The M in the PMC

The other day I received an email from what might be one the few colleagues still checking into Twitter (most seem to have moved to Bluesky, as have I). The email was just a link with the subject title Did you see? I hadn’t.

Gosh, I wrote in response (which I gather they found a little understated).

My colleague was pointing to this tweet, where Adam Tooze described my fairly recently published book, Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World 1870-2008 as ‘the sort of book that changes how you see the world’.

I mean. Well. Gosh.

Recently, Adam Tooze had discussed the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) on the Ones and Tooze podcast. This is not a transcript, just me typing while listening. Apologies for any small errors:

The issue with materialism…is that the minimum we need to understand US politics right now is a three class rather than a two class model. …you can’t understand the politics of the US right now unless you acknowledge that there is a third class, lets call it the professional managerial class, who are a credentialed by the education system, occupy positions of authority within society and the economy at large and they exercise control directly often over working class Americans. And that starts literally at the beginning in Kindergarten where you have a college educated person taking charge of your kid…or taking charge of you yourself, subjecting you to education and it goes all the way through to hospitals where your kids are born and your parents die.

This is all true, though I am sure many will notice that it doesn’t quite see that Kindergarten teachers and hospital nurses among other have been proletarianized (had their working conditions and autonomy at work undermined) to a degree that they often likely fall into the working class – which also reminds us that the bottom of the PMC and the working class overlap and so does the top overlap with the ‘rich people’ Adam describes.

How does this work?

… and the folks that regulate what you can build in your front yard and everything else, right, the entire apparatus of managerialism….Once you’ve got that three part system in place, which is materialism, you can easily understand the dynamics which are in play here. The stereotypical working class Trump voter admires…the billionaire class who … are allowed to do flaunt and show disrespect and scorn for the values of the professional middle class who the rich folks are allowed to just spit on and the working class have to just suffer. They can say out loud what many working class people think, which is that they just can’t get on board with the highfalutin ideas that everyone drew on from the schoolteacher to the Ivy league professor to the folks on television who want to talk about complex norms of transgendered identities or structural racism or climate change, these big abstract complex concepts. What the working class will point out is that its not those people in the final analysis who call the shots. The people who do are people like Trump…and if somebody like that is willing to shoot their mouth…then this plays extremely well with the working class constituency. This is not anti-materialist or a refusal of materialism, it is a specific set of resentments deeply embedded in the actual existence of working class Americans…What is difficult to understand about the fact that working class men are not prepared to vote for fancy high-powered lawyer-lady?

Adam Tooze continued:

The distaste is compounded by the fact that…[Harris] is treating Trump like a bufoon. And one of her most successful punchlines for the New York Times reading is “I am speaking now”, which is this sort of maternal assertion of power towards whoever it is who is supposed to shut up…it expresses something that working class Americans will find easy to relate to. I mean, is it really surprising that white women without college degrees preferred Trump over Hilary and then Harris by a margin of 25-28 percent?

OK, so this shows all the ways that the bossy PMC is in an antagonistic relationship to both the working class and the ‘rich people’. It also reminds us when the ‘virtue’ that professionals need to do their work (and they do) is performed as power, this is experienced at antagonism. That power was what originally gave the M in the PMC – not only expert, but meddlesome and controlling aka ‘managing’.

There have been several responses to this problem, which has been observed by scholars since the 1970s. Scholars saw ‘professional dominance’ as a kind of means-of-production-like control (the New Left Marxists), to deem expertise as power (the Foucauldians). But the rising managerial class, who from the 1970s and 1980s were detached from specific sectors and brought their generic, transferable managerial skills to flexible, globalized economy, saw this as an opportunity to wrench power from experts. Some even saw this as a moral opportunity, since expertise performed as power is pretty – well, crap – and maybe a more generic managerial class might temper it.

However, this produced a split between experts and managers, which also reduced professional autonomy – taking much of the M from the PMC so that it became just M.

It is important to note that this was a profoundly gendered process – which I will write about separately down the track.

Adam’s Heart Surgery Team

If like me you follow Ones and Tooze, you will know that Adam recently had heart surgery.

It was a big deal. Luckily, America has some of the best surgeons in the world, to whom only a small handful of Americans have access – but Adam Tooze is one of them. In the episode dedicated to the expensive American healthcare system/Adam’s heart surgery, he talks with great (and deserved) admiration about ‘his team’, the ones who will do the surgery.

We really want these surgeons to be good at what they do. The considerable advances in medicine, medical technologies and surgical techniques is what will (we trust) Save Adam’s life, as indeed they did. We want experts.

But we don’t want them to be dickheads about their expertise – meaning, we’d like them to be ‘our team’ who work with us, acknowledging our agency. And not arrogant, bossy, or taking control of our lives.

See, Adam is not only among America’s privileged (as he acknowledges), but he is also a member of the same professional class as his surgical team. As we all know, this doesn’t guarantee an absence of dickheads.

However, chances are higher that we can see other professionals as members of ‘our team’. By recognizing one another as members of the same class, encountering other members of the PMC helps confirm one’s own values and expertise.

What this also shows is that it is possible to be a niche expert but honour other people’s self-determination, our ability to make choices about our own lives.

Dickheadery is Systemic

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock you will know that not that long ago, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot and killed. Awful and violent, right. But also. Bullet casings with the words ‘deny’, ‘defend’ and ‘depose’ seem to have captured the ‘structural violence’ that some of the best commentators have argued needs to be understood. That is, there were two kinds of violence at work here. Firstly, someone got shot. And secondly, a kind of violent unfairness is structured into the system.

Australian journalist Rick Morton recently pointed out the ways that this kind of violence is structured through the economy.

Add this to Adam’s analysis of the structural unfairness embedded in the excessively expensive American health system with shameful consequences, including maternal deaths, we can see that systemic dickheadery has consequences that go well beyond hurt feelings to matters of life and death.

The urgency is clear. Daily reports from the USA about suppression of science, health information and government data show that since Trump’s second election, attacks on expertise have escalated beyond rhetoric to slashing universities and the public service – both peoples’ jobs and their ability to do them. This really must be opposed.

However, resentment about meddling experts is real, material and important. The response requires something rather like what I think Keynes was getting at:

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as competent, humble dentists, that would be splendid. John Maynard Keynes 1936

As we know from Adam Tooze’s surgical team (and everything else…looking at you, climate science) we really need experts. But we also really need them to stop with the Meddling Managerialism, and instead systematize respect. And not just respect for expertise – respect for everyone who needs experts.

And that really is everyone.

 

 

 

This is a revised version of a post originally published via my roughly-weekly newsletter https://hannahforsyth.substack.com/