The Discreet Charm of the PMC

Stanley Sharpey

May 29, 2025

"The rich they live in heaven, the poor they live in hell, and I . . . live somewhere in between." 

– Ishmael Reed, "Middle Class Blues"

"Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you"

– Stealers Wheel, "Stuck in the Middle with You"

Condemnation of the "PMC" has become a staple of Leftist discourse over the last decade. The Professional Managerial Class has performed the role of both internal and external enemy for socialists and those whose allegiance is to the "working class." [1] In the UK, the incredulity of Remainers in the face of Brexit, was considered PMC pathology. [2] Corbyn failed to broaden the Labour Party base beyond that of downwardly mobile urban PMCers and lost the "Red Wall" resulting in miserable electoral failure. [3] In the US, Elizabeth Warren was the candidate of the PMC within the Democratic Party accused of trying to suppress the authentically populist Sanders campaign. [4] Perhaps, it was suggested, the Democratic Socialists of America were compromised by their largely PMC membership and so failed to build a base amongst bonafide workers? [5] Today it is Trump, after having swept to power on the back of an ignored working class constituency, who makes war on the PMC from above. [6]

Barbara and John Ehrenreich first discussed the "Professional Managerial Class" in 1977 in two essays for Radical America. It should strike us as strange that a term coined in a pair of obscure magazine articles in the late 1970s should have gained such currency 40 odd years later; especially as uses of the concept today are not particularly faithful to the Ehrenreichs' original definition of the PMC. In the present, more often than not, "PMC" is hurled as an epithet by Leftists of the "dirtbag" variety. [7] It stands for wokeness, identity politics and technocratic elitism as obstacles to a real working class politics. Hence the tendency for discussions of the PMC to take the form of elaborate ethnographies of the psychic and cultural life of its constituents. [8] But the Ehrenreichs thought they were describing an objective feature of 20th century capitalism, of which a shared culture ("a coherent social and cultural existence") was part, but which was ultimately rooted in the PMC's "relation to... the means of production." [9]

The Ehrenreichs' 1977 articles were also born of a period of defeat and disappointment. They sought to explain the failure of the New Left, for them nearly identical with 1960s student radicalism, to broaden its base or to develop beyond its narrow outlook to become a genuine socialist movement. This could be in large part attributed to its origins in the PMC. At the same time they claimed to be making an intervention within and against Marxism which could not account for the emergence of the PMC. For them, orthodox Marxism, represented in their time by the New Communist Movement [10], was burdened with a dogmatic "two class" worldview which could only acknowledge intermediate classes (e.g. the petty-bourgeoisie) insofar as they were not really classes at all, but a great wavering mass between proletariat and bourgeoisie. This meant they could not take the problem of class division within radical movements seriously. “New Working Class” theories, for example those of Serge Mallet or André Gorz, fudged the issue by attempting to find in the new, expanding sectors of employment, the same old, still revolutionary, working class in a new guise. [11] Again, the problem was disappeared by sleight of hand. The Ehrenreichs claimed to have identified a third, genuinely novel, class that had been in development since the later 19th century but had fully matured in the post WW2 period. This was a class that could not be counted on as an agent of socialist transformation: the PMC.

The Ehrenreichs define the Professional-Managerial Class as "consisting of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations." [12] They are to be distinguished both from the productive working class and from the owners of capital. The constituents of this class range from teachers, academics and social workers ("the professionals") to factory foremen and high level corporate employees ("the managers"). At one end of the spectrum there are those who are more explicitly concerned with the propagation of “ideology,” for example, academics, who frequently exercise no direct control over the labour of others. At the other end there are those whose explicit function is to oversee workers e.g. foremen, supervisors and middle managers. On the Ehrenreich’s account there is no absolute distinction between these two poles: the teacher who considers themself to be merely propagating ideas prepares their students for the workforce; the factory foreman, who might conceive of himself as merely serving a technical function of coordinating the production process, nevertheless propagates the “ideology” of “capitalist class relations.” Importantly, according to the Ehrenreichs (following André Gorz and others) engineers and technical workers also serve a primarily reproductive role. That is, their main function is to enforce labour discipline and maintain the capitalist organisation of production; any contribution they might make to greater efficiency and productivity is secondary. Thus, they too belong to the PMC. None of these functions carried out by the PMC are strictly necessary in abstracto. The PMC do not truly add anything to the productive powers of society; professional-managerial occupations are created through the expropriation of the native abilities of the working class who are then left deskilled and dependent. [13] The creation of these roles was necessitated by a sharpening of class antagonism that had to be suppressed through social control and disempowerment.

