-- Mark,
I think your skepticism about the PMC category is well-founded. College and university graduates, the so-called "professionals," do not collectively constitute a unitary Professional Managerial Class, nor an intermediate stratum with coherent interests of its own. Most professionals are workers employed in large, stratified public and private bureaucracies. They do not own or control the means of production, they do not direct investment, and most do not exercise real authority over other workers. In many jurisdictions outside the United States, they have the legal right to join or form unions. When they bargain collectively, whether in their own occupational units or as part of broader bargaining units, their practical consciousness is often that of unionized wage and salary workers, not that of a distinct managerial class. A smaller number of professionals are supervisors, and fewer still are managers. Even then, the class question is not settled simply by job title, educational credential, or income level. Professionals who supervise other professionals or support staff may or may not have union rights. Management and unions frequently contest that question, and labor boards decide it. The usual test is whether they can independently hire, fire, discipline, or direct workers in a meaningful way, rather than merely coordinate work under policies set from above. The genuinely managerial layer is narrower: those professionals at the upper levels of the hierarchy whose function is to control labor, enforce budgets, discipline subordinates, and limit rather than expand the pay, benefits, rights, and collective power of the workers beneath them, including trades, clerical, technical, and professional workers. Although they too may receive salaries, their authority in the labor process and, often, their accumulated wealth through stock, bond, retirement, or property holdings tend to align them more closely with capital. So the problem with “PMC” is that it collapses too many different social relations into one loose cultural category. It treats education, professional status, supervisory authority, income, and class interest as if they automatically move together. They do not. Some professionals are ordinary wage workers. Some are supervisors with ambiguous and contested positions. A much smaller group are managers whose material function is to reproduce capitalist control over labor. That distinction matters politically. If we misidentify broad layers of educated wage-workers as a separate hostile class, we obscure the real lines of conflict inside the workplace and weaken the possibility of organizing them as part of the working class. Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42115): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42115 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119843448/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
