Is the notion of a professional-managerial class (PMC) a useful one?

George Kerevan I know as a leftist Scottish economist and nationalist politician in whose tribute to Tom Nairn on the excellent Conter site - Tom Nairn – globalisation and the new middle class - I found this intriguing passage

“The last few decades saw the incorporation of China into the global market and the final victory of commodity production as a world system. But the failure to replace capitalism historically has resulted in a massive excess of surplus value that cannot find investment outlets. One result is the emergence of a super layer of unessential functionaries, pseudo managers, financial service employees, academics and pampered cultural workers, otherwise known as the New Petty Bourgeois or the New Professional Middle Class.

This parasitical layer is funded by the excess surplus value the global capitalist system cannot use productively, hence its massive growth in numbers in the West. At one end (eg computer programmers and IT engineers) it clearly merges into the proletariat. And at the upper end (financial executives) it is clearly bourgeois. But in the mass, this group has all the unstable characteristics of any middle social layer: individualistic, narcissistic and devious.

In Scotland the rise of modern nationalism stems from the 1970s and was (crudely) a working class response to regional economic decay and the failure of the Labour Party to do anything about it. As a result, the SNP has become politically hegemonic. But this very hegemony – including the SNP’s total domination of the local state and civil institutions – has now attracted the attention of the New Petty Bourgeois. Effectively, this social layer has colonised the SNP and the Scottish national movement, serving to align independence with neoliberal values and policies – including uncritical support for EU membership, economic policies fixated on supporting foreign capital, and an emphasis on personal identity politics.

My understanding of class is, I grant you, quite rudimentary.

• I know that there are owners (the “ruling class”), workers and managers

• that Marx assumed a state of bitter conflict between owners and workers

• that the German marxist theory of scientific socialism led to fatalism

• Berle and Means set off in the 1930s a profound debate about managers beginning to get the upper hand over owners

• which persuaded “revisionists” such a Anthony Crosland in the UK in 1956 that capitalism had reformed itself

• but that in the late 1970s Milton Friedmann’s espousal of “shareholder value” transformed thinking dramatically about the purpose of the company

• with senior managers often becoming owners

• and the development of services and of “financialisation” altering the very nature of the economy

I had been transfixed in the early 1990s by John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards – the Dictatorship of Reason in the West which argued that figures such as Robert McNamara (of Ford, Vietnam, World Bank infamy) revealed the evil embedded in what we knew as western civilisation. But the book somehow seemed too far-fetched to make the necessary connections in my mind to the real world. But I’ll readily confess that I’ve been floundering in the attempts I’ve been making since 2000 to make sense of the new system of capitalism.

Kerevan’s article persuaded me to google the phrase “professional-managerial class” which unearthed a fascinating if motley crew – Barbara Ehrenreich, David Graeber, Chris Hedges, Ralson Saul and Sheldon Wolin. Ehrenreich seems to have been the first to use the phrase – as far back as 1977 which “Dissent” wrote about recently but which hyperlink doesn’t allow me to access https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/on-the-origins-of-the-professional-managerial-class-an-interview-with-barbara-ehrenreich. But it’s the first half of David Graeber’s short 2014 essay Rise of the professional-managerial class which made the most sense to me when I read it yesterday

Job security made it easier for all employees to identify with the company. As a result, both workers and management tended to see financiers and financial interests as outsiders, even interlopers. In the 1970s and 1980s, all this began to change, and the upper echelons essentially shifted their allegiances and realigned with the financial classes. The notorious boom in mergers and acquisitions, and asset-stripping, and the like, so widely remarked on at the time, the abandonment of former guarantees of lifetime employment, the use of stock options to pay executives and increasingly even skilled workers, were all manifestations of this shift of allegiances. But in fact it ran deeper. During this period, financial elites and corporate bureaucrats essentially merged: the two classes began to intermarry; their careers tended to move back and forth between the different sectors; they came to speak the same language, share the same tastes, and see the world in identical terms. This gradually had profound cultural effects, at first in North Atlantic countries, and then among wealthy countries everywhere. Here I will just single out two.

First, it seems to me that the profound bureaucratization of almost every aspect of social life that has marked the neoliberal era (see The Utopia of Rules 2015) - a bureaucracy in which it is increasingly difficult to even distinguish public and private elements - really traces back to this period.

Second, the political dominance of this new financial-bureaucratic class was cemented by bringing on board large sectors of the middle classes (the professionals and managers again: essentially, by encouraging them to see the world from the perspective of investors).

Graeber writes that "As the middle classes are being pulled upward to identify with the perspectives of the financial sector, the actual operations of financialization are pulling down in such a way as to make it increasingly difficult for many to see themselves as middle class at all.

