John brings up important questions in his critique of The Professional-Managerial Class. Namely, are teachers class traitors?

The Ehrenreichs’ description of the PMC attempted to make sense of what we may call “the upper middle class” and its position in relation to Capital. Their arguments center on the New Left, the left-wing organizers of the Boomer generation. The New Left was a group of white student organizers largely concerned with the Civil Rights Movement, such as SNCC, SDS, and the New Communist Movement. Their analysis is not open-ended, and actually points directly at this group, giving us context that changes the meaning of the essay.

John, like many others who have dissected the essay, attempts to determine how one could place PMC job titles on a Marxist axis. Like everyone, the problem begins when attempting to place teachers and social workers, government workers, on par with lawyers and doctors. I believe this is due to a misreading of the Ehrenreichs’ essay, which presumes that they are mere observers of the New Left when in fact, they were members.

In the second part of their essay, they say the following:

By late 1966, Black militants and Black community groups were raising the demand for "community control" of the very agencies and institutions which were providing opportunities for the white PMC. This demand did not fit into the traditional categories of the Old Left. (In the case of the New York City school struggle, the Progressive Labor Party decided that the community-control demand was a ruling-class plot against the only "workers" in sight —the teachers!) But it was a clear declaration of class warfare: the Black community (largely working-class) against the invading PMC.

In parentheses is the most important sentence in the paragraph. A ruling-class plot against the only workers in sight! Written in 1977 and published in a New Left magazine, you are meant to be in on the joke. It isn’t explained in detail what is meant by community control, which agencies and institutions, or why we should not consider the teachers union to belong to workers. It is taken for granted that we have recent memories of these large, very publicized fights, understand the issue, and have agreed on all stated facts.

Community Control was a demand of the Civil Rights Movement during desegregation. Black and brown communities wanted control of the institutions that served their neighborhoods. The New York Central Board of Education was not doing an adequate job at desegregation, and schools in their neighborhoods were underfunded, de facto segregated, and overcrowded. In response to years of political struggle, New York created three new test districts that included local school boards. One of those (Black-led) school boards fired 14 white teachers at once, drawing the ire of the union and leading to intense strike waves.

The Ehrenreichs make a critical mistake in their analysis. The 3 experimental school districts were real school districts, meaning that they had to establish a board. The Central Board of Education was appointed entirely by the mayor, but the Ocean Hill-Brownsville board, the subject of the teacher strikes, chose to democratically elect a handful of parents and then appoint a number of other positions. Once elected, they operate as any school board, holding a smaller and more democratic slice of institutional power granted by the Central Board of Education. In other words, they became a subsidiary of the existing institution, or an institution themselves.

The Ehrenreichs’ view institutions negatively, rather than neutrally. This is evident in their writing, influenced by the Maoist university-driven undercurrent of the New Left. That is why they are unable to see that the community of Brownsville won a fight to become part of an institution, and then used that institutional power to remake their schools, becoming the boss of local teachers, not the employee. Whether the firing was correct isn’t relevant, because institutions are capable of being correct in a dispute.

Social work faces a similar critique. In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson declared War on Poverty, setting up programs for the poor like Medicaid and Medicare, and establishing the Community Action Program, which would give federal funds to organizations working to address poverty. This became another front of struggle for believers in “Community Control”, who demanded wider ownership of these new institutions, and resented the social workers who staffed them. On occasions where control was granted, these institutions did not change form, instead only changing the staff. By 1977, both of these stories would be imprinted on the minds of every SDS graduate, taken for granted as truth and presented here as a sidenote.

The Ehrenreichs work from a flawed starting point. Acutely focused on institutions as the reproducer of the PMC, they then turn their eyes to the lowest institutional staff. They also believe that the PMC behaves like the bourgeois, passing down power, when instead institutional power can be transferred to the working class without changing the structure of the institution. I believe the Ehrenreichs were closest to a PMC description when they accused the SDS movement of being largely PMC-led, and that starts with SDS president Alan Haber.

Alan Haber was the son of a world renowned economics professor at the University of Michigan. William Haber wrote 20 books, was dean of the liberal arts college, served on many institutional boards, and served as the advisor of Jewish Affairs to General Lucius Clay in World War 2. He became president of Ort in 1950, an organization for Jewish refugees, where he helped to establish the state of Israel as an advisor to the Israeli government. Though he does not appear to be the owner of any company, he has served an important role in perpetuating imperialist-class interests.

Here, we find a clearer class description. An academic with institutional power who helps or desires to help shape the governing of wealth accumulation(in this case the accumulation of land). You see this with economists, NGO directors, lawyers, media, policy workers, tenured professors, judges, administrators, campaign consultants and staff, political scientists, journalists, and lobbyists.

Rather than being direct managers of the working class, the PMC manages the image of the ruling class, or its strategies for wealth accumulation. They do not need to be supportive of capitalism for this to work. They create individualist aspirations in workers by demonstrating a higher standard of living, creating a belief in meritocracy that legitimizes capitalism, even when they are personally opposed. A teacher, notably, does not do this.

The PMC grew during the 1960s and 70s, at the largest rate in history, which the Ehrenreichs observed. This, combined with falling wages and deindustrialization, brought millions more students to the university each consecutive year in search of room within the PMC, reducing the value of academia as a class signifier at all. That differs greatly from 1963, when the Ehrenreichs graduated college, and less than 10% of the American population shared that distinction.

There is no room for these students, which inspires vicious competition for entry among all classes, discouraging the work of building an organized working class in favor of individual pursuit of entry. This creates distrust among working classes, who view a college degree as a symbol of participation in that competition. AOC may indeed work a blue-collar job, but her aspirations are visible, and it is the aspiration that is noticed.

To answer John’s last thought on whether it truly matters, my answer is yes and no. No, DSA is not largely made up of PMC, and they have no institutional power with which to reproduce culture. It is, however, largely made up of people who sought or seek to be PMC, and an immediate task at hand is to disarm them of that desire, which is inherently in service of capital, in favor of the new rank among the proletariat.