The development of this class was largely an unconscious process punctuated with brief episodes of more concerted ideological and political self-assertion. Progressive Era reformism, the Debsian Socialist Party of America [14], the Technocracy Movement of the 1930s, and finally, the New Left, (despite their differences) are all expressions of PMC class interest for the Ehrenreichs insofar as their horizon was rationalising capitalism through technocratic measures. The problem of capitalism from the PMC standpoint is that it is irrational, wasteful and inefficient. It squanders the skills and education of trained professionals by subjecting them to the demands of the market. Conveniently, the proposed solution is that the administration of society and production should be handed over to the experts. [15] However, the PMC can never quite raise itself to the level of a new ruling class. [16] Thus, they are "stuck in the middle." They are hostile both to the objects of their administration, the working class, who they treat, at best, with benign condescension, and resentful of the true masters of universe, the capitalists, to whom they consider themselves intellectually and morally superior. The necessity of acquiring the education and credentials required to retain membership in their class adds to the individual PMCer’s psychic predicament. There is always the danger of falling into the ranks of the proletariat. [17]

What were the political stakes of the “discovery” of the PMC? Would any future socialist movement in the US have to be “pure,” excluding any members of the PMC altogether?   Contemporary critics of the Ehrenreichs accused them of “trying to encourage the working class to smash all the communists and the leftists … [they] don't like — the PMC radical especially.” [18] The obstacle would have to be cleared by being attacked from without. Here an affinity to the Maoism of the Cultural Revolution was detected. There is truth to this. The Ehrenreichs were part of the heterogeneous Monthly Review milieu which contained Trotsykists like Harry Braverman but displayed a marked sympathy towards “Actually Existing Socialism” and was especially invested in developments in post-revolutionary China as a potential model. The Ehrenreichs themselves pointed to two previous articles they had authored in Monthly Review on the Chinese situation and recalled a trip they had taken to the PRC in 1974/75  during the “Campaign to Criticise Lin Biao and Confucius” as decisive for the formation of their theory of the PMC. [19] “China highlighted the conflict between manual and mental workers, and showed that this conflict could reach the proportions of what might be called class struggle.” [20] Allegedly, the Cultural Revolution provided an instance of revolution being made on anti-bureaucratic grounds that attempted to overcome “inequalities” caused by the intellectual and technical division of labour. However, the Ehrenreichs were careful to emphasize that there was no precise “homology” between the class structure of a “largely peasant country” and that of an advanced industrial country like the USA. We might shudder at the Ehrenreichs’ naïveté, especially in light of the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge which took the “bottom up” campaign against intellectuals to a bloody extreme (though Cultural Revolution itself was not free of such violence), [21] but it is doubtful whether they intended to endorse these excesses. Rather, they thought the problem of the PMC would have to be countered from within. The PMC would have to learn to overcome itself. This is clear in the second of their 1977 articles which deals primarily with the New Left. For the Ehrenreichs the most promising development of the late 60s had been that of the “radicals in the professions.” Students had left the university to enter into professional careers as social workers and doctors but they had attempted to transform their own role within the division of labour by turning decisions about their own lives over to their clients challenging the ideology of “expertise” and the relationship of control between PMC and the working class. Whilst promising, this was ultimately not successful. They rebutted the charge of Left melancholy, a longing for a non-existent “pure” working class subject, leveled by their critics. In fact, they claimed, the 1970s was not a period of downturn on the Left in any simple sense. The New Left proper might have peaked and then fractured into an array of micro-sects and even terrorist “urban guerilla” cells but the 70s had seen increased participation of the traditional working class in surviving “Left” organisations. This only emphasized that the cultural, educational and ideological divide between the PMC and the working class remained as these same organisations were subject to crises and splits along class lines. Insofar as they specify the task of PMC self-overcoming in terms of a specific function in the division of labour the Ehrenreichs avoid the criticism made by Schaeffer and Weinstein that, substantially, they agreed with the claim of the Weathermen that the New Left was doomed by the “privileged” status of its constituents. [22] Unfortunately, the “political” end result of PMC discourse today is too often a kind of self-deprecation framed in terms of “privilege”  which is perfectly consonant with intersectionality and identity politics. [23] The Ehrenreichs at least upheld a horizon broader than this.

