Classless Class

George Hoare

June 16, 2025

The question of the middle class and its role in politics is not a new one. As Arno Mayer maps out in his ‘The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem,’ the Marxist tradition has been concerned with the role of the middle class in politics, often concluding in fairly straightforward terms that the intermediate classes are in general fairly weak-willed politically and will basically side with the ruling class when things start to get dicey. But as Stanley Sharpey points out, debates around the political role of the middle class have assumed a new focus, or at least a new vocabulary, in recent years with the focus on the Professional-Managerial Class, or the PMC. The mainstreaming of “PMC discourse” on the Left largely came from direct political engagement – in the British context, the PMC were presented as the main constituency of a supercharged anti-Brexitism and as the core support for Corbyn’s brand of left populism that failed to broaden its project beyond the interests of the downwardly mobile lower part of the PMC. That the term “PMC” has become a standard term of debate (or abuse) strongly suggests the intuitive appeal of an identifier for a politically active and important middle class that seem to have increased in prominence in British politics in recent years. More generally, we could suggest that many on the Left feel that parts of class theory that were once integral have now been lost and are looking for class descriptors of some sort or other to describe a changing situation, even if this is not always consciously recognized.

Sharpey’s engagement with the history of the term PMC since its birth in a pair of 1977 essays by Barbara and John Ehrenreich is a helpful reminder of the history of the term and some of the debates it has birthed. He also notes that Marxism has not been interested in the concept of class used by almost all sociologists today: a static, “objective” sociological category, into which individuals are either granted membership or allocated to another group. The approach to class analysis that is dominant today largely focuses on giving an empirical picture of social stratification under contemporary capitalism drawing on the tools of Weberian sociology. This approach to class runs through the work of Michels, Giddens, and Bourdieu to the work of empirical sociologists like John Goldthorpe all the way to contemporary market research and ABC1C2DE (and similar) class schemas. Much supposed contemporary discussion of class ends up being a debate about identity or “class position,” often whether someone is a given class or not depending on a single defining characteristic (then further degenerating into argument over whether someone with a specific salary can or cannot be working class). Relatedly, the default way in which class is politicized today, if it is politicized at all, is in relation to social mobility and questions of whether someone can “rise beyond” their class background. In opposition to this bourgeois political sociology, what can Marxism offer? Sharpey’s discussion of Lukács offers some useful pointers here: Marxism is concerned with the historical consciousness of classes, and whether they are able to organize or lead society. We find ourselves, of course, in a very different situation than the one Lukács wrote in over a century ago, and so might think that what Marxism can offer needs also to be updated, for better or worse. One way to pose this question is to ask what the tasks of “PMC theory” – that is, of class theory from a Marxist perspective as applied to the PMC – are today, and to see how far we might have come in addressing them.

The first task of contemporary PMC theory is to explain its rise and situate it in a model of contemporary class struggle. The strongest explanation here (in my opinion) for the “rise of the professionals” is a negative one: the PMC, or the intermediate class more generally, has emerged as an increasingly strong political force in large part due to the defeat of the organized working class. This is an important difference to the context in which the Ehrenreichs were writing, and any account of the PMC that does not talk about the changing nature of class struggle as the twentieth century passed into the twenty first risks taking the PMC as a static object rather than as formed in political struggle with other classes. In Mayer’s account of the lower middle class he talks about the “second birth” of the lower middle class in the nineteenth century with the rapid development of industrial, commercial, and financial capitalism (placing its “first birth” in the late medieval and early modern period). What is required now is a history of the middle class that takes into account not just the changed position in production that the PMC may occupy compared to the time when the Ehrenreichs were writing but also the historic defeat, disorganization, and demoralization of the working class. If the Ehrenreichs were right that the PMC were “dead” by the early 2000s then perhaps it is the “rebirth” of the PMC we see in the early twenty-first century, as the last defenders of a zombie liberalism. Ultimately, though, it is the defeat of the working class, starting with the onset of neoliberalism since the late 1970s that marks the difference between the Ehrenreichs' time and ours. If we take seriously our changed context, then we can suggest that the reborn contemporary PMC is a fairly new class, and so is likely inchoate and in the process of development rather than likely to be fully formed.

The second task of PMC theory is to give an account of the group’s interests and internal divisions. This account can be fairly schematic and general, and its utility lies primarily in whether it is able to explain the collective action (or lack thereof) of the group. As I have written elsewhere, one of the clearest lessons of Brexit for a class analysis of British politics was that the PMC is internally split between the downwardly mobile lower portion (underemployed graduates and those with a fear of being proletarianized) and the more stable upper part with secure professional employment and wealth (usually in the form of home ownership); Benjamin Studebaker calls these two factions the “rump professional class” and the “fallen professional class.” It was the lower PMC who were the core of the Corbyn project, allied with the upper PMC over Brexit but ultimately split over the desirability of Corbynite social democracy. Sharpey largely confines his analysis of the internal divisions (or unity) of the PMC to the answer to this question in the Ehrenreichs’ essays, which is likely to be less illuminating than an examination of the class as it exists and acts concretely today.

The third task of PMC theory is to build on the results of the first two undertakings to provide an account of how the PMC acts politically. This is by far the most challenging yet important task of PMC theory. It is easier to address questions of composition, such as whether we should prefer the term MAANGOs (those who work in the media, arts, academia, and non-governmental organizations) to the PMC label, or to dispute whether the PMC are a class or, as Sharpey seems to suggest, a “stratum.” To call the group the Professional-Managerial Stratum, presumably PMS for short, seems to be a categorizing move driven by a desire to downplay the importance of the PMC politically. It is probably more generative to instead suggest following Mayer that the PMC is likely a contemporary instantiation of an older historical problem of an intermediate “classless class” – a class in itself but not for itself. The question then becomes how the PMC understands its own interests and the meaning of its political action, since it would not be under an explicit or self-conscious “PMC” banner. Political events in the past decade suggest that the PMC acts in conjunction with the ruling class, not directly instructed by it, producing ideological justifications of the existing order in much the same way that the church did under feudalism; the PMC then acts politically in the “general interest” (rather than in terms of its own explicit class interest), specifically to discipline and manage any inchoate working class dissent (whether this is around Brexit, Covid, or anything else) for the benefit of managing the ruling class’s hegemony.

Judged from this perspective, a treatment of the PMC such as the one given by Sharpey gets to one of the most interesting and important questions only right at the end. Sharpey concludes that contemporary political sociology has less to say about the historical mission of the working class than it does about descriptions of contemporary social stratification, which of course is true. But if we focus our attention on the history of the term PMC without risking applying it in the present we prevent ourselves from working out some of the contradictions and weaknesses of PMC theory through interaction with empirical reality. As elaborated by E. P. Thompson among others, the classical model of Marxism takes class struggle as prior to classes, since the conditions of struggle are part of what give individuals their consciousness of their class and accordingly make that class. A more direct political engagement with PMC theory would allow us to answer the question of whether the PMC are key actors in contemporary class struggle, managing working class dissent for the benefit of capital, or whether the PMC are better understood as racketeers watching from the sidelines engaged in something wholly different from class politics.