The idea that the Professional-Managerial Class, or PMC, is overrepresented in left-wing movements has had a long history of discussion. From the Ehrenreichs’ initial formulation to Catherine Liu’s polemic in Virtue Hoarders, this class, typically defined as college-educated mental workers who hold positions of either expertise or authority, is blamed for all manner of issues in the left, in particular its supposedly paternalistic and elitist attitudes towards the working class. The Ehrenreichs attempt to explain this cultural phenomenon through the PMCs material interests: broadly against capital, but still interested in maintaining dominance over unskilled labor. Catherine Liu goes further, questioning if the PMC can ever be working-class allies at all. Varn and Tutt in The People Are Not One reject Liu’s notion of complete severance, but concede that if they are to be allies they must be “class traitors”.

This article rejects the premise shared by these writers that the PMC, as a whole, has interests fundamentally opposed to the working class. It argues instead that what are labeled as PMC occupations actually represent three entirely separate class positions with divergent class interests: the supervisors and managers between the bourgeoisie and proletariat; the semi-autonomous workers between the petite-bourgeoisie and the proletariat; and the state-mediated positions whose relations are defined by social reproduction and not commodity production. The semi-autonomous worker in particular is increasingly proletarianized to the degree that the primary differences between a modern engineer and electrician are in income and education alone. While these are certainly important distinctions, they do not represent fundamentally different material interests. This overly broad definition of the PMC does describe a real cultural phenomenon that is better understood today as cultural capital. However, it is this post-hoc explanation of a cultural phenomenon that ultimately ignores where alliances can be made and perpetuates solutions that do not address this divide.

DSA as a Demographic Case Study

The idea that the PMC at-large is overrepresented on the left is often taken for granted. Most discussions take this fact at face value and do not interrogate it. However, an understanding of not only the degree to which this problem exists, but also which occupations are overrepresented, is imperative to understanding the problem. To address this, I use a comparison between DSA survey data on membership occupations from 2021 and Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data from 2020. While the DSA is not representative of the left as a whole, it is certainly the single largest organization on the left that has these statistics in detail. Moreover, DSA is often held up as a particularly cogent example of this problem, so it should provide us with the clearest empirical example. The table below shows the results of this comparison.

Before we dive into an analysis of these numbers, some weaknesses and assumptions must be addressed. The biggest weakness is that the DSA survey did not use the same occupational categories as the BLS data. Some assumptions had to be made to align the categories. In particular, most of the groupings under “Professional, non-Tech” had no definite counterpart, so the BLS data used included all professional occupations as well as sales and clerical work, grouping the three DSA groups into one category. For academics, BLS data does not clearly delineate an occupation like researcher or professor, so this grouping includes all occupations labeled teacher or life, physical, and social science occupations. This likely means that academics are slightly underreported on the BLS side to an unknown degree. Lastly, BLS does not separate self-employed as a different occupation, so the self-employed are sprinkled throughout the BLS data. Since this is not a large fraction, the impact is minimal on this analysis, but it is worth noting that BLS suggests that roughly 10% of the population is self-employed.

It is immediately noticeable that four occupations are wildly out of sync: Academics (including school teachers), Tech workers, creative occupations, and blue-collar workers. There are some mild discrepancies for other occupations, but not dramatic ones, and they fall within statistical noise. This does indeed align with the assumption going in that the PMC is overrepresented and traditional workers are underrepresented. However, school teachers, tech workers, and writers are hardly the highly credentialed elite that are often conjured up when discussing the PMC. Academics are the sole stereotypical PMC group that are potentially overrepresented. This itself is complicated by the clarification the survey results provide: based on unionization numbers (of which 60% in DSA are noted to be schoolteachers), the proportion of members that are schoolteachers can be estimated to be at least 8%. This assumption would practically eliminate the supposed overrepresentation of academics within DSA.

Among the traditional working class, it is only blue-collar workers that are underrepresented; service, food, and retail workers are exactly proportional to their population. In fact, since BLS data includes occupations such as police within broader service workers, and DSA explicitly forbids law enforcement membership, this means service workers are potentially overrepresented within the DSA. If this is true, then DSA does not have a problem attracting the working class as a whole; it has a problem attracting blue-collar workers specifically. One could argue, as Thomas Edsall does in his recent article in the New York Times, that proportional representation is not enough to represent the working class; blue-collar and service workers must make up more than their population-level proportion. In this case, the situation is certainly dire, as blue-collar and service workers indeed do make up a small proportion of the party. However, this criticism rests on the assumption that a working-class party should not represent workers as a whole, but only blue-collar and service workers.