The collection Between Labor and Capital — comprising the Ehrenreich’s original two articles from Radical America and several responses — is itself an interesting document of the late New Left. Many of the contributors score points against the Ehrenreichs on “theoretical” grounds. Multiple critics (Jean Cohen and Dick Howard, Robert Schaeffer and James Weinstein, David Noble) point to their abuse of the categories of “production” and “reproduction” in Marx (distinct from but related to the opposition between “productive” and “unproductive” labour). It is true that the idea of a class whose function is primarily reproductive as opposed to a class which is primarily productive is problematic. For Marx, and the Marxists that followed him, capitalism was itself a bottom up phenomenon. The working class itself reproduced capitalism. This did not just mean at a “material” level in terms of the production of goods, infrastructure and the means of sustenance (which are required to reproduce any form of civilisation) but politically and ideologically. The classic example of this comes in Chapter 10 of Capital on “the working day” where Marx discusses how the struggle over labour-time produces the dynamics of automation and technological development (via competition between capitalists) that characterise capitalism as a contradictory form of society (that retains labour as a measure of value but continually undermines it). This holds even of the unemployed (the “reserve army of labour”) whose demand for work and thus recognition of their status in society also contributes to the dynamics of capitalism. [24] In making claims to the value of their labour the workers were the chief proponents of bourgeois ideology and did not need to have it forced upon them. The idea that there need be a specialised “class” of “reproducers” imposing capitalism on an unwilling working class stands opposed to this insight. However, this is an unfair criticism of the Ehrenreichs who, by their account, were only attempting to deal with a new historical phenomenon of the 20th century and not a model of capitalism in the abstract. It might not be the case that something like the PMC is necessary for capitalism per se to function (an obvious point given that the relatively liberal capitalism of the 19th century by their own account had no such intermediary class) but, supposedly, it did play a role in maintaining the statified, Fordist-welfare capitalism of their day. The danger of the Ehrenreichs’ account and subsequent PMC Theory is that it implicitly accepts a Romantic (“Rousseauian” in G. M. Tamás’ terms) [25] image of the working class, prior to its enforced dependency, as possessing a self-sufficient culture, a “moral economy” based on different principles, which is only destroyed through the a gradual effort of the ruling class and their PMC handmaidens. It might be the case that a revived socialist movement would take up certain functions that are currently carried about by agents of the state and return them to working class civil society; but this should not lead us to the conclusion that the end goal ought to be the destruction of expertise in favour of reviving the superior indigenous knowledge of working folk.

The Ehrenreich’s critics also rightly question whether the term “class” ought to be applied to the PMC. “Class” as used in Marxism has an idiosyncratic sense. Marxism was not concerned with class a static, “objective,” sociological category (which is almost always the sense given to it today). [26] This is to say it was not concerned with merely describing how society works as if what was meant by that term was an elaborate machine or a “social system.” [27] Marxism treated society insofar as it was mediated by the subject, through consciousness, and, for it, consciousness itself became an objective force “in the world.” Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness as a whole is a meditation on this Hegelian aspect of Marxism (and on Marxism’s overcoming of Hegel precisely by being more dialectical). The essay “Class Consciousness” is most relevant to the PMC debate given that it defends something like the so-called “two class” theory. Yet again, this is not really a “theory” at all but an exposition of the Marxist philosophy of history. For Marxism there were two classes in capitalism because there were only two standpoints from which a claim to lead and organise society as a whole could be made: those of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. [28] This was a matter of historical consciousness. From the standpoint of the bourgeoisie in capitalism the current form of society was insurmountable. This perspective was unable to deal with the fundamental crisis of bourgeois society in capitalism. The proletariat was the class that took up the historical consciousness that capitalism was a transient form of social life and that bourgeois social relations could be overcome. Such consciousness could only be achieved through a lengthy process of political mediation (facilitated by a socialist party which served as a repository of the working class’ memory of its own struggles and defeats) and was not identical with the “empirical consciousness” of actual workers. Lukács was upholding Lenin’s infamous distinction between the working class’ spontaneous “trade union consciousness” and “socialist [or proletarian] consciousness” brought from without from What is to be Done? (which itself was only a paraphrase of Kautsky’s “merger formula”) [29]. Given this Lukács could claim that there was only one true class in capitalism, the proletariat, since bourgeois historical consciousness would prove to be a dead end. As defined by the Ehrenreichs the PMC is explicitly capable of no such leadership, it can make no claim to organise or lead society in the interests of society as a whole (and so ultimately to bring about historical “progress”). But they are not really concerned with “class” in this sense at all. In Stanley Aronowitz’s terms the PMC might be better described as a “stratum.” [30] We might identify innumerable groups of this kind within contemporary capitalism. Wherever there exist people who might unite around a common “interest” in forwarding their own particular sectoral claims there is the potential for the formation of a racket. As Adorno and Horkheimer never tired of pointing out, in the absence of proletarian consciousness, all of society degenerates into rackets. [31] The working class is not exempt from this. It divides itself into rackets along industrial lines through the unions. It may form one great racket as a constituency in capitalist politics. Even the isolated worker can be a racket of one. White-collar unions, professional organisations and even advocacy groups with a “PMC radical” ideology would perform the same function for the PMC. None of this amounts to “class politics.”

