The PMC And The Walls That Separate Us From Them... pt 3.
"Universities as apparatuses of class reproduction" and "Capital and recognition."
This is part 3 of Bryce Nance’s piece in Underground Theory. You can read part 2 here.
Universities as apparatuses of class reproduction
One of the biggest impediments to setting our institutions back on track, of serving the public good rather than Capital itself, is that the point of the university itself has changed. The Marxist critique of the university being “for profit” misses the point that its real function, since the early 20th Century, has been the production of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC). At the beginning of this piece I referred to the invisible walls that separate me from “my class.” My class is the PMC, but I cannot be a good PMC because I don’t have a degree. To the PMC, the point of the economy is not profit in an exchange economy, it is prestige in a recognition economy.
Until recently the economy was driven by death and decay, innovation and entrepreneurship, discipline and elbow grease, sticktoitiveness, American exceptionalism, profit, value, interest and derivatives, money. Now, the prime commodities, which sit atop all human hierarchies, are expertise and education, status, and recognition.
It is undeniable that in many mainstream social, political, and economic spaces, one’s actual merit matters far less than one’s apparent merit. One can do their job to the best of their ability, be dependable and flexible and dedicated, but all that means nothing if one is not seen doing and being these things. Maybe this is what Baudrillard is getting at with his claim that “sign value” has superseded “exchange value”?
Success is now dependent on telling one’s story in a compelling manner, while winning respect from professionals. If you don’t give a reason to buy into your personal brand, give a sob story, or leverage often irrelevant demographic information to make yourself appear special or uniquely valuable, then you will quickly come up against a dead end of your career. This is of course not entirely new. It is just standard bourgeois bullshit. What is new here is that, with the advent of platforms, this has ceased being a game only played by the elite. Now everyone feels this need, even small business owners, high-school teachers, police, and regular working people feel trapped in this recognition economy.
In “the control phase of capitalism”[i] the lie of bourgeois self-actualization has been foisted upon the masses. We’ve internalized the need to perform our deservingness. The fact that this has trickled down into the very hearts and souls of regular working people is no accident, because the means by which class society gets reproduced have changed in ways fundamentally different than what Marx was looking at.
The professional managerial class and the schooling system erected to rationalize its function forever changes how workers see themselves and others. Now, what follows in this section might not be of more than a passing interest to people who were never Marxists, much less people who have never associated with Marxists. But I was and do, so I cannot talk about the rise of the PMC and how it changed the function of universities without settling a score of sorts with my Marx-influenced fellow travelers. They tell me the PMC is a bullshit category, that it is not a real class by a strict Marxist definition. Not only are they missing the point, but they forget that Marx’s own definition was vague and poorly thought out:
The owners of mere labor-power, the owners of capital, and landlords, whose respective sources of income are wages, profit and ground-rent, in other words, wage laborers, capitalists and landlords, form the three great classes of modern society resting upon the capitalist mode of production.
In England, modern society is indisputably developed most highly and classically in its economic structure. Nevertheless the stratification of classes does not appear in its pure form, even there. Middle and transition stages obliterate even here all definite boundaries.[ii]
Now, I’m just a burnt out cynical asshole, not some big city Marxist, but it seems silly to cling to a misinterpretation of an incomplete definition.
Many Marxists define class through the relationship to the means of production alone. Marx is never concrete on class and allows for transitional, middle, and derivative classes throughout his work. Moreover, he admits that these pure forms never live up to themselves, that they are tools for analysis and interpretation rather than prescriptive commandments meant to end further analysis.
Marx never laid out an exhaustive, definitive analysis of class; Das Kapital ends right where that, supposedly, was to begin. Engels went on to flesh out his ideas on class, but they already deviated from Marx’s work by leaving out the rentiers and boiling everything down to workers and owners; and everything that came after has been either general consensus or admission that it’s not the thing we should be focusing on or, sometimes, zealous adherence to the idea that these are ontological categories.
The proletariat are the workers, right? Yes. And, no. See, the proletariat proper are workers within whom lies, by virtue of the mode of production, the potential to step back and stop the system, the potential to use class solidarity to achieve collective goals. Can you imagine what would happen today if all the workers simply stepped away from their machines? We just saw it during COVID, the bulk of the workers who were deemed essential en masse and kept working were service workers, and the minority of actually productive workers who kept working were so replaceable that even if they stepped away, the reserves would be called in immediately.
The game has changed. The deskilling of labor and the Taylorization of everything has made it so workers no longer control anything. We are simply plug ‘n play discrete actors with effectively infinite understudies rather than agents who intentionally participate in the economy with the ability to impact things one way or the other.
As much as I love to see an academic who loves talking about labor power and building a broad labor movement, it strikes me as very off indeed to see their unwillingness to take seriously the idea of the PMC. But it makes sense. I used to be that guy, until not very long ago.
About three months ago, or so, I was decidedly opposed to taking seriously the idea of a Professional-Managerial Class, or PMC. It’s funny, the first time I heard the phrase in a “Marxist” discussion, I thought people were talking about Private Military Contractors. I’m a veteran, and when I got out of the Army I spent a few years toying with the idea of becoming a contractor, a PMC. But things worked out differently.