In the non-technical professional group, the DSA survey complicates things by listing three employer categories instead of true occupations. This made one-to-one occupational proportion comparison difficult, but industry-level data is available. By this measure, NGO and public sector employees are actually slightly underrepresented in DSA compared to the population. Due to the oddness of conflating these employers with occupation, this should probably not be given too much weight, but the fact that it's even possible is interesting. The employer type that is hugely overrepresented is those employed specifically by political organizations and unions. I would designate this category a “reasonable outlier” due to the fact that DSA is a political organization itself, so both groups are more likely than any other to be involved. If this is largely union leaders, it could even be held up as a strength.

The issue of PMC overrepresentation is often framed as an issue unique to the left and liberals, but this is not supported by the data. In fact, the right draws from a different segment of the PMC: the supervisors and managers who exercise authority, command, and coercion. The Federalist Society is a network of legal elites. The January 6th rioters were more likely to be business owners, managers, and professionals, though notably only four of those convicted were engineers and were more likely to hold management positions. Despite this, blue-collar workers often embrace the right. Accordingly, any suggestion that the PMC has no place on the left cannot be made based on an inherent toxicity to blue-collar workers. What remains is the suggestion that members of the PMC must betray their class interests to do so. This argument may be supported by the fact that the PMC is also overrepresented on the right, but it must also contend with the fact that the segment of the PMC that is attracted to the left is distinct from the segment attracted to the right. Specifically, this rests on the assumption that school teachers, tech workers, and writers have the same material interests as their bosses.

This data confirms the overrepresentation of the PMC in the DSA, but it also complicates the category. The overrepresented occupations are not the supervisors and managers that the Ehrenreichs' framework centers, and are largely the ones they themselves define as “on the borders”. Tech workers in particular are the most overrepresented occupation, but actually fit very few of what the Ehrenreichs use to define the PMC. On the other side of the class divide, the proportional representation of service workers in DSA compared to the dearth of blue-collar workers suggests that the issues are not just Weberian class antagonisms defined by income, but broader cultural antipathy.

The PMC as Contradictory Class Positions

The Ehrenreichs define the Professional-Managerial Class “as consisting 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”. As Chibber notes in The Politics of the PMC, this definition is confusing and could be expanded to include any salaried mental worker. If the bar is reproduction of capitalist culture and relations, it is difficult to reject any workers that produce anything but the simplest commodities and services. He attempts to correct for what they meant by providing this alternate definition: “salaried mental workers, people who engage in some kind of intellectual labor whose function is not to reproduce capitalism, but whose function is to manage the extraction of labor or to aid and abet in the extraction of labor in the sense that managers do.” However, it’s immediately clear that this definition would exclude many of the workers the Ehrenreichs explicitly describe in their paper. While Chibber acknowledges this tension, he is content to conclude that the Ehrenreichs were just wrong and moves on with his updated definition. This ignores the question of why the Ehrenreichs strove to include nurses, social workers, and engineers alongside managers.

As Barbara Ehrenreich notes in her interview with Dissent Magazine, her inspiration for the idea was based on seeing how people within this class frequently treated working-class people with contempt. She continues to be explicit that she intended to include all mental workers in her categorization effectively. She saw a real phenomenon of “the contempt for especially white working-class people among leftists of college backgrounds”, and then attempted to explain this through material interests based in antagonistic class divsions. The problem that this has created is that the phenomenon is so compelling that the claims of material interest are either taken at face value and the full PMC is seen as a class enemy, or, as Chibber does, the PMC is whittled down to the “actual” enemy and loses its power to describe the cultural divide that does exist between mental and manual laborers. To avoid both traps, it is important to first identify what the real material interests are of the various people within this class.

Erik Olin Wright argues in Class and Occupation that occupations within classes exist along a tripolar spectrum between the bourgeoisie, petite-bourgeoisie, and proletariat. There are many workers who fit somewhere in between each pole –and therefore share class interests with the two poles they reside between – that Wright calls contradictory class positions. Between the bourgeoisie and proletariat are the supervisors and managers. These are the workers who exercise control on behalf of the bourgeoisie, but typically do not have control over accumulation, nor do they typically receive direct profits. Between the petite-bourgeoisie and proletariat are the semi-autonomous workers. These are the workers that have significant control over what they produce but are employed by capital and do not own the means of production.