The neoliberal age was initiated, in the 1980s, by an attack on the political place of labor—the breaking of the miner’s strike in the United Kingdom, the air controllers’ strike in the United States, the rail strike in Japan—followed by an eventual purging of any working-class influence over any mainstream political party. This was accompanied by an idea that mass home ownership, access to consumer credit, and the like, would allow the bulk of the population to identify themselves no longer as working class but as middle class. But there is, I think, a catch here. “Middle classness” is not really an economic category at all; it was always more social and political. What being middle class means, first and foremost, is a feeling that the fundamental social institutions that surround one—whether police, schools, social service offices, or financial institutions—ultimately exist for your benefit”.

To be continued

David Graeber RIP

I’m devastated to hear that the writer and activist David Graeber has suddenly died – in the prime of his life – at the incredibly early age of 59. He has figured a lot in my posts of the last year – not least the full post I devoted in December to his superb book Bullshit Jobs 

His book The Democracy Project was one of those list in my very recent list of essential reading for social activists – and indeed arrived the very day after I posted this…

He is also on the short list of great writers I drew up a few months ago (and was the subject of only the last post) to advance the argument that authors who straddled different worlds (whether class, country, academic or vocational) experienced themselves as “outsiders” – which gives them originality of insight and communication.  

He was a prolific - as well as an excellent – writer who gave generously of his time as well to activism and to the increasing number of journalists from all over the world who would approach him. I suspect he simply worked himself to death – it has happened to so many of the people I knew in Scotland in the 70s and 80s who were unstinting of their time. Convener Geoff Shaw of Strathclyde Regional Council – whose door, as a community minister, was always open to people when they were in trouble.  Labour MP and Professor John MacIntosh ( who had been my University tutor) in the 1970s; Labour Leader John Smith in the 1990s;Scotland’s First Minister Donald Dewar and ex-Foreign Sec and Leader of the House Robin Cook in the 2000s.

All tragically early deaths from literally working themselves to the bone…..

Salon had a touching tribute - and the Guardian gives the basic facts -

 

Born in New York in 1961 to two politically active parents – his father fought in the Spanish civil war with the International Brigades, while his mother was a member of the international Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union – David Graeber studied anthropology at the State University of New York and the University of Chicago, he won a prestigious Fulbright fellowship and spent two years doing anthropological fieldwork in Madagascar.

In 2005, Yale decided against renewing his contract a year before he would have secured tenure. Graeber suspected it was because of his politics; when more than 4,500 colleagues and students signed petitions supporting him, Yale instead offered him a year’s paid sabbatical, which he accepted and moved to the UK to work at Goldsmiths before joining LSE. “I guess I had two strikes against me,” he told the Guardian in 2015. “One, I seemed to be enjoying my work too much. Plus I’m from the wrong class: I come from a working-class background.”

 

His 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, made him famous. In it, Graeber explored the violence that lies behind all social relations based on money, and called for a wiping out of sovereign and consumer debts. Graeber followed it in 2013 with The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, about his work with Occupy Wall Street, then The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy in 2015, which was inspired by his struggle to settle his mother’s affairs before she died. A 2013 article, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, led to Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, his 2018 book in which he argued that most white-collar jobs were meaningless and that technological advances had led to people working more, not less.

“Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it,” he told the Guardian in 2015 – even admitting that his own work could be meaningless: “There can be no objective measure of social value.”

 

An anarchist since his teens, Graeber was a supporter of the Kurdish freedom movement and the “remarkable democratic experiment” he could see in Rojava, an autonomous region in Syria. 

He became heavily involved in activism and politics in the late 90s. He was a pivotal figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 – though he denied that he had come up with the slogan “We are the 99%”, for which he was frequently credited.

“I did first suggest that we call ourselves the 99%. Then two Spanish indignados and a Greek anarchist added the ‘we’ and later a food-not-bombs veteran put the ‘are’ between them. And they say you can’t create something worthwhile by committee! I’d include their names but considering the way police intelligence has been coming after early OWS organisers, maybe it would be better not to,” he wrote.

 It’s been a sad few days for anarchists since it was only a couple of weeks ago that Stuart Christie died

 Graeber Resource

For those who prefer visuals here’s a Youtube session hosted by Baffler with David and PeterThiel (!) debating the pace of innovation  For an academic, Graeber has a very accessible writing style – although I have to say I found his massive "Debt - the first 5,000 years" too detailed for me to absorb. It has been sitting, glowering at me from the bookshelves, for the past couple of years..... 

Much more accessible are these books (all downloadable)

Possibilities – essays on hierarchy, rebellion and desire (2007)

Direct Action – an ethnography (2009)

Revolutions in Reverse – essays on politics, violence, art and imagination (2011?)

