The "PMC" is not a social class

The term "professional-managerial class" (PMC) was coined in 1977. Barbara Ehrenreich, who coined it, thought that by 2019 the "class" had been "seriously smashed", i.e. dispersed into a variety of skilled white-collar worker occupations at one end and into full-on corporate management at the other. However, since then discourses targeting that "professional-managerial class" as the main, or a main, enemy of the working class have spread.

Catherine Liu's 2021 book Virtue Hoarders: the Case against the Professional-Managerial Class makes a case from the socialist left. Her book is a squib, a polemical flourish, against people in "talking PMC" positions with "progressive" politics which "amount to little more than virtue-signalling" which "to the majority of non-college-educated people… appear as pedantic, hypocritical, and punishing".

Liu is surely right as against those who think (or operate as if they think) that being a member in good liberal standing of the "talking" sections of "the PMC" is to be emancipatory enough. But her book is a squib, not an analysis. Negative "anti-PMCism" can lubricate, and is lubricating, gravitation to the right.

The "PMC" is not a class. At best it is an amalgam of (1) sections of the labour aristocracy (better-off workers) with (2) what Marxists around the start of the 20th century called "the new middle class" (technical, administrative, etc., rather than the "old middle class" of small shop-owners and such) and with (3) the lower layers of the actual capitalist class and its adjuncts.

With the amalgam, "anti-PMC-ism" can deflect working-class anger against actual capitalist impositions onto easier-to-hit targets (immigrants, asylum seekers, women, transgender people) supposedly favoured by the "PMC". Shortages of housing, good jobs, etc. are blamed on PMC virtue-signalling of token favours for "minorities" coming to replace general social improvements.

Aggrieved young men can be channelled into blaming "the feminisation of society" ("prioritising empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition", according to US right-winger Helen Andrews). (Maybe some older women can chime in with the male backlash, seeing assertive young "PMC-ish" women as devaluing and mocking the adaptation of the older ones to older gender roles).

Aggrieved young white people can blame their own rowdiness on "two-tier policing", claiming that the cops have been manipulated by the PMC into leniency against Black people and immigrants. (In fact, in the UK, police stop and search Black people four times as often as white people, and Asian-background people 1.4 times as often as white people. Yet Asian-background people have lower arrest rates as well as lower conviction rates. In the UK, non-citizens have lower crime rates, adjusting for age, than citizens. They have lower rates of conviction or jail for robbery or violence against the person).

Boys doing poorly at school, and their parents, can blame that on "anti-boy ideology" said by Australian Liberal Party leader Angus Taylor to be imposed on schools by the PMC. The schools are, so the story runs, too bothered about token gestures for "minority" groups to teach basic skills.

All such targeting of a "PMC" amalgam lets the actual capitalist ruling class off the hook, instead painting a false picture of a "PMC" blob as the "enemy class".

Today's "lower levels" of the "PMC", the people whom worse-off working-class people deal with as teachers, nurses, doctors, officials, etc., are surely not flawless, but they are less (not more) inclined to snobbish and censorious "talking down" than their equivalents of decades past, if only because their social distance from the bulk of the working class is smaller.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion, etc., done as box-ticking exercises, or in forms which appear to those taught as "pedantic, hypocritical, and punishing"? Then do them better, and release resources for levelling-up.

NGOs sounding sanctimonious? And siphoning off left-minded activists into lobbying rather than organising with other workers in routine working-class jobs? Sure, but that is mainly a problem for the left to sort out. NGOs are not the ruling class.

Since the big 2010-11 increase in student fees, access to university education for "mature" students (i.e. who missed out around the end of their school years) has plummeted. Yet there is still a sort of "glass ceiling", with jobs advertised as open only to graduates even when they rely on no particular university knowledge? Scrap fees, widen lifelong access to education!

At all times in the history of industrial capitalism, it has been possible to point to "professional and managerial" grades. The recent decades do not show a "compactification" of those grades into a cohesive collective, but rather their dispersal into a variegated spectrum. They also show a shift in the "interface" between the worse-off working class and those grades which may explain something about anti-PMC ideology.