When viewing the occupations within the PMC, it is clear that they do not fit cleanly into any one category. In fact, it is almost precisely the merging of professional occupations with managerial occupations that creates this tension. Managers and bureaucrats occupy the axis between bourgeoisie and proletariat, while doctors, lawyers, academics, and engineers occupy the axis between the petite-bourgeoisie and proletariat. Fitting nurses, schoolteachers, and social workers into a clear category outside of the proletariat is slightly more difficult. Wright rejects schoolteachers as supervisors and places them within the proletariat. He does not explicitly reference the other groupings, and his framework largely focuses on relation to production, so social reproduction occupations are particularly hard to place. I will use the Ehrenreichs’ intent to place the remaining groups with that in mind. Under their framework, since teachers and social workers oversee students and cases, they are supervisors, and I will place them accordingly. Nurses fit better under semi-autonomous workers. They are generally able to make decisions as the first line of care for patients, are valued for their knowledge in that realm, and are credentialed accordingly. With our various PMC occupations sorted, we can now understand their material interests further.

To understand the class interests of the supervisors and managers, it is helpful to imagine what happens if the people occupying either pole were to disappear. If the bourgeoisie were to disappear, the managers and supervisors would take their place immediately. They would gain more power, but would change nothing about their relationship to the working class. Without the proletariat, they would simply become the proletariat. Without either, they would have no place at all. This is what the Ehrenreichs describe when they discuss the PMC’s material interests as a whole. They are structurally dependent on controlling the working class, but also have much to gain by usurping the bourgeoisie. Except now, we must reckon with the decision to include schoolteachers and social workers. This logic largely holds for social workers; without cases to work, they have no job, and therefore have a vested interest in maintaining a case to work. That is not to say they have no interest in dismantling oppressive structures, but that their interest is entirely moral and not material. Schoolteachers, on the other hand, do not have these same interests. As long as children need to be educated, schoolteachers will exist. The only thing that makes schoolteachers an uncertain ally is that they have no direct interest in the overthrow of capital. If they are anti-capitalist, it is either out of morality or the more abstract benefits they would likely derive from having a socialist society. The placement of these social reproduction occupations still feels unsatisfying, however, and we will revisit this later.

We can do a similar thought experiment with the semi-autonomous workers, with some modification. Since the existence of the petite-bourgeoisie has little bearing on class relations as a whole, we will primarily focus on the poles of bourgeoisie and proletariat again. Like the supervisors and managers, without the proletariat, the semi-autonomous workers would simply become the new proletariat. In fact, this would happen before the managers would, because the semi-autonomous workers are themselves controlled first by management. Without the bourgeoisie, things are less clear. If the supervisors and managers remained, they would likely have no change in station. Without the supervisors and managers, one could make the assumption that these workers would replace them, but even if this were so, it would be a change in structural position and not an obvious evolution. Where they differ most is in the scenario without the bourgeoisie or proletariat. Whereas supervisors and managers lose their purpose, semi-autonomous workers lose very little. They would be happy to be doctors, lawyers, etc. for the other doctors and lawyers. The exercise does begin to strain the imagination; after all, if the proletariat actually disappeared, whatever society remained would have to figure out how to perform the functions of the proletariat. However, understanding this disappearance as the disappearance of the structural basis of labor extraction helps to make it concrete. In many ways, this scenario resembles the Star Trek-esque utopian socialist vision where toiling is no longer necessary, and the people are free to pursue whatever passions they desire. After all, the world of Star Trek is full of doctors, lawyers, and especially engineers. Since this segment gains freedom when capitalist extraction is ended and has no structural dependency on the proletariat, it can be said that their material interests are primarily centered around gaining or preserving autonomy. While this does not perfectly align with the primary material interests of the working class and often aligns instead with petite-bourgeoisie, this is by no means the “objectively antagonistic” relationship the Ehrenreichs suggest, and to claim that this means that this segment must betray its class to align with the working class one must reckon with the fact that the PMC do not have a monopoly on semi-autonomous workers, and rejecting all but the most proletarianized workers leaves a quite small segment of the population.

