaning coteries, even when the Democrats have just done something to prove once again that they don’t care about the class war,” which, the Fourth Estate dog-whistles, is an express route to Republicans’ winning elections. They hate it. If you’re on Twitter and feel like trolling, say, a liberal human resources director who fires lots of angry tweets at “communists” who refuse to vote for Democrats, ask them innocently why top Democratic lawmakers like Nancy Pelosi supported repealing the SALT (State and Local Tax) cap, which would disproportionately benefit high-income taxpayers (as well as violate the principle of tax neutrality). Prepare to be instantly blocked if you pull a stunt like that.
It’s not the PMC’s fault that they sometimes overreact when someone points out their level of privilege, given that terrifying levels of precarity are alien to them. For years, scientists have known that social class directly influences how deeply one cares about the well-being of others. It boils down to how free and independent we feel, as one study found: The less we rely on others for help to survive, the less we care about what others are going through. The scale of selfishness (and greed) peaks at the billionaire class, of course, a group thickly populated by people possessed of disturbed personalities that psychologists have described as a “dark triad” of dysfunction combining elements of Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism.
As well as occasionally revealing themselves to be a bit tone-deaf to the difficulties experienced by their fellow citizens, center-left PMCs are staunch believers in the pillars of the “liberal class” (loosely defined by Chris Hedges as a demographic whose members put faith in “liberal institutions,” such as churches, the mainstream media, the Democratic Party, labor unions, and academia), so much so that it confounds people who only rarely consume news and political opinion from Fourth Estate sources.
At this point, Hedges should add America’s intelligence agencies to his list of liberal class institutions, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency. PMCs began venerating the Agency in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, probably because the mainstream liberal media was working hard to convince them that the Agency’s “top secret” efforts would lead to Donald Trump’s arrest, which, of course, never happened.
That was an odd development. It’s not as though the CIA has ever actually earned any respect, least of all from the college-educated liberal crowd. As Florida journalist River Page wrote in 2021, “Historically, the agency has been more adept at cultural manipulation than intelligence gathering (see the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the failure to predict the Iranian Revolution, the failure to predict the Yom Kippur War, the failure to predict the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, the failure to predict 9/11, the faulty intelligence pointing to the existence of [weapons of mass destruction] in Iraq, and most recently, miscalculating the strength of Ashraf Ghani’s government in Afghanistan).” One item Page cites is particularly revealing: the only American demographic that adamantly believes Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating John F. Kennedy is white college graduates.
Another thing PMCs should consider regarding the CIA is that it’s a redundant, unnecessary institution. Every time a microphone got anywhere near him, Chalmers Johnson urged that the Agency be closed and its duties handed over to the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). The INR’s budget is open for public scrutiny (in contrast to the intelligence agencies, all of which have budgets that are kept entirely secret from Congress), and it’s staffed by career government professionals (unlike the CIA, whose practice of hiring highly paid outside contractors led to the leak of intelligence secrets by Edward Snowden).
On the other hand, PMCs do have the CIA to thank for “woke culture.” Page posits that the CIA invented wokeness as a “dialect of power,” a way for upper-middle-class citizens to differentiate themselves from the rabble. That is to say, where upper-middle-class citizens in the mid-20th century took to affecting a faux-British accent to signal their privileged status, today’s upper-middle-class citizens speak fluent “woke,” often using phrases like “cultural appropriation” and neologisms like “microagression” (defined as an interaction between people of different races, cultures, or genders in which a member of a “victim group” is subjected to subtle but powerful attacks that the attacker is unaware they’re carrying out).
Indeed, since at least the 1950s, the CIA has insinuated itself as a model of diversity and wokeness by doing such things as investing heavily in the Congress of Cultural Freedom, a German-born propaganda effort that journalist James Petras has described as “a kind of cultural NATO” that was “completely free to defend Western cultural and political values, attack ‘Stalinist totalitarianism’ and to tiptoe gently around U.S. racism and imperialism,” all toward an anti-communist, pro-free market effort.
It’s funny; many well-enough-heeled liberals jump on the spy stuff like puppies to a trough of Hamburger Helper, rarely if ever stopping to think about why the intelligence agencies might want the liberal media to “let citizens know” about a particular thing in the first place. The script has flipped: the educated liberal class, a segment of humanity that at one time stood as a Keep On Truckin’ hippie vanguard denouncing imperial chicanery in general, has become a chimerical petit-bourgeoisie that trusts the Central Intelligence Agency more than it does Ralph Nader, its former hero.
Anyway, despite their being CIA-approved and mildly rich, most PMCs do indeed feel some sense of precarity, but the dread they experience is elusive. For PMCs who fancy themselves as capitalists, the television comedy series Schitt’s Creek is at once comforting and terrifying: wealthy married couple suddenly find themselves flat broke, they’re forced to resort to drastic measures to survive, mortally embarrassing high jinks ensue. At some level, all high earners can relate. While earning big bucks at the height of my software programming career, my concerns mostly revolved around unimportant things, such as, “What restaurant should we try next,” never anything remotely like, “Will we be able to pay the rent this month.” But precarity bubbled underneath, manifesting in my subconscious. Many nights, just before falling asleep, I’d be jolted into full wakefulness by hypnagogic hallucinations in which I suddenly imagined myself sitting at the edge of a city skyscraper, with no exit in sight and nowhere to go but down. I have severe acrophobia, and those sudden, vivid panic attacks jolted me out of near-sleep more times than I can count. But past that stuff, the “worries” that haunted my waking life revolved around trivial “rich people problems.” Even so, back then, my political sensibilities didn’t revolve around “woke” issues as much as systemic ones. I was always big into underground journalism, punk-culture agitprop (any SubGeniuses out there?) and gravitated to books like Bob Woodward’s Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, so I didn’t trust the CIA as far as I could throw it. To be honest, when all the culture war drama got into high gear on Tumblr and whatnot in the 2010s, I didn’t get worked up about it, figuring it was all just a CIA operation intended to keep people distracted and divided.
But is wokeness really such a terrible thing?
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If you want to be fully, genuinely informed about the political troll/bot invasion of Election 2016, 2020, and Elections-Yet-To-Come, buy my last book. There’s the tiniest bit of technical stuff in there, but you’ll get it, I promise. My second book, My Year In The Online Left, will be out on June 10, but meanwhile, my Twitter is @esaeger, my Mastodon is @esaeger@universeodon.com, my BlueSky is @esaeger.bsky.social and my cursed Facebook is eric.saeger.9.