There have been "professional" and "managerial" grades throughout industrial capitalism. In 19th century UK, for example, "the professions" were the Anglican Church and the law. Later, top civil service, industrial-commercial managerial, and armed-forces officer jobs acquired the same status. These were the outskirts of the ruling class, the jobs for their members who weren't running their landed estates or family businesses.

Some broadening came already in the 19th century. In 1851, there were only 140,000 office workers; by 1911, almost a million. The offices contained a hierarchy from bosses down to junior clerks and office boys. By the early 20th century Marxists were talking about "the new middle class" of technical and office workers as distinct from "the old middle class" of small shop-owners.

Then there was the "labour aristocracy". As early as Capital Marx mentioned (unpejoratively) the "labour aristocracy". By the late 19th century there was a clear division between the "respectable" working class, such as skilled metalworkers or woodworkers, and the less-respectable, called (often arbitrarily) unskilled. The "skilled" workers might have a chance, if they choose to take it, to become works managers or open their own workshops. Some of them might "look down on" the worse-off workers, as some workers claiming to be "professional" today look down on others. But also more of the "skilled" workers were literate, read widely, and attended meetings and lectures.

Most of the time the better-off sections of the working class include the better-organised, more confident, more formally-educated workers, and they are the main base for trade-union and socialist organisation. Pretty much always, there are also some better-off sections who may be unionised but are conservative and disdainful of the so-called "unskilled". Thus these days in several countries there are better-off trade unionists in some better-paid "blue collar" jobs open to the messages of the nationalist, anti-immigrant far right.

In 1866, a First International, in a resolution drafted by Marx, appealed to the trade unionist activists who then, even more than now, were disproportionately better-off workers. The appeal remains valid, and requires constant socialist effort: "Considering themselves and acting as the champions and representatives of the whole working class, they cannot fail to enlist the non-unionists into their ranks. They must look carefully after the interests of the worst paid trades... rendered powerless by exceptional circumstances. They must convince the broad masses of workers that their efforts, far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions".

The emancipation comes from turning the activists among the better-off workers to wider class awareness, not from trying to bypass them, or dismissing them as part of the enemy.

The "labour aristocracy" today is mostly formally-educated "white-collar" workers.

By World War One the teachers' union was a big and left-wing part of the French trade-union movement, in fact the only union to maintain a full if skeletal functioning during the war.

Other countries were different, but they have followed over time. The National Union of Teachers in Britain, forerunner of the NEU, affiliated to the TUC only in 1970; Nalgo, the main forerunner of Unison in local government, only in 1965. Previously those unions found the TUC too proletarian and militant. Now NEU is if anything more militant than most TUC unions.

As, from the late 19th century, more "white-collar" jobs came which might open paths to high promotions, there was a blurring of the lines between the labour aristocracy and "the middle classes". At the other end, with the rise of larger firms and of "professional" management (first MBA course: Harvard 1908) the line between the top of "the middle classes" and the ruling class (always blurred) became blurred in new ways.

In the UK in the Thatcher years differentiation within the working class increased.

Income-distribution figures suggest the differentiation has remained but not increased. On some dimensions, differentiation has decreased. Access to higher education has increased. Around 60% of the workforce now is "white collar". The divide that used to exist in factories between monthly-salaried employees with staff canteens and weekly-waged with "works canteens" has been blurred since the 1980s, with "single status". Automation has made a lot of manual work lighter, quieter, cleaner, and often also less stereotype-repetitive.

In more advanced container terminals, maintenance and repair and IT workers outnumber direct "operatives", and those operatives are driving straddle carriers rather than carrying loads on their backs. There are still many hard manual jobs even in the most advanced economies. Construction in the UK has 2.5 million workers. But car factories in advanced countries now have about 50% of their workers not directly on the production line.

There are still big differences within the working class. But we can draw no clear line to separate better-off workers from the rest and classify them into a "PMC" class rather than the working class.

