PMC Hate

Conversely, the traditional middle classes were transformed by the expansion of universities and white-collar occupations. This also reached a peak, somewhat later, when the over-production of cultural elites collided with the post-2008 breakdown of the capitalist system. Graduate wages fell to levels often indistinguishable from working class occupations. But economic convergence was matched by cultural and political divergence. While graduates entered the left and the unions in droves, their hunger for distinction entered with them. For this reason, universalist appeals to ‘the 99%’ fell flat: today’s leftism presents itself as an immense accumulation of subcultures, all seeking moral differentiation from a fallen cultural majority.

Here, I believe, lies the root controversy over the “professional managerial class” (PMC). The term emerged in the 1970s during the retreat of the first wave of New Left social movements. Barbara and John Ehrenreich, who popularised the term, were not the first to notice the accumulation of managerial and professional bureaucracies that were both causes and consequences of university expansion. Earlier notions of a “new class”, distinct from an earlier petty bourgeoisie or traditional professionals, can be traced to the post-war theories of James Burnham, John Kenneth Galbraith and Milovan Djilas.

The Ehrenreichs’ innovation lay in linking the rise of this class to post-68 social movement leftism. Thus, from the start, it mixed sociological description with political diagnosis. “The PMC’s objective class interests,” they observed, “lie in the overthrow of the capitalist class, but not in the triumph of the working class; and their actual attitudes often mix hostility towards the capitalist class with elitism towards the working class”. The PMC origins of the New Left, the Ehrenreichs contended, “shaped its growth and ideology”. That said, their assessment, as of the seventies, was ambivalent rather than hostile: the PMC was by nature haughty towards the working-class majority, but also structurally antagonistic to capitalism. It was a potential ally, though not one to trust further than you could throw.

Post-68 radicalism ebbed away, leaving a cultural imprint on academic faculty, who, in a ponytailed, blue-jeaned, turtle-necked spirit of rebellion, passed hand-me-down ideas to their students. The resulting mixture of cultural radicalism, political quiescence and economic yuppiehood still dominates campuses today, and radiates out into graduate professions like fashion, journalism and the arts

Mór Thököly wrote:Potrebno je sjebati prekarijat. Bar na odredjenim podrucju.

Talason wrote:
Ista strategija kao kad štrajkuju prosvetari, nahuškaj na njih radnike, zato što je prosvetarima gistro mnogo bolje, nego ovom što stavi na kraju meseca osamtsoiljadauđep.

Talason wrote:Nisam saglasan sa tim što pišeš. Mislim da si previše pametan, bar sudeći po filmovima, da bi mogli da komuniciramo tako da se razumemo, te odustajem.

Is College Driving Political Division?
Jake Bittle
19-24 minutes

Did you go to college? I did, and it was an interesting experience. I attended a prestigious and expensive school, and there were a lot of people there from various backgrounds; many of them were very wealthy, the children of lawyers and bankers, but many of them, like me, were from middle-class families and had arrived on campus only thanks to generous financial assistance from the university’s bulbous endowment, along with student loans. Some of the people at my school were conservative, but most of them were very liberal, and I spent a lot of time attending protests on the quad and engaging in hair-pulling conversations about how to ensure that our cafeteria food menus—designed and served by a company that also caters prisons—were inclusive for all students.

Spoiler:

That fight begins not in the lecture hall but at the bargaining table.

Liu’s portrait of the PMC is far more astringent and over-the-top than anything Goodwin has produced. Yet, it is also more realistic. Liu does not pretend that the virtue hoarders constitute a new ruling class. As a supporter of Bernie Sanders, what provokes her ire is that they stand in the way of real social change, having abandoned class politics for what she calls “performative transgression”. And where Goodwin argues that the “radical woke” capture of society lies at “the roots of today’s more turbulent politics”, Liu understands that the new elite is the product, not the cause, of political turbulence, the consequence of the evisceration of mass movements for social change.

