Like my base assumption is that she’s wrong. If you think the PMC is an actual class then you’re also only one step away from 🤡
https://twitter.com/jacob__posts/status/1367492298783744001?s=19
I maintain my position that the PMC is not a real class distinct from the proletariat or the bourgeoise, but it is a real phenomenon of class collaboration among various subclasses of the main two.
I don’t think it works as coherent class collaboration either. There are tendencies and heavy similarities in affect and cultural aesthetics and speech patterns, but it is still not a matter of class collaboration for that to be the case. There is no serious methodology to induct nurses, for example, into the ranks of the managerial positions in the sense of managing firing and hiring of workers, or any consistent alliance between them and the rest of the richer professionals who are not proletariat (nurses vary heavily in political, local union activity, and voting habits, despite having a shared professional background with liberals). Petty bourgeois, and a focus on the change of management and managerial policies after finance shifts in the 70s, is a better frame of analysis.
I think you’re wrong. Managing the health of wage slaves is managerial praxis, where do you think the opiate epidemic started? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nursing#As_a_profession
That’s not what managerial praxis means, it isn’t when you manage people’s health. Your manager does not care about your health at work. A parent who cares about one’s health is now a manager too from this line, or a daycare worker. It’s about the role in wage labor, not whether they vaguely have some professional authority in interacting with you in one aspect of your life. Opiate epidemic doesn’t change that, especially when the vast majority of bribes went out to physicians.
It’s basically a conflation between sections of the Labour Aristocracy (dude Bro Code Monkeys) and a merger of both the Proletarian and Bourgois sections of the professional intelligentsia (the latter of which barely exists now outside the lanyard types, since doctors and engineers and lawyers are mostly proletarianised in terms of relationship to capital these days).
Yeah, it’s weird. It’s like they’re saying the petite bourgeois don’t exist. Like waving your hand at the slave-farmer and the slave-overseer and saying “There is no difference”. Then just lighting a pile of Piketty’s “Capitalism in the 21st” on fire and insisting modern finance capital hasn’t materially altered the way wealth and power change hands.
Modern finance capital has changed the nature of centralization of the heads of these firms, but the mode of production has not changed. The petite bourgeois still exists, they’re not the PMC and PMC is generally a term for one group of petite bourgeois to try and distance themselves from another group of petite bourgeois who have more cringe affects. Actually examining how managers fit into production, their role in the finance capital era, is a worthwhile endeavor. PMC as a concept approaches instead the cultural norms and signifers, grouping together members of the proletariat with petty bourgeoisie due to “professionalism”.
PMC as a concept approaches instead the cultural norms and signifers, grouping together members of the proletariat with petty bourgeoisie due to “professionalism”.
It identifies a class tier that comes out of corporate governance. One that is fills some necessary managerial role within Capitalism, both socially (creating the illusion of upward mobility) and economically (by quite literally managing lower-tier workers). A culture surrounds the class, and that episode was mostly poking fun at the attempts to market to people within the class through status symbols. But this thread seems to confuse Chapo-as-Observational-Comedy with the PMC-as-class-tier.
People are only able to indulge in these cultural consumerist fetishes because they have surplus disposable income. And they have that income because of their class status. And they have that class status because they fill a necessary position in the capitalist class hierarchy.
That the fetishes the class adopts are so absurd is something the Pod is making jokes about. Much in the same way they love to make fun of proletariat movie propaganda coming out of the Evangelical community.
Class is defined by relation to property, wage labor, and the mode of production. The proletariat are those that are almost or entirely propertyless, obliged to sell their labor for wages. Petty bourgeious often is associated with small business owners, but can include those that do wage labor but don’t have a substantial immediate concern if they were to lose their job, the middle class is the modern equivalent basically. It’s not a hard and fast thing and there is a general trend, outside of great moves like the shift towards stocks and pensions tied to mutual indexes and finance capital, that results in the proletarization of the petty bourgeois. Other classes have been eroded in time-peasantry no longer exist in a great deal in most countries, lumpenproletariat still exists as well.
PMC can refer to a general group-it’s issue though is the tying together of managerial positions and proletarian positions like nurses, whose relation to production is considerably different, due to cultural signifiers. Some people in the Chapo sphere like Matt are aware of this, but take the position that since America is so devoid of material politics, that it’s a useful lens to analyze how partisan politics works in the US, and attempts to break from electoral politics like the nascent left and the tensions within it.
ok now that you’ve laid claim to your precious jargon term “class”, rich people are fucking evil
Sure, they are and I often call them evil myself on a whim even if it’s imprecise and moralism and not useful class analysis. PMC doesn’t refer well to rich people either, it’s used by some college educated professionals to refer to other college educated professionals who have more annoying cultural affectations, whether they’re actually poorer or richer or more powerful or less. Insult rich people then if you’re talking about them, or professional liberal culture if it’s the lib telling you to if you don’t vote you’re a bad person.