Lukács was criticised by his contemporaries and by subsequent generations for his account of the “imputed” or “ascribed” consciousness of the working class. It seemed to be an abstract “ought” that disregarded the actual consciousness of actual workers; a utopian fantasy cooked up in the brain of an intellectual high on Bolshevism. [32] But this ignores that in Lukács' moment, though the world revolution was already in retreat by 1923, proletarian consciousness seemed to be on the way to becoming a reality “in the world.” By 1977 there might be more justice to the claim that invoking “the historical mission of the working class” risks losing contact with reality. [33] The Ehrenreichs make the perceptive point that the whole debate in which they were engaged was conditioned by the “academisation” of Marxism that had begun in earnest in the 1970s (as part of the fallout of the New Left). [34] For them this meant that Marxism was in danger of becoming mere abstract definition-mongering with no purchase on contemporary reality, study into the conceptual coherence of Marxist scripture (what today is called “Marxology”). Reality would then be wrangled into the categories as best as possible. But what if reality had falsified the categories of Marxism? What is the point of invoking the “correct” Marxist concept of class, as I have above, if it did not seem to have any purchase on the world? It is telling that one of the Ehrenreichs' defenders claimed that when they spoke of “defining” the PMC they should have really said they aimed to provide a description. [35] Their defence of their own work largely corroborates this. The Ehrenreichs themselves could not leap outside of the situation they ascribed to “academicised” Marxism characterised by an antinomy between proscription and description, “ought” and “is.” Marxism is also subject to the same reification with which Lukács contended. This was true even in his time. How much more true was it in 1977? How much more true today?

So, whilst the Ehrenreichs might have made a useful intervention by simply pointing to the existence within the New Left of tensions based on cultural and educational differences it is doubtful whether their supposed Marxism had much to contribute to this. Their first hand experience with the New Left was decisive. Marxist “class analysis” in general cannot escape this fate today insofar as there is no political force through which the working class might be constituted. The very idea of “class analysis” is contemplative. And so, the tradition of political sociology which stretches from Weber, through Michels and Elite Theory, to Mills and Giddens, and even to Bourdieu, might offer us more resources to address stratification within contemporary capitalism if we want to confine our task to description. However, it has less to say about the historical mission of the working class. . .

We do not yet know who the working class or its opponents are — that is both a problem and an index of potential. Our task is to find out!

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1 - This is not confined to those on the “Left” but includes avowed conservatives (e.g. Michael Lind) and those who consider themselves “beyond Left and Right.” See: Jonathan Rutherford, “The New Class War,” The New Statesman, January 7, 2023.

2 - George Hoare, “The Rise of the Professionals,” Compact, April 29, 2022.

3 - Dan Evans, A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie (Repeater Books, 2023).

4 - Matt Karp, “Is This the Future Liberals Want?”, Jacobin, September 14, 2019.

5 - Class Unity, “The Left’s Middle-Class Problem,” Sublation Magazine, July 23, 2022.

6 - Ryan Zickgraf, “Trump’s purge of the professionals,” Unherd, April 23, 2025.