It is worth more directly addressing those segments that have more to do with social reproduction than commodity production. Wright's framework sits within the Marxist definitions of class and is largely centered around commodity production and the relation towards extraction of labor within production. As a result, occupations that are not directly related to commodity production and don't create surplus value to be extracted are difficult to place. To address this, I will extend Wright's framework to a fourth pole representing the state. Where Wright's is seen as a triangle with each side representing a contradictory class position, this formulation would be a pyramid where position along each face additionally represents the relation to the state for all class positions. While the state does not represent a class in a true sense, this can help to visualize a secondary form of relation that is separate from direct commodity production. Occupations residing along this axis may be employed directly by the state and work on its behalf or simply perform functions that perpetuate society. This resolves the tension for schoolteachers, where they can now be workers (where Wright places them), but as employees of the state are both dependent on its structure while being subject to its control. Similarly, social workers can exist within the worker or semi-autonomous worker sphere, but are still reliant on the structures of the state. This is not unique to the PMC. Police and military are workers who exercise state control. The various strata within the defense industry still fit the same structure in relation to commodity production, but all are dependent on the state to employ them. This is not meant to be a full taxonomic exercise, but to illustrate how the relation to the state can impact material interests. Those with stronger ties to the state have a material interest in maintaining the state as-is; those in the middle range may be anti-capitalist and perhaps even interested in revolutionary change, but have skills that only make sense within the context of state administration. While this does not preclude them from alliances with the working class, it does influence the solutions that they provide. When envisioning a post-capitalist society, they may be more inclined to support simple reform or highly bureaucratic socialist societies.

We have now identified three distinct subgroups within the PMC with diverging material interests: supervisors and managers, state-mediated occupations, and semi-autonomous workers. This challenges the idea that the PMC have cohesive material interests that are objectively antagonistic towards the working class. Only one of these three groups can be considered objectively antagonistic; the other two can be considered at worst ambivalent towards and at best easy allies of the working class. This also complicates the suggestion that allies must be class traitors. While this is definitively true for the managerial group and potentially (but not universally) true for state-mediated occupations, the argument does not hold well for semi-autonomous workers without also applying the logic to many blue-collar trades. If you maintain that the semi-autonomous workers betraying the managers is what makes them a class traitor, the designation of class traitor is essentially meaningless and can be applied to anyone as long as you assign them an external label first. Returning to the demographic data, this suggests that the DSA does not at least have a material interests problem. If the most overrepresented occupations are firmly within the semi-autonomous or state-mediated groups, these are not inherent enemies to the movement. That said, that clearly hasn't solved our problem. The initial observation the Ehrenreichs noted, the contempt and paternalism of professionals towards blue-collar workers, is still there. If it's not material interests, then what is it? To find out, we must understand where the differences actually are.

What Divides Professionals from Skilled Trades?

If the PMC's overrepresentation on the left cannot be explained by unified material interests, then what accounts for the persistent cultural gap between the professional class and blue-collar workers? The Ehrenreichs' framework, whatever its limitations, correctly identified a real phenomenon: the contempt and paternalism that educated leftists often direct toward the working class. But if this class antipathy is not rooted in material antagonism, we must look elsewhere. Perhaps the most revealing comparison is between professionals and skilled trades.

Professionals themselves are not a monolith; in fact, the term itself is somewhat hard to define. By a basic dictionary definition, it is “someone who does a job that requires special training, education, or skill”, but under this definition there is no difference between the professionals of the PMC and skilled trades. If you require both training and licensing, doctors, lawyers, and teachers are included, but most modern engineers and tech workers are excluded, while cosmetologists and truckers are included. Jobs that require a Bachelor’s degree or more get us closer, but many white-collar workers and even tech workers are left out, as shown by the proliferation of “boot camps” of the last decade. This leaves us with a final definition: Jobs which either require a degree in a specific subject from an academic institution or see a degree in that subject as equivalent to experience. Even this definition is slightly complicated by the existence of trade schools, which only furthers the squishiness of this definition.

It would be simple to jump to adding “mental work” to our definition, as is often done, but this ignores the highly mental nature of many skilled trades. After all, it is largely this aspect that makes them skilled trades. Electricians must understand routing currents, how to troubleshoot issues, and how to do it all safely. Automotive mechanics must be able to assess problems by sound and feel. Automation has nearly eliminated rote manual tasks within factories, and the modern factory operator must operate often complicated and dangerous equipment. And these are some of the lower-skilled trades when compared to an aircraft mechanic or elevator maintainer. Professional occupations, then, are not defined by the presence of mental work, but the absence of manual labor. Even this becomes fuzzy for engineers who prototype as well as ER doctors and surgeons who often work physically demanding shifts. This comparison highlights the cultural differences at their starkest: many wrongly view blue-collar work as insufficiently mental and therefore the workers as less intelligent, while others view professionals as weak and effete.