The worst (and like maybe only bad) part of the episode was Ambre saying she wasn’t “professional” while working as a writer and podcaster for the last… 4+ years?
Like it’s ok to be “professional”. You can be “professional” and leftist. It’s weird to pretend and cosplay like you aren’t.
Teachers are highly trained and educated professionals, but I defy people to try to say that teachers can’t be leftists.
The idea that professionals can’t be leftists is absurd.
Exactly.
I mean, Marx was a highly educated professional.
There are some silly ideas about training, professionalism, and politics.
smh everyone knows teachers are cops especially ms. brown of 10th grade english literature, she knows what she did
Teachers are working class so the whole discussion is fucking moot. If for you teachers are PMC then that term is fucking useless.
People who conflate PMCs and professionals…someone here tried to imply people who made over like $50k a year couldn’t be…it’s been said.
I’m not really listening to the pod anymore, but it seemed implied in the comment I responded to that Amber has implied that before.
no they’re not. you can become a teacher with just a college degree, you don’t have to have any training at all. it’s also low pay and low authority and prestige. barely a profession.
Not only do most states require a master’s degree, you also have to have teaching licensure.
I’m required to do 150 hours of training over the course of every 5 years in order to renew my license. Some in my subject matter, some in pedagogy, some in SEI education, and some in special education.
But go off, I guess.
It’s still considered a part of the PMC, because a college degree in education is considered professional. It’s why the term doesn’t make sense.
Peasants are a separate class. Always have been.
Some people are being way to simplistic in their analysis of class. It’s not just own shit/do shit. Nobles are different from Bourgeoisie, Proletarians are different from Peasants.
This is the nuance you lose when you get your theory from the internet instead of books.
instead of books
name this book, sir! (please?)
What would be a good resource for “Nobles are different from Bourgeoisie, Proletarians are different from Peasants”
Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1 should make clear that the class systems of Feudalism and Capitalism are distinct. You can find further references to this in Capital.
Really, any of his works should make clear that he saw his time as one of transition, where the bourgeoisie was still establishing its hegemony in much of Europe. The Bourgeoisie was a separate class which was in the process of overthrowing the nobility.
Bourgeoisie originally just refered to free, urban townspeople in European feudal society.
The primary difference, if we stick to “means of production” was that nobles owned land, while the bourgeoisie owned tools and workshops. Both are forms of productive capital and can be used to extract surplus value (though, initially most Bourgeoisie extracted it from themselves), but the key difference is that land is not a commodity. It’s a finite resource (unless you’re Dutch). This meant wealth was finite for nobles, but for the Bourgeoisie, it was something that could be created. This kicked off a series of transformations in the bourgeoisie, including the increased reliance on wage labour. This would transform the bourgeoisie into modern capitalists, and capitalism would eclipse feudalism.
So, clearly relations to the means of production as a definition for class doesn’t just come down to own/work. Different forms of ownership and ownership of different things can have huge impacts. As can relationships to government, the church, and other centers of power outside the primary means of exploitation.
I remember principles of communism by Engels being a little Q&A pamphlet and one of the questions is “so the proletariat hasn’t always existed?”
Edit: link, it goes into the difference between proletariat and other working classes that existed in pre capitalist economies https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm
One thing that soured me a bit on Amber was that rant about how people who hate their parents should get over it. It just came across as naive. Some people (like abuse or neglect victims) have a damn good reason for hating their parents.
Some people (like abuse or neglect victims) have a damn good reason for hating their parents.
Hurt people hurt people. These parents were, very likely, the victims of abuse and neglect during their childhoods. As their parents were in turn. That’s before you get into the impact of shit like lead poisoning on the human brain. The whole 80s-era drug/crime wave can be traced back to lead gas and lead paint. The damage done to people’s brains caused all sorts of mental illnesses.
Even setting aside all of that, lets say your parents had no excuse. Lets say they’re straight up Jeffery Epstein grade sociopaths who deserve every ounce of hate you can fling their way. It’s still just, like, not good for your own psyche to dwell on these people. Trauma isn’t something you should seek to cultivate in yourself. It’s poison. It’s debilitating and agony-inducing. Escaping that agony is far better for you, if you can manage it. And if you can’t, that’s what good comrades are supposed to help you out with.
The goal of Leftism isn’t to exact revenge on the old world. It’s to purge the poison from the system so that the next generation has it better than we did.
You make some good points but there is something in me that doesn’t think people that hurt children should be forgiven, at least not without being made to atone. I don’t know if I’m bitter or vengeful or what. Maybe.
something in me that doesn’t think people that hurt children should be forgiven, at least not without being made to atone
Not forgotten, certainly. Not necessarily even liking them. But part of the materialist view of history is recognizing our decisions are - at least in part - a consequence of our conditions.
I don’t know if I’m bitter or vengeful or what. Maybe.
You’re a product of your condition, too. And having feelings isn’t a sin.
