I recently finished reading this article by Scipio Sattler which has added to the discourse on the “professional-managerial class” from the point of view of an orthodox Marxist position. The article charges that the American left is thoroughly taken over by enemies of the working class: this antagonist is the professional managerial class, which collaborated with the bourgiosie to support the Warren campaign at the expense of the Sanders campaign in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
In particular, the article engaged with my recent piece for Palladium Mag which argued that the “proffessional managerial class” is not a class at all, but rather a cultural group generated as a byproduct of the reproduction of various state ideological apparatuses, and which cuts across the various classes in society. To make this argument, I first had to establish precisely what grounds we can define a class: a group with its own political ideology and a distinct stream of income. This twofold definition was required to utilize class as a category in the analysis of a society and its political economy, in order to connect its political and economic dimensions.
To defend the theory of the professional managerial class, Sattler suggests that he can define this class precisely on those grounds: that the economic difference can be found in the difference in income between college graduates and people without a college education, and the political ideology can be found in what has now been termed “wokeness”.
Let’s address the economic side first. There is a very big problem with basing the economic status of a class on income, rather than the relation of production. Differences in income are, from the historic standpoint, somewhat arbitrary, and dependent on factors which are not structurally necessary for the system. There is after all, a difference in income between many groups (including arbitrarily defined groups), including men and women, blacks, whites and latinos, ect. While the difference between those with a degree and without is larger than the differences between these other groups for the moment, this doesn’t always have to be the case. If the supply of college educated workers continues to increase, there could be a situation where there is no difference in income at all.
Sattler attempts to make this distinction more concrete by pointing to the difference between wage labor and salaried labor, (while also conflating this with the difference between productive and unproductive labor). However, this distinction is also arbitrary and highly contingent in a way relationships of production are not. In the United States, salary work is determined purely by the income level according to the law, that is, workers earning above, as of writing, $35,578 will be salaried and exempt from overtime rules. This was actually changed earlier this year, raising it from $23,660. Professional Managerial class collaborationists who earned $25,000 in 2019 would have suddenly been transformed into salt of the earth proletarians in 2020, indeed in the middle of the primaries.
It is also an error to ascribe this class distinction to be between productive and unproductive labor, which is only the difference between working to circulate commodities versus working to create commodities directly. As Marx points out, unproductive work can have exactly the same content as productive work. Even manual labor can be unproductive labor if it is not done in the service of capital in the productive process, as he says:
The same kind of labour (e.g. gardening, tailoring, etc.) can be performed by the same working man in the service of an industrial capitalist, or of the immediate consumer. In both cases the worker is a wage labourer or a day labourer, but in the first case he is a productive worker, in the second an unproductive one, because in the first case he produces capital, in the second case he does not; because in the first case his labour forms a moment in capital’s process of self-valorisation, in the second case it does not.
Particularly important in Marx’s remarks here is how he notes that even “professionals” have been transformed into wage laborers.
A large number of functions and activities which were surrounded with a halo, regarded as ends in themselves, and done for nothing or paid for in an indirect way (so that professionals, such as physicians and barristers in England, could not or cannot sue for payment), are on the one hand converted directly into wage labour, however their content or their mode of payment may differ. On the other hand, they become subject — that is, the estimation of their value, the price of these various activities, from the prostitute’s to the king’s, becomes subject — to the laws that regulate the price of wage labour.
When we say that an economic class demands its own unique stream of income, we do not mean a unique level of income, but a form of income with unique laws which regulate their magnitude. To this extent, there is no real difference from the standpoint of economics between the group he has gestured at as the PMC, and the proletariat. These were arguments I considered including in my original article, but decided to leave out on the basis I felt that they were relatively obvious.
Now we can deal with the political ideology of this group, the ideology of wokeness. I believe we can agree it is an ideology, and indeed a destructive ideology for class politics. It is also true that college educated professionals and academia are responsible for producing this ideology, but only on the basis as their status as mental laborers for the petite bourgeoise and capitalists.
This is I feel, the important aspect of my project here. I want to point out that someone actually has to produce systematized ideology, just as Marx did in the German Ideology. This production has to occur for all classes in society, identifying those who specialize in this production as a class of their own produces some very absurd results – for example concluding that all philosophical and ideological discourse is at root simply shadow-boxing between factions of this intellectual class.
Where Sattler and others have failed is not in being too class reductionist and orthodox, it is in not being class reductionist and orthodox enough. The logical conclusion of their arguements is that the left as a whole must be abandoned, the same conclusion reached over and over again by irrelevant Trotskyist groups through the past 30 years (the Platypus society comes to mind). Possibly even class struggle must be abandoned, after all, only a minority of Americans over 25 have now received no higher education.
Each of these frustrated declarations, whether they are caused by the failures of social democracy, the Soviet Union, the anti-war movement, occupy wall street, or the Sanders campaign, have a certain myopia to them. Let’s take this most recent anti-Warren focus, which posits that the movement of voters away from Sanders to Warren was the result of the treachery of this fundamental class enemy of the proletariat, and that, call-out culture is the representation of the concrete interests of this class. This naturally poses the question, why was this class behind Bernie in the battle against Hillary then? Hillary hit all the high notes of woke identity politics, and explicitly positioned herself as the candidate to provide experience and expertise to the office.
And for that matter, if call-out culture represents the concrete interests of the PMC, why did they have almost the exact opposite position in 2014/15, where their rallying cry was first and foremost against “internet harassment”? The left was, if anything, even more liberal and identarian than it was earlier this year, Socialism and class politics had only barely re-entered the conversation on a formal level. Mark Fisher’s famous “Exiting the Vampire Castle” essay, defining this sort of woke culture, was published in 2013. In 2015, you could be attacked simply for talking about class rather than simply identities. Now, everyone must accept the validity of class struggle, even if only as one of a number of struggles (perhaps the 70s would be a good comparison, which while still the death throws of mass working class movements, was still before the end of history total negation of popular class politics between 1991 and 2008).
Is this the kind of progress we need? Well, yes and no. People need to be aware of class struggle in order to see the historical options presented by it. But as of yet, the historical depatures from capitalism represented by class struggle have been suppressed at every contingent point. What is important is that the tendencies and contradictions which forced all the crises mentioned before have not gone away. After a crisis has slipped by, along with it the radical opportunities, there is an instinct to hyper-analyze the situation, and create over-fitted theoretical models to explain them. To accept the analysis of the PMC class is not only incoherent with existing theories of class struggle, but also fundamentally defeatist.
The PMC theorists would do well to focus on the following questions: exactly why the Marxist theory of mental labor is incorrect, what the economic laws of this class’s income are, and why wokeness must be attributed to a class’s agency and not other structural forces. Or perhaps more importantly, now that the political crisis of capitalism represented by Sander’s campaign has passed, what are the contours and possibilities of our current crisis?
Nicolas D Villarreal 