The Utopia of Rules – on technology, stupidity and the secret joys of bureaucracy (2015);

Bullshit Jobs – a theory (2018) the full book 

Bullshit Jobs - commentary

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/12/bullshit-jobs.html my overview after reading the book

https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2018/07/bullshit-about-jobs one of the few academic reviews – but one with a tinge of jealousy about it

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331159223_Book_review_of_Bullshit_jobs_A_Theory_by_David_Graeber/link/5c691c87299bf1e3a5ad4600/download a more positive academic take

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/08/bullshit-jobs; a serious review which does a good summary

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-by-david-graeber-review - a fair review

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/27/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-david-graeber-review-laboured-rant - a more critical reviewer who ends  up agreeing with Graeber

https://nonsite.org/review/back-to-work-review-of-david-graebers-bullshit-jobs too clever

https://medium.com/@nouri.pennywhistle/dissecting-two-academic-trolls-review-of-bullshit-jobs-a-theory-e2782559becb turgid nonsense

https://philebersole.wordpress.com/2018/05/23/managerial-feudalism-and-bs-jobs/ blog

http://www.catherinecheek.com/2018/12/10/book-review-bullshit-jobs-a-theory/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/14/bankers-anthropological-study-joris-luyendijk 

It was a nice gesture of New York Review of Books to give us another look at the last piece he wrote for them - Against Economics, his very positive review of Robert Skidelsky’s “What’s Wrong with Economics”.

Graeber had also been complimentary about Skidelsky’s previous book - Money and Government – a challenge to mainstream economics 

And also these tributes from DG's friends - including this one from writer Rebecca Solnit

A Challenge to Conventional Finance

The curious title which the blog has had for the past year or so is a tribute to those who have managed to escape a monoculture (or “tunnel vision”) - generally by having moved from one territory to another; be that intellectual or geographical.

Being an outsider seems to give one’s writing a bit of an edge – as I argued earlier this year with some examples

Robert Skidelksy’s name should probably be added to that list – it’s not just his family background (he lived in China until he was almost 10) but the fact that he is both an historian and an economist.

I’ve been a fan of his ever since I came across his Interests and Obsessions – historical essays (1994) in a second-hand bookshop a couple of years ago. It’s a delightful collection of essays on different aspects of British life in the last century or so – including quite a few profiles. He is the definitive biographer of Keynes – his 3-volumes on the man come in at more than 1000 pages.

So I didn’t need a lot of convincing to buy his Money and Government – a challenge to mainstream economics (2018 – full access by clicking the title) even although several chapters have short appendices of formulae (for me the ideal place for them!)

David Graeber (another excellent writer) has a long and very positive review from which I’ve taken some excerpts at the end of the post

Before I get on to that book, here’s an example of Skidelsky writing – from a book review he did a few years ago for NYRB on the impact of computerised systems

The aim of all control systems is to control human behaviour, including the way we think. Priests and political leaders have long used religion and ideology for this purpose, since it economizes on the use of force and terror. But it is only in the last hundred years or so that the attempt to control behaviour by controlling the mind has achieved scientific status, largely through the explosion of calculating power that computers have made possible. In one of his many fascinating chapters, the author shows how CBS originated in the needs of the military for battlefield control, before they were applied to the needs of business.

Unlike the machine assembly line for Ford cars, the human assembly lines in giant retail organizations like Walmart and Amazon pose special problems. The stacking and retrieving of customers’ orders requires the attention of a “panoptic monitoring regime to pick up on…human waywardness [on the part of the employees] and correct it without delay.” The model is that of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the circular prison he designed with an inspection tower at its centre, where a single watchman could observe the inmates without them being able to tell if they are being watched. Bentham himself thought of the Panopticon as an unprecedented way of obtaining power of mind over mind. What has made computerized business systems universally applicable is the joining of Taylorian scientific management (breaking down jobs into small tasks) with the panoptical control made possible by digital technology.

In 2016 Skidelsky edited a book with the fascinating title Who Runs the Economy? The role of Power in economics from which, I suspect, this text is taken

Adapting Steven Lukes (1974), one may think of ideas as a form of ‘soft power’, which structures our debates about reality. Alternatively, and more comprehensively, they may be seen as shaping our consciousness –the way we interpret our world. But just because ideas are produced in institutions, we cannot ignore questions about the hard power behind the soft power. Who finances the institutions from which ideas spring? Who finances the dissemination of ideas in popular form –media, think tanks? What are the incentives facing the producers, disseminators, and popularisers of ideas even in a society in which discussion is ‘free’? In short, what is the agenda of business? It is reasonable to see business as the hard power behind the soft power of ideas, not because the business community speaks with one voice, or because there are no other centres of hard power (e.g. government) but because it is the main source of the money without which the intellectual estate would wither and die……

Assertion of the independence of ideas is a necessary modification of crude Marxism, which I dare say Marx himself would have accepted. Nevertheless, in the Marxist scheme, the intellectual class, like the state, attains only ‘relative autonomy’; and ideas rarely overturn the perception or promotion of self-interest, however much they may modify its expression. Practical men like nothing better than to have their prejudices dressed up in scientific language. Ultimately the ideas in power serve the interests of the class in power; under capitalism, this is the capitalist class.