A factor that weighs heavily in the Ehrenreichs’ definition as well as Wright's contradictory class positions is autonomy. Again, we reach a fairly fuzzy line, especially in modern times. While most doctors and lawyers have a fair bit of autonomy (though many in underfunded hospitals or corporate firms don't, especially early career), engineers, tech workers, and nurses do not. Engineers are given requirements to meet; they have autonomy on how to achieve those requirements, but rarely any say in what they are until they are deep into their career, if ever. Software developers are often subject to similar and often further constraints on what tech stack to use, which tasks to complete when and how to approach them. Both are often subject to “Matrix” organizations which intend to treat tasks and workers as completely interchangeable. With the rise of AI coding agents, this is only being magnified. If all white-collar work is included, call center workers are some of the least autonomous workers. Contrasting this to blue-collar work, it's difficult to identify a definitive line where they are less autonomous. An HVAC tech will size and route ducting and troubleshoot units, all with little oversight beyond the most senior worker on site. Most maintenance technicians of all types have significant leeway in how they approach their jobs. While some engineers and tech workers have the privilege of working remotely and therefore have autonomy over where they do the work, many don't, as the debate over return to work post-Covid has emphasized. One remaining potential distinction is autonomy over when they work, but that is still bounded and not guaranteed. Again, we have a situation with significant overlap between professionals and blue-collar workers. However, this autonomy may not feel equal. Yes, the office worker may get no say in their hours or where they work, but the hours are likely predictable, and the office is likely climate-controlled. However, it should not be discounted that this combination of low autonomy and relative comfort of many white-collar jobs is a breeding ground for the psychological torment of what David Graeber deemed “Bullshit Jobs”; a potentially radicalizing state in its own right.

A supposedly obvious distinction is pay. The PMC are, after all, the rich elite. Unfortunately, this leads to similar conclusions. Doctors, and to a certain extent, lawyers, are certainly well paid in comparison, so we will put them to the side for now, remembering that the tension that we need to resolve is that of school teachers and tech workers. Using BLS occupational outlook data, median pay tech workers make on the low end $60k a year for general computer support to $130k for software developers. Most engineers make around $100-110k per year. If this doesn't match your expectations, you are probably imagining the Silicon Valley FAANG software developer with Google stock and a fat salary to match. The Ehrenreichs probably had similar images in mind when they ultimately placed engineers in their grouping because engineering served as a “gateway to the ruling class”. But there are millions of tech workers in America, and very few are making it to that degree. To complete the comparison, at the low end of blue-collar workers we have the construction trades and electricians at $55-65k per year, and at the high end specialty maintenance techs and linemen at $90k-100k. This shows some very strong overlap, so if we assume it's the raw pay, we also have to answer why blue-collar workers are included in the working class given that they make significantly more than service workers, as well as precisely at what number the cutoff for salary should reside. However, there's an underlying tension that resolves the answer more effectively. A lineman risks their life and limb to bring power to communities and makes as much or less than most professionals. Even the less explicitly dangerous jobs will see office workers making at least as much as they do for sitting at a desk all day. To a blue-collar worker, it can certainly seem like the professional is getting paid more while giving less of themself.

In every dimension there is fuzziness and overlap, so drawing a line anywhere inevitably misclassifies some occupations in each class. If they aren't really separable on a material basis, then we can't separate them based on competing interests. But it's also very easy to separate them. Skilled trades also get training and even go to schools for the trade sometimes, but research institutions rarely, if ever, have these programs (and these programs rarely have advanced mathematics or humanities as part of their curriculum). Both groups engage in mental work, but blue-collar workers are delineated by their physical work. Autonomy is perhaps the most overlapping trait, but that autonomy can seem lesser if you're working in the hot sun or an unairconditioned factory. Pay brings this all together, where the actual numbers may be similar, but the blue-collar worker feels like they sacrificed more to get at best the same and often less pay. None of these are convincingly a structural problem, however. There's nothing that should inherently separate these groups, except for the culture that arises around the academy and around manual labor. While this comparison addressed those cases where there is still a tangible difference in occupation, it is also important to consider the other end of the spectrum: those who have the cultural markers of the academy but hold clearly proletarian occupations.

The AOC Problem: Are Well-Educated Bartenders Working Class?