Barbara Ehrenreich summarised her view of the PMC thus: "There was a real difference between people who worked essentially telling other people what to do - and teachers get included in that - and people who do the work that other people tell them to do". She identified a real factor. But there isn't quite the clear dividing line she suggests.

For a start, better-off workers (who blur off into the "new middle class" at the top end) are differentiated from worse-off workers on other dimensions. They probably have more job security, and maybe even the prospect of "increments", automatic wage rises just from staying in the job. They work in quieter, cleaner conditions. They are more likely to own homes, and better homes. They are more likely to have access to credit, or even savings, and to expect relatively comfortable pensions. Better-off workers usually have more congenial work hours, more flexibility, and more "work-from-home" options.

But then again plenty of "professional" workers have to work shifts - nurses, junior hospital doctors, librarians - or can't "work from home". The differentiation is a multidimensional blur, not a class vs class line.

Even on the "tell others - be told" spectrum it's more complicated. In the exemplary union-building campaign by the Unite union in New Zealand among fast-food workers in Auckland, the union found that it had to prioritise organising supervisors and shift leaders in the fast-food places. Those were the "core" workers, because they were the ones likely to stay in place for at least a few years. Through all the layers of the working class, there are workers, "managed" from above, whose job also involves coordinating or supervising the work of others. The "team leaders" in factories now generalised from their origins in Toyota coordinate and check only about four to six other workers; if you can stick it long enough "on the line" your chance of becoming a "team leader" is good, but it does not make you a manager. It's not new. Many of the skilled manual workers who led the labour movement back in the day "oversaw" young workers around them, cleaners, warehouse hands, machine-feeders, assistants, apprentices; and those skilled workers were not managers, either.

Rather than "the PMC" being "compactified" into a cohesive "class", it has become more variegated, from those only mildly better-off within the working class - the beginning nurse or school teacher on about £32,000 a year and the qualified librarian or casual university teacher on less - through the clearly managerial and "middle-class" and up to CEOs (even of quite small firms) on £200,000 a year (a wage sufficient also to become a wealth-owner) and higher CEOs getting multi-million annual payouts. The median full-time wage in the UK is £40,000.

The "interface" between the better-off workers and the middle-class people labelled "PMC" and the worse-off working class has changed. There are now a lot more "accountancy professionals" in the UK than there were (about 350,000), and a lot more "data scientists" and statisticians. But the "talking" interface of the supposed "PMC", the facet which draws the fire, is elsewhere.

There are more school teachers (500,000 in UK) and university academics (about 240,000) than there were. People stay longer in school. More go to university. And NGOs and charities (the "third sector") now have a million wage-workers, about three times as many as in the early 1990s.

The great social shift whereby in Britain and many countries girls do better in school than boys, and more often go to university, has changed the interface between the "PMC" spectrum and the worse-off working class.

Most teachers are women. Nearly 70% of the wage-workers, and two-thirds of the CEOs, in the "third sector" are women. About two-thirds of law and medical students, and of newly starting journalists, are women. HR departments have replaced the much-less-active old "personnel departments" since the 1990s: 75% of the 480,000 "HR professionals" are women. Many more of the "talking" part of the high-formal-education workforce are women, and the worse-off working class hears from them more.

In the 1950s, the "talking" parts of the "PMC" audible to the working class (doctors, lawyers, teachers in grammar schools) were male-majority, considered themselves middle-class, had high autonomy in their work, and would probably vote Tory. Most GPs and lawyers were economically small traders rather than waged workers. Grammar schools were much smaller, with smaller staff numbers, than today's comprehensives, so ascent to head teacher was a nearer prospect. Since then, level of formal education has become a major predictor of voting. Most NGO workers, teachers, nurses, and even younger doctors or lawyers are wage-workers (half of GPs, even, now are salaried) and lean liberal or leftish; conversely, primary school teaching and nursing have become graduate-entry trades.