Skidelsky is 85 but is extraordinarily prolific – he has just produced What’s wrong with economics – a primer for the perplexed 2020) and was an active member last year of a small advisory group to the OECD Sec-Gen which helped produce an amazing little document Beyond Growth – towards a new economic approach; (OECD Sept 2019) which basically questions the entire raison d’etre of the OECD for most of its existence!

But here’s what David Graeber had to say about Money and Government – a challenge to mainstream economics

What it reveals is an endless war between two broad theoretical perspectives in which the same side always seems to win—for reasons that rarely have anything to do with either theoretical sophistication or greater predictive power. The crux of the argument always seems to turn on the nature of money. Is money best conceived of as a physical commodity, a precious substance used to facilitate exchange, or is it better to see money primarily as a credit, a bookkeeping method or circulating IOU—in any case, a social arrangement?

This is an argument that has been going on in some form for thousands of years.

Technically, this comes down to a choice between what are called exogenous and endogenous theories of money. Should money be treated as an outside factor, like all those Spanish dubloons supposedly sweeping into Antwerp, Dublin, and Genoa in the days of Philip II, or should it be imagined primarily as a product of economic activity itself, mined, minted, and put into circulation, or more often, created as credit instruments such as loans, in order to meet a demand—which would, of course, mean that the roots of inflation lie elsewhere?

To put it bluntly: QTM is obviously wrong. Doubling the amount of gold in a country will have no effect on the price of cheese if you give all the gold to rich people and they just bury it in their yards, or use it to make gold-plated submarines (this is, incidentally, why quantitative easing, the strategy of buying long-term government bonds to put money into circulation, did not work either). What actually matters is spending.

Nonetheless, from Bodin’s time to the present, almost every time there was a major policy debate, the QTM advocates won. In England, the pattern was set in 1696, just after the creation of the Bank of England, with an argument over wartime inflation between Treasury Secretary William Lowndes, Sir Isaac Newton (then warden of the mint), and the philosopher John Locke.

Newton had agreed with the Treasury that silver coins had to be officially devalued to prevent a deflationary collapse; Locke took an extreme monetarist position, arguing that the government should be limited to guaranteeing the value of property (including coins) and that tinkering would confuse investors and defraud creditors. Locke won. The result was deflationary collapse.

According to Skidelsky, the pattern was to repeat itself again and again, in 1797, the 1840s, the 1890s, and, ultimately, the late 1970s and early 1980s, with Thatcher and Reagan’s (in each case brief) adoption of monetarism.

Always we see the same sequence of events:

(1) The government adopts hard-money policies as a matter of principle.

(2) Disaster ensues.

(3) The government quietly abandons hard-money policies.

(4) The economy recovers.

(5) Hard-money philosophy nonetheless becomes, or is reinforced as, simple universal common sense.

How was it possible to justify such a remarkable string of failures? Here a lot of the blame, according to Skidelsky, can be laid at the feet of the Scottish philosopher David Hume.

The one major exception to this pattern was the mid-twentieth century, what has come to be remembered as the Keynesian age. It was a period in which those running capitalist democracies, spooked by the Russian Revolution and the prospect of the mass rebellion of their own working classes, allowed unprecedented levels of redistribution—which, in turn, led to the most generalized material prosperity in human history. The story of the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s, and the neoclassical counterrevolution of the 1970s, has been told innumerable times, but Skidelsky gives the reader a fresh sense of the underlying conflict……

Economic theory as it exists increasingly resembles a shed full of broken tools. This is not to say there are no useful insights here, but fundamentally the existing discipline is designed to solve another century’s problems. The problem of how to determine the optimal distribution of work and resources to create high levels of economic growth is simply not the same problem we are now facing: i.e., how to deal with increasing technological productivity, decreasing real demand for labor, and the effective management of care work, without also destroying the Earth. This demands a different science. The “microfoundations” of current economics are precisely what is standing in the way of this.

Any new, viable science will either have to draw on the accumulated knowledge of feminism, behavioral economics, psychology, and even anthropology to come up with theories based on how people actually behave, or once again embrace the notion of emergent levels of complexity—or, most likely, both.

Intellectually, this won’t be easy. Politically, it will be even more difficult. Breaking through neoclassical economics’ lock on major institutions, and its near-theological hold over the media—not to mention all the subtle ways it has come to define our conceptions of human motivations and the horizons of human possibility—is a daunting prospect. Presumably, some kind of shock would be required. What might it take? Another 2008-style collapse? Some radical political shift in a major world government? A global youth rebellion? However it will come about, books like this—and quite possibly this book—will play a crucial part.