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was first elected, her background generated a lot of discussion. Working as a bartender, she was lauded as a working-class representative. Many on the right pointed to her Boston College education as proof of the opposite. Her father was an architect, certified PMC. I have no interest in resurrecting this specific debate, but it serves as an acute example of the difficulty of placing someone who has a PMC background but works an objectively working-class occupation.

This is not a question unique to AOC, or even a small minority of people; a large number of service workers went to college, got a degree, and found themselves unable to find a job in their field. One could surmise that perhaps this is the reason why service workers are well represented; they are simply PMC themselves, and the problem is even worse than we thought. However, if this is true, and they are not working class, we are rapidly departing from the Marxist conception of class, and material interests cease to be immediately determinable. These workers objectively reside in a structural position that can only be described as working class. If we base our analysis on their structural position, then clearly their material interests are not a problem.

In all the cases we've reviewed, a common theme emerges. The material interest argument is weak or conditioned on assumptions, but there is still a clear distinction. When comparing professionals and blue-collar workers, despite the many similarities in the abstract, it is immediately identifiable which jobs belong in which category. The fact that educated service workers have their class position questioned at all shows their distinction. What this builds to is that the PMC is not a true class in the Marxist sense. Instead, it is a class defined entirely by cultural capital.

In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu suggests that cultural capital –which is accrued through education, accent and word choice, and familiarity with general “good taste”– is the primary signifier of class position, and therefore a major source of social power. Those with significant cultural capital themselves define “good taste”, and institutionalize these ideas through education both in the academies and in childrearing. “Bad Taste” then, represented by anything counter to “good taste” is a form of hegemonic domination over the lower classes. Those with bad taste are seen as less intelligent, rude, and “poor cultural fits”. They are expected to conform to good taste in order to acquire “respectable” jobs, but good taste is often developed in opposition to their culture. This distinction of bad taste is not unique to white blue-collar workers and is often highly racialized and accordingly has implications for any discussion on the racial makeup of the left as well. The internalization of this concept of taste is unconscious; to many, the “correct” way to act is obvious. This creates the very conditions often at play in the PMC debate: the working class is expected to speak the language of the PMC but was never taught it.

Why does this Matter?

It may at first seem that I've spent a long time creating a distinction without a difference. Cultural capital is still developed through material structures, and its value cannot be ignored. Perhaps all the arguments still hold; the material interests are just in maintaining the social hierarchy and not in structural economic domination. In this case, a “class traitor” is betraying a social class and not an economic one, but betraying it nonetheless. This argument is compelling and holds some water, but ultimately is a much weaker basis for unresolvable divides than material arguments.

The biggest weakness in this argument is that it ignores that culture is fragmented and constantly evolving. This is especially evident on the right, where (particularly white) blue-collar workers have immense cultural capital. Men who never do manual labor even around their own home buy massive work trucks to signify their alignment. Country music is celebrated, and ties to the industry are cultivated by conservative politicians. Mass market domestic beer is held up as what “Real Americans” drink, and this is fiercely protected, as seen with the Bud Light boycott over a single ad campaign celebrating a trans woman. On the right, these signifiers are lauded. On the left, they are all “bad taste”. This is often transparent, as in the humorous case of Ben Shapiro buying a single two-foot board at Home Depot and carrying it out in a shopping bag, but the signal is there: by emulating blue-collar culture, they show that they value it.

This also highlights the different stakes at play for a social class traitor as opposed to an economic one. To betray the dominant social class has far fewer consequences and is done constantly, often shaping culture itself. This is especially evident in the frequent adoption of racialized signifiers like AAVE, sneaker culture, etc. These are never adopted fully; to do so is, of course, in bad taste, but adopting the aesthetics of the lower social classes is seen as akin to teenage rebellion and often lauded as authenticity. Even if you push it beyond simple cultural adoptions, there are few forms of cultural rejection that bring with them significant consequences. To betray an economic class is far more consequential, especially when betraying the upper class. It is effectively admitting that you will be worse off in the new system, but you reject your material interests for moral or intellectual reasons. To frame it this way, then, is to signal to the curious that they do not belong and socialism is against their interest. If this is false, not only is this clearly a recruitment issue, but those that do join are prone to zealotry in order to “earn” their place. That is not to say actual class traitors should not be accepted, but framing it this way when the class at hand is merely a social class is actively detrimental to building a socialist movement.