For Goodwin, though, the new elite are the “people who really run Britain”, having largely displaced the old ruling class of “upper-class aristocrats, landowners and industrialists”. The idea that Gary Lineker or the US-based British journalist Mehdi Hasan or Sam Freedman, a fellow at the Institute for Government thinktank (all of whom Goodwin has namechecked as key members of the new elite) shape our lives more than Rishi Sunak or Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England is, to put it politely, stretching credulity. Similarly, the suggestion that those who have been responsible for austerity, anti-trade union laws and the imposition of real-terms wage cuts on nurses and railway workers are not the ones who really have power over our lives is bafflingly myopic. It exposes the postliberal concern for the working class as being as performative as the antiracism of the “new elite”

Members of the new class ultimately derive their authority, Gouldner argues, from their modes of speech and argument: specifically, what he defines as their deployment of the “culture of critical discourse” (or CCD). CCD is a mode of speaking and writing in which speakers must justify all the assertions they make, but by deploying evidence or reasoned forms of argument and not by simply referring to tradition or relying on personal authority:

good speech is speech that can make its own principles explicit and is oriented to conforming with them, rather than stressing context-sensitivity and context-variability. Good speech here thus has theoreticity.

The triumph of CCD was, Gouldner suggests, part and parcel of capitalism’s successful assault on traditional, religiously grounded understandings of knowledge.
 
What CCD does is to disqualify “all speech grounded in traditional societal authority, while it authorizes itself … as the standard of all serious speech.”

CCD has several consequences for those who use it. Firstly, it necessitates a pose of impersonality, much like the journalistic “voice from nowhere.” It seems to rise above the individual speaker and resist embodiment in any particular person or point of view. This is the discursive realm of “trusting the science” and “the figures speak for themselves.” It may result in a form of technical jargon or rhetoric that is highly distinctive in itself, but which curiously renders all users of it seemingly indistinguishable from one another. Secondly, it encourages a sense of detachment from all local levels. CCD is above all international and cosmopolitan in scope. It is a transnational language shared by new-class adherents across national borders. Its modes of speech and self-understanding encourage members to distance themselves from “particularistic, history-bound places” or languages and the folk-understandings of families and local cultures.

Similarly, it encourages a global or unified view of problems that lends itself easily to an affinity with “deep green,” ecological, or systems-based understandings of the world.

The gulf between the intoxicating temporary power reversals that CCD can seem to confer and the often precarious material circumstances of the average CCD user, however, produces its own forms of alienation. Members of the new class can end up feel perpetually cheated and frustrated, as though the rewards and powers they feel entitled to are constantly slipping out of reach. Doubling down on rhetoric becomes its own form of denial—a way of disavowing the knowledge that wielding symbols and “devastating” opponents with language have a habit of never actually achieving any real-world effects.
This sense of frustration is magnified by the chronic global overproduction of symbolic analysts and PhD-holders by the universities. This was a phenomenon first visible in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s.

 However, the global collapse of the academic job market (particularly in the humanities) after the financial crisis of 2008 has dwarfed any previous manifestation of this problem.

 As devastating as this is for the often debt-burdened and precariously employed junior members of the academic fraction within the new class, alienation and elite overproduction produce their own powerful feedback mechanisms. Institutions use the oversupply of credentialed labour to drive down wages and conditions, getting critique "on the cheap." Frustrated expectations, meanwhile, inflame existing radical tendencies within the new class. Rhetoric becomes divorced ever further from reality in a fetishistic insistence on the transformative powers of language. A deeply felt sense of the new class being oppressed victims themselves, meanwhile, reinvigorates the central mystification within the new class’s understanding of itself—that it exists to liberate oppressed groups and avenge victims everywhere, rather than to simply further its own class interests.

Erős Pista wrote:Bas to htedoh da primetim. Ovo je sustinski kritika modernosti i kao takva se stalno ponavlja iste poteze - naucni znanje je univerzalno, a ne lokalno, kosmopolitsko a ne nacionalno, "obeskorenjeno" a ne ukorenjeno u tradiciju.