I would like to thank Cosmonaut Magazine for publishing two recent articles that have better than anyone else exposed the bankruptcy of the modern US left and its class composition. This was not the intention of Cosmonaut, whose writers are clearly invested in an agenda of denial. A denial of the class that composes the modern left in the US: the PMC. 

First we have John Haywood’s Are Socialist Teachers Class Traitors? What the PMC Debate Gets Wrong About Strategy, which tells us that at the end of the day there is no coherent entity called the PMC, that what is labeled the PMC mistakes differing sociological categories, that the modern DSA has no problem with representing workers, and that in fact so many of these divides between the working class and PMC are just culture after all. What a relief! Apparently the left has no problem representing working-class people; we just have some cultural antagonisms to overcome, some biases towards the white-collar perhaps, but nothing too much to worry about. The PMC may describe some real phenomena, but there is no real class basis for these divisions. 

Then we are told by Payton Q in Against Class Neutrality: Winning Working-Class Trust that DSA does indeed draw its basis from the downwardly mobile educated youth, those promised that their credentials would promise them success and were let down by the system, who were activated by and who trusted the socialism of Bernie Sanders. Yet in light of Haywood’s revelations, this is all fine for a socialist organization; we just need to expand to the right of the working class from this core of frustrated would-be professionals, who are disappointed their college degree hasn’t given them a job that can impress mommy and daddy. 

The problem is very apparent if one thinks about this for 5 seconds. How can a socialist movement destroy a system when its core is motivated by resentment that they have been robbed of their right to manage it? The denial of the PMC allows a denial of the reality that the DSA is not a movement of the working class, albeit the more educated and white-collar sections, but is instead a movement of potential bureaucrats and managers who want to instead manage the working class in a more rational and “just” way. This is the same class that made up the Progressive Movement and the SPA as pointed out by the Ehrenreich’s, which created the paternalistic bureaucratic institutions that today dominate this class, and are rarely ever the criticism of DSA politicians. 

Writers like Haywood can draw from their “analytical marxist” sources like Erik Olin Wright, who provides endless definition mongering about the specifics of class categories all they want, but if we want to see a class, the best way is to look at a class in its motion. American history in the 20th century sees not the triumph of working-class struggle, but the triumph of a different class altogether, the PMC, those who are defined by their credentials giving them access to salaries and positions of power above the actual proletarians who have a stake in the destruction of the capitalist system. The PMC was as critical of capitalism as it was of the proletariat; hence it clashed with financial capital, who were able to install a system of neoliberalism, weakening the PMC’s power. But now the PMC strikes back, taking up the mantle of socialism and working-class identity while most American workers want nothing to do with them. They would rather vote for Trump, or status quo Democrats, than for these young adventurists whose visions of state-run grocery stores just seems like more of the same technocratic welfare state domination they’re used to, just with a Red Rose flag flying on top. Why should workers trust these young embarassed wannabe professional to loyally fight for them when they are just mad they didn't get the career they think they deserve?

How do we know this is the class movement of the PMC? Just go to any NYC DSA meeting, and you are in the same kind of cultural environment as an HR meeting. All of the cultural codes you learn from academic seminars are the norm. It’s not a place you can bring workers, and I mean actual workers whose main concern is putting food on plates, not whatever avant-garde cultural fads college kids are obsessed with. Economic necessity pushes the proletariat to put their survival as their prime concern; the PMC is concerned with symbols, with the manipulation of ideas, with culture. When economics is discussed, this is in terms of passing policy to benefit workers, not in terms of workers actually building real power with their own organizations. 

I’m not surprised Cosmonaut is so in denial about the PMC nature of the DSA. They are clearly adjacent to the org as a publication and have some investment in its success. They also claim to espouse an ideology of “scientific socialism”. Why “scientific socialism” instead of “workers socialism”? Because they are a bunch of professionals and students, who are socialized to believe their capacity for attaining and spreading knowledge gives them their worth, or that this is how they actually have social power in their daily lives. Their idea of socialism is a vanguard of “Scientists” who determine the suppposed “laws” that govern the world, and through their enlightened knowledge of these “laws” can tell the workers what to do to transform them. Workers’ self-emancipation is subject to the whims of our “Scientific Socialists” and their knowledge, not what workers themselves actually need. Yet for our Cosmonauts this all fine, they are just workers like anyone else, just with some cultural differences that need to be sorted out. 

Yet a truly “scientific” grasp of reality, if we understand science as no bullshit truth, tells us that the PMC is not only real but has skinsuited the working class in the name of pushing them around like beasts of burden for their visions of rationalizing in the name of “progress”. One can only confuse the matter at hand with so much “analytical marxism” before you realize that the professor and the janitor do not belong to the same class. They don’t live in the same neighborhoods and don’t want the same things. You can define class in different ways, but definitions don’t change this reality. 

What is needed is a new workerism, a movement of workers focused on organizing workers as workers to actually speak for themselves as a class without distortion from the PMC. Any references to Marxist theory should be strictly in terms of labor interests. Marxism has for too long given license to those who see themselves as our betters to lecture at us. Perhaps membership should require one to show their pay stubs; imagine the anger from the academics who want to join, who think that the workers need them to translate their concerns and anger into properly socialist terms. No, what we workers need is to learn to speak on our own, without the professional-managerial class doing it for us, no matter how “Scientific” they claim to be.  

John Jay