The easy way out now is to say that if many in the PMC are working class and make up a large amount of the population, there is no real problem. The left should continue exactly as is, because it's enough to build a movement. It may be a shame that the blue-collar workers don't join, but it's not a structural issue. Or, perhaps, that I have only shown that anyone in the middle class, blue-collar, and educated service workers included, is not the true working class and should be excised to create the real working class movement. However, both conclusions ignore the strategic importance of each class: the PMC has cultural power, the blue-collar workers have the power to halt industry.

Despite their cultural power, the PMC has very little direct economic power. If all software developers went on strike, it would be an inconvenience. If they're lucky (or willing to take the risk of active sabotage), a crucial component will fail, and their refusal to fix it will cause an outage that forces capitulation, but that is far from guaranteed and software developers are certainly not immune to scabbing. Those in the PMC who do have the power to stop their industry, such as teachers and especially nurses, must reckon with the fact that doing so may cause real harm to others in the working class. This leaves the PMC with a limited number of solutions. Electoral reformism is of course immediately seen and frequently chosen. Less frequently chosen, and providing its own strategic issues, is terrorism; whether that be soft terrorism as in the modern case of “Hacktivists” or hard terrorism as in the case of the Weather Underground. The preferred strategy of the PMC, though, is posting online. While this description is facetious, it should not be dismissed as irrelevant. Over the last decade, socialism in the US has gone from a slur to a serious force within US politics. This has largely been achieved through cultural power, often online.

Blue-collar jobs, on the other hand, have enormous power. Longshoremen, teamsters, and railroad workers in particular can shut down all of industry simply by refusing to work. Directly productive workers like auto workers have the power to shut down their plants and stop all production. While there are blue-collar workers whose powers are similar to a tech worker in that impacts are mostly delays, such as in construction, even then the impact is visual and has more potential to tie up resources and capital. This is likely a factor in the right-wing move to court them despite frequently competing economic interests: blue-collar workers pose the biggest threat to capitalist interests if they are organized against them.

What arises is two important factions: the cultural and the industrial. They are both important, but for different battles, best understood through Gramsci’s concept of War of Position and War of Maneuver. The war of position supposes that bourgeois hegemony must be destabilized before any successful revolution may be waged. The PMC are uniquely poised to wage this war as they are often the shapers of this hegemony. Through academies, writing, media, and even social media, the PMC has the most power to normalize socialist ideology and merge it into “common sense”. The war of maneuver is tactical. It is how demands are won, through direct action and the display of worker power. To eschew the PMC is to cede the cultural playing field. To lose blue-collar workers is to lose direct power to achieve economic goals.

Bridging the Cultural Gap

Given the strategic importance of both factions, it is important that we learn how to bridge the cultural gap. If the right has been able to cultivate an alliance across class lines despite having legitimately opposed material interests, surely it is possible for the left. The question remaining is how, particularly without sacrificing our programmatic clarity.

As much as I've written about the cultural divide, it is not as wide as it may seem at first glance. As recent polling suggests, blue-collar workers are not hopelessly conservative, and as a whole are getting more progressive over time. This aligns with my own experiences working various working-class jobs before solidifying my position in the PMC as a career. Particularly relevant to this discussion is my time working on a factory line. The workers on the factory floor were diverse, but no racial animosity was on display; White and Black workers discussed the obvious logic of racial equality as freely as any other topic. They were slightly less openly enthusiastic about LGBT issues, but the base level of acceptance was clear. Despite being an engineering student, they never questioned my belonging there and generally thought it was cool. The primary cultural dividing line between that workplace and subsequent professional ones was that of decorum, best exemplified by the time I was asked directly and with genuine curiosity if I ate ass. I concede that this factory may have simply reflected the area’s political atmosphere, and these more progressive attitudes may have derived from the diversity itself, but factories like this one are numerous. The point remains that the cultural divide is largely abstract, and frequently dissolves with actual interaction.

It may be a cliché, but before any serious solutions can work, a base level of respect is essential. That means listening to the intent of what they say and assuming good faith. So often, people on the left, armed with their superior knowledge, will take the worst possible reading of a statement and immediately jump down their throat. Outright bigotry is right to be corrected as forcefully as necessary, but this often is not bigotry, but simply unfamiliarity with vocabulary or even taking for granted the liberal line on some topic. When met with this immediate hostility, engagement with a movement becomes taxing, pushing potential allies away. Since cultural capital within the left can be gained through familiarity with these debates, this is not relegated to strictly the PMC. Anyone can be guilty of using their cultural capital to dominate others.

