Professional-Managerial Class

PROFESSIONAL-MANAGERIAL CLASS. To generations of radicals, the working class was seen as the agent of both progressive social reform movements and socialist revolution. The Left of the 1960s and since, however, has been mainly based in people who think of themselves as “middle class,” while the working class has been largely quiescent for three-quarters of a century.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, groups on the Left struggled to understand the class basis of their own movement. Why did the new left wing of mass movements emerge primarily among students and young professionals? Why did the Left continue to have trouble gaining support and recruiting activists from the working class? In those Left groups that did manage to draw significant numbers of working-class members, why were political and cultural tensions between middle-class and working-class groups so evident? Did class as well as race help explain the divisions between feminists, with white feminists focusing on issues appealing to white middle-class women and Black feminists focusing more on the needs of Black working- class women?

In this context, Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, both long time Left activists and writers, formulated the concept of the “professional-managerial class” (PMC). The Ehrenreichs defined the PMC as being made up 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.” Some (e.g., teachers, health care professionals, social workers, lawyers) play a more-or-less explicit role in the processes of social reproduction and social control. Others (e.g., journalists, artists, advertising copy writers) produce and disseminate the ideology of capitalist societies. The functions of still others are hidden within the process of production itself, as is the case with engineers, who organize the process of production, and lower and mid-level managers, who directly manage the productive process.

The PMC, as the Ehrenreichs conceived it, has a contradictory relationship both to the working class below them and to the capitalist class above them. Like the traditional working class, the PMC is employed by capitalist institutions and is constantly engaged in struggles with employers over wages and hours, autonomy in the workplace, and the content of their work. It also provides needed services to those in the working class (e.g., health care, education). PMC radicalism and humanism flows from its self-interests, which are shared with the working class. At the same time, the PMC also has a conflictual relationship with the working class. It controls the working class on behalf of capitalism and seeks to sustain capitalist cultural and technological hegemony over the working class. The PMC vision of socialism places rationality and expertise at its center, but the PMC has a long history of undermining working-class culture and skills. Humiliation, harassment, disrespect, and frustration at the hands of the PMC is part of the daily experience of the working class.

Real-life contacts between the two classes express these conflicts, sometimes implicitly and sometimes benignly. The subjective dimension of these contacts is a complex mix of hostility and deference on the part of working-class people, contempt and paternalism on the part of the PMC. Hence there emerges the possibility of both a PMC “anti-working-class radicalism” and a working-class “class conscious anti-socialism.”

The concept of the PMC has been used to explore various aspects of American culture and to advance an understanding of the contemporary Left. Barbara Ehrenreich noted that PMC positions are not passed down from parents to children but are acquired through extended schooling, leading to intense anxiety among PMC parents over childrearing and schooling. Adolph Reed saw an “identity politics” in which class becomes invisible as the ideology of the Black PMC, which expanded dramatically in the post-Civil Rights era. Nancy Fraser similarly identified the mainstream feminism of the early twenty-first century as primarily benefitting women of the professional-managerial class.

Since the mid-1970s, the PMC has tended to fragment. The allegiance of lower managers and mid-level engineers to the corporations they worked for has increased. Other professionals (e.g., computer coders, journalists, human service workers, academics) have faced downward pressure on pay and threats to autonomy and job security, and the replacement of permanent employment by contract work has increased. The long-term implications of these changes remain unclear.

Ehrenreich, Barbara and John. “The Professional-Managerial Class,” Radical America 11(2), March-April 1977.

Ehrenreich, Barbara and John, “The New Left and the Professional Managerial Class,” Radical America 11(3), May-June 1977.

Ehrenreich, Barbara and John. Death of a Yuppie Dream: The Rose and Fall of the Professional-Managerial Class. New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2013.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. New York: Pantheon, 1989.

Press, Alex. “On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich,” Dissent, 2019 (Oct 22).