7 - Amber A’Lee Frost, “The Characterless Opportunism of the Managerial Class,” American Affairs, Vol 3, no. 4 (2019): 126–39.

8 - Lizzie Warren, “Inside the Mind of the Professional-Managerial Class, Part One,” Damage Magazine, April 37, 2020.

9 - Original publications: Barbara and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” Radical America, Vol 11, no. 2 (1977): 7-31; Barbara and John Ehrenrreich, “The New Left and the Professional Managerial Class,” Radical America, Vol 11, no. 3 (1977): 7-24. Reproduced as “The Professional-Managerial Class” in Between Labor and Capital ed. Pat Walker (The Harvester Press, 1979), 5-45, 11.

10 - Max Elbaum, “Maoism in United States.”

11 - Serge Mallet, The New Working Class (Spokesman Books, 1979).

12 -  Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” 12.

13 - The Ehrenreichs provide an interesting account of the genesis of the PMC thesis in their medical activism: “We had both been activists and journalists in the are of health care, and since the early 70s we had been especially interested in medicine as a profession — its emergence as a modern profession near the turn of the century (at the expense of the working class tradition of lay healing), the ideological content of medical science, and the role of medical care as an instrument of social control.” Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich “Rejoinder” in Walker, Between Labor and Capital, 313-334, 317-318.

14 - This is, of course, a controversial claim and a marker of the Ehrenreichs’ Stalinist understanding of Second International socialism.

15 - See, for example: Thorsten Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System.

16 - On this point the Ehrenreichs are keen to distinguish themselves from James Burnham’s “managerial revolution” thesis. See: James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening to the World (The John Day Company, 1941).

17 - Barbara Ehrenreich would expand on this in her later work. See: Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (Pantheon Books, 1989).

18 - Robert Schaeffer and James Weinstein “Between the Lines” in Walker, Between Labor and Capital, 143-172, 170, fn 40.

19 - Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, “Rejoinder,” 318.

20 - Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, “Rejoinder,” 319.

21- Chris Buckley, “Bowed and Remorseful, Former Red Guard Recalls Teacher’s Death,” The New York Times, January 13, 2014.

22- “[V]irtually all of the white working class also has short-range  privileges from imperialism, which are not false privileges but very  real ones which give them an edge of vested interest and tie them to a  certain extent to the imperialists” Asbley et al. “You Don't Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows,” New Left Notes, June 18, 1969.

23 - The most persuasive advocate of the claim that identity politics develops out of a professional-managerial strata is Adolph Reed. See: Adolph Reed, “Black Particularity Reconsidered,” Telos, March 20, Vol 1979, no. 39 (1979): 71-93.

24 - “All those who work and even those who don’t, have a share in the creation of contemporary reality.” Max Horkheimer, Dawn & Decline (The Seabury Press, 1978), 51.

25 - G. M. Tamás, “Telling the Truth About Class,” Socialist Register, Vol 42 (2009): 228-268

26 - See: Gillian Rose, “Does Marx have a method?,” Thesis Eleven, Vol 186, No. 1, (2025): 3-12.

27 - See, for example: Talcott Parsons, The Social System, (The Free Press of Glencoe, 1951).

28 - Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Merlin, 1971): 46-82.

29 - V. I. Lenin, “What is to be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement” Collected Works, Vol. 5 (Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961): 347-530.

30 - Stanley Aronowitz “The Professional-Managerial Class or Middle Strata” in Walker, Between Labor and Capital, 213-242.

31 - Max Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations,” Nonsite, January 11, 2016.

32-  Georg Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, trans. Esther Leslie (Verso, 2000).

33 - “[W]hat I do not quite understand about some New-Left writers is why they cling so mightily to “the working class” of the advanced capitalist societies as the historic agency, or even as the most important agency, in the face of the really historical evidence that now stands against this expectation. Such a labour metaphysic, I think, is a legacy from Victorian Marxism that is now quite unrealistic.” C. Wright Mills “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review, no. 5 (1960); For a recent example see debate over the “Leftist revolutionary subject” between Dave Mckerracher, Douglas Lain and Chris Cutrone. Theory Underground, “Why Left - Cutrone on the PCFM vs Revolutionary Subject and The Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” streamed on Apr 25, 2025.

34 -  Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, “Rejoinder,” 321.

35 - John Welch, “New Left Knots” in Walker, Between Labor and Capital, 173-190.