Probably the more formally-educated are more liberal these days simply because they are more formally-educated. Even if they study, say, economics, and have neo-liberal economics pushed on them, it will be neo-liberal economics which sees "racial" discrimination in jobs as noxious "market distortion", women's equality and public services as necessary lubrication for markets, etc. They have heard about the science of climate change, of transgender identities, of neurodivergence.

In previous eras higher education was a fairly tight preserve of the upper or upper-middle classes, and that tended to overwhelm the enlightening effect of study. Now it is not. The struggles of the 1960s and 1970s have had an effect, not irreversible but long-lasting, on successive generations in the educational institutions.

And in recent decades the ruling class has largely "absorbed" gender and "racial" equality (for those "already here"), seeing them as "good for business", as in fact they are. A good few employers deliberately aim for mixed-gender workforces, seeing them as more productive.

The "talking PMC fringe" deserves some credit for liberalisations, though it has done them only with the consent of the actual ruling class. It carries no essential responsibility for the neo-liberal (or worse) economic policies imposed by that ruling class.

There is pressure from the new far right against the ruling-class absorption of some liberal values, but as yet it walks crabwise, as we shall see.

One Nation in Australia clearly proposes a drastic reduction in abortion time limits, and the Trump Republicans ditto in the USA, but Trump at federal level, Reform in Britain, and even the AfD in Germany, have limited themselves to general phrases, and the RN in France is explicitly for keeping abortion rights there.

However "manospheric" some of their activist base, all the far right formations avoid appearing explicitly anti-feminist. (RN, and One Nation too, have largely closed historic gender gaps - more men supporting them than women - though Reform and AfD and Trump still have those gaps).

They seek to "slide" anger generated among workers who see the "talking PMC" as both sanctimoniously bothered about "minority rights" and "gender ideology" and the "talking face" of governments eroding public services and worker living standards, so that it vents against "softer" targets, mainly immigrants, asylum seekers, and carbon-emissions reduction.

All of them praise "the family", and One Nation in Australia proposes tax changes to make it more advantageous for parents to have one stay-at-home and another working long hours. Even One Nation, however, shies from saying women should be pushed out of waged work.

One Nation in Australia openly declares itself against climate science, and advocates halving fuel excise and quitting the Paris climate accord (as well as the WHO and the UN). Its main plank is to cut immigration and deport "illegal" migrants.

The RN in France also proposes reducing taxes on fuel. Reform UK opposes net zero.

All the far-right parties propose more prisons, more arrests, longer sentences.

All the far-right parties, in different keys, propose a less liberal education system. Reform UK would require every school to have a picture of the King, fly the Union flag, and run “patriotic” history classes; it would cut university access. All want to restrict or abolish transgender rights for young people.

Reform UK and the AfD stress that they want to make society "Christian", while One Nation and the RN say they will stick with secularism.

All the far-right parties also propose to "cut government waste".

Compared to the far-right parties of the 1930s, all these far-right parties have little social demagogy. The Nazis in Germany, after all, campaigned consistently for higher old-age pensions, and promised more jobs. Little like that with today's far-right parties. They are not addressing the underlying social grievances behind working-class resentment of sections of "the PMC", but instead diverting the flow from those grievances into other channels.

The worse-off working-class or middle-class person may hope that the changes they advocate will clip the wings of the "talking PMC" fringe, and stop them "wasting" resources on immigrants and on climate measures, but that is all.

In the UK, measures such as much more council housing; a nationalised building corporation, and restoration of substantial local authority Direct Labour Organisations; union recognition and union-negotiated conditions in logistics; turning schools from "exam factories" into better education; restored funding for Design and Technology in schools (where GCSE D&T entries went down from 280,670 in 2009 to 84,320 in 2026) with clear pathways to trade skills; restored adult education and mature-student access to higher education, would serve the interests of worse-off working-class people, those who feel that the credentialed "talking PMC" fringe talk down to them or ignore them, and are actually treated by the actual ruling class as disposable fodder for the low-paid job market.

The battle for such measures requires an alliance between the more-formally-educated-worker end of the supposed PMC, and some of its "middle-class" layers too, with the worse-off working class, against the actual ruling class.