While I have spent much time rejecting the Ehrenreichs’ framework, their actual proposed solutions are remarkably relevant despite rejection of their material basis for the class. It is notable that while the Ehrenreichs’ framework and taxonomy are invoked frequently in modern times, their suggestions from the second part of their essay are completely ignored in favor of suggestions that are sometimes completely in opposition. This is certainly a testament to how much easier it is to assign blame than build bridges. Their suggestions consist of three base directions. The first is that attempting to expunge all PMC ideology from the left in order to organize along pure proletarian ideology is counterproductive and futile. The fact that the PMC has so frequently developed critiques of capitalism and socialist movements is evidence of its value. The second is that the cultural antagonisms cannot be swept away with ideas of socialist unity and must be confronted with humility. That is not to suggest guilty self-effacement but recognition of their position and biases. The third is to avoid exclusive economism and address the issues that cause the antagonisms. None of these solutions are radical or even difficult, nor do they need to be. The right has proven that cross-class alliances can be made with simple tactics; the left does not need a revolutionary method to win over blue-collar workers. Like the Ehrenreichs, I do not intend to provide a prescriptive 10-step program, but I will provide some concrete actions that can be taken.

I have already thoroughly defended their first point, and it must be tied to their second. Varn and Tutt's general argument is relevant here. Their rejection of populism is largely on the ground that painting over the differences of the people at large is ultimately a capitulation to the dominance of the PMC. I agree here, and this is precisely why this second point is so important. The PMC occupy an important position in the movement, but they must avoid using that position to assert dominance. That means recognizing and accepting that both classes can learn from each other and have the capacity to lead. Part of this is structural. As for any special interest group, space needs to be made for leadership input from blue-collar workers. Most work, however, must be interpersonal; beyond the cultivating of respect in day-to-day interactions mentioned previously, learning how to “talk shop” is imperative. Many PMC have never even seen a factory floor, much less worked on one, and this is evident in how these jobs are often discussed in the abstract. It is nigh impossible to organize an industry you do not understand. Addressing this could take the same route as my own of taking a temp job in college or between jobs. It could take the form of settling into blue-collar work when job prospects are low instead of service work as is so often the case. Even learning the basics of a trade can facilitate conversation. This could be encouraged with skill-share events where skilled workers of all classes are given the opportunity to teach the group. Beyond the practical implications for organizing, this shows a recognition that the skills of manual labor are legitimate and valued. It is in this message of value that the right excels through embracing “bad taste”. While addressing biases against working-class culture is important, we need not copy the right’s strategy of raising white working-class culture above others.

This brings us to the most contentious debate around the PMC on the left. Frequently, the problem of blue-collar recruitment is first stated as a problem of overemphasis on social and identity issues, with the PMC as the source of this. Implied in the solution is not only the rejection of PMC but also of any non-economic issue. This mentality has no place in a socialist movement. Beyond the problem that this discussion tends to center the white working class, ignoring the actual racial makeup of the class, to limit the movement only to economic oppression is organizationally and strategically weak. A movement organized on economic lines alone is too narrow to change society. Yes, economic struggle is the common experience the whole working class shares, but non-economic oppression is the way the state and other structures uphold power.

Conclusion.

The Ehrenreichs released their paper in 1977 and even at the time heavily caveated many of their suggestions of who belonged to this class, suggesting deskilling had the potential to change many of their classifications. IBM wouldn't release their first mass market business computer for another four years. Most occupations, especially within the PMC, have fundamentally changed in the nearly fifty years since their paper was written. The internet has provided myriad ways jobs have been “demystified” – a solution the Ehrenreichs praised in their analysis. Despite this, modern discourse is content to keep the same class lines (even including new occupations that just seem to fit) and then conclude that there are intractable material differences between them and the PMC that must be dealt with. The reason this narrative is so powerful is that despite deskilling and decreased autonomy, the PMC has largely been able to maintain its cultural capital through participation in and exposure to the universities.

Understanding the PMC through a cultural lens changes the debate entirely. It immediately highlights both the source of the problem and the strategic importance of the PMC. Completely dismissing the PMC pushes away genuine allies and forfeits the power of their cultural capital. To create a solidaristic movement, the PMC must recognize that power and actively unlearn the tendency to use it for dominance. The left's future depends not on purity but on power, and power requires unity along class lines.