Hearing the term “PMC” brought up several years later, in a completely different context was a bit jarring. Most of my “Marxist” friends (and I’ve just decided to use that language for brevity’s sake, it’s not a hard label) have no idea that PMC is a very charged signifier for an entire cohort of millennial veterans. And most of my veteran friends have no idea that it’s a very charged signifier for an entire category of “Marxist/Marxish” folks from the Boomers up through the Zoomers; that’s just a funny little point that only means anything to a small subgroup of Millennial Marxist veterans, and I like occupying exclusive spaces, so nanny nanny boo boo.
The method of defining class has long been a neglected point, a thing that just gets taken for granted because it seems simple—relationship to the means of production seems sufficient to many, never mind that using that condition alone was already an oversimplification in the first place. The lines that were blurry from the very beginning have only got more blurred. Barbara and John Ehrenreich, in their 1977 essay, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” hazard an attempt to update the firmware that seems to make sense to me. They define a class on the basis of two major factors:
1. At all times in its historical development, a class is characterized by a common relation to the economic foundations of society-the means of production and the socially organized patterns of distribution and consumption. By a common “relation” we do not mean a purely juridical relationship; e.g., legal ownership or nonownership of the means of production. Class is defined by actual relations between groups of people, not formal relations between people and objects. The former may or may not coincide, at any given moment in history, with the legal relationships evolved over previous years. The relations which define class arise from the place occupied by groups in the broad social division of labor, and from the basic patterns of control over access to the means of production and of appropriation of the social surplus.
To summarize this first aspect of class: Formal ownership is less important than relations of control over access.
2. However, the relation to the economic foundations of society is not sufficient to specify a class as a real social entity. At any moment in its historical development after its earliest, formative period, a class is characterized by a coherent social and cultural existence; members of a class share a common life style, educational background, kinship networks, consumption patterns, work habits, beliefs. These cultural and social patterns cannot be derived in any simple fashion from the concurrently existing relationship to the means of production of the members of the class. For one thing, culture has a memory: social patterns formed in earlier periods, when a different relation to the means of production (or even another mode of production) prevailed, may long survive their “owners” separation from the earlier relationships. (For example, the culture of an industrial working class newly recruited from a semi-feudal peasantry is quite different from that of habitually urbanized workers.) In addition, the social existence of a group of people is determined not only by its experience at the point of production, but by its experience in private life (mediated especially by kinship relations, which, in turn, are at most only distantly related to evolving relations of production). The relationship between class as abstract economic relationship and class as real social existence has been all-but-unexplored; for our purposes we shall have to limit ourselves to insisting that a class has both characteristics.[iii]
To summarize this aspect of class, class means nothing if there is no common cultural basis for that class. Serfs who became proletarians in Charles Dickens’s England had a common culture, or we could call it a shared lack of culture. Compare that to an entire class of people who spend their first 25 years just going to school while everyone else in the world toils without any possibility of prestige. This is why doctors of philosophy and heart surgeons have more in common with one another than factory workers or Amazon drivers.
The fact that the PMC are situated in opposition to the workers is evident at first glance; they are either the managers, the ones who tell you to pick up the pace and do the stupid bullshit that you stay up late thinking about, or they are the ones who are considered “experts,” whose success in schooling has resulted in having specialist authority. Upon further thought, however, the fact that the PMC is situated in opposition to the owners slowly racks into focus, and this fact is the distinguishing feature of the PMC. The PMC aren’t just workers who depend upon the productivity of those beneath them for their wages, they are workers who depend upon the opacity of their tasks from the point-of-view of the owners and the masses, a popular belief that they are necessary in the first place, to ensure that their salaries persist.
Workers used to just work, people would start producing a thing and stick with it till the end; a skilled man would start by shaving planks and finish by applying finish to a table, for instance. With industrialization and Fordism, the manufacturing process was changed beyond recognition, multiple workers completing discrete tasks that only produced a thing at the end of the process, the work of several men was represented in a single thing but was not recognizable as such, an evolution of the already inherent alienation in commodity production. Marx saw this in its early form, but at the turn of the 20th century it was cranked up to an entirely new level.
As the story goes, Frederick Winslow Taylor proposed that there was more profit to be squeezed out of the production process, and set about the task of completely stripping what dignity remained in work by quantifying and mechanizing every aspect of production, including the human, which had previously been too soft and squishy for Capital to successfully capture. What is missing from this standard narrative is the fact that Taylor, like all progressives of his time, believed this de-skilling of the work force and creation of a new specialist class was essential for creating intra-class harmony. They hated the labor movement. The invention of the PMC was a self-conscious response to class conflict.
Along with this restructuring of industrial production, management was reimagined as well. The owners of the means of production are no longer the ones who make meaningful decisions, those are left up to highly qualified managers. Rather than spending one’s life becoming skilled in a trade one must either accept relegation to a lower class or become educated to enter the ranks of the aspirational elite. Throw that in a pot with boards-of-directors and financialization and, honestly, the infancy of Algorithmic Capital, and you’ve got the recipe for Neoliberal dystopia, a dark Machine God, a dumb artificial intelligence that wants to turn everything into paperclips regardless of the wants of those who nominally own it.
All of this is the historical and material basis to why regular working people are so easily pissed off by identity politics, cancel culture, and really, elitist PMC control society gatekeeping measures—gatekeeping of walled-in spaces that are meant to secure social prestige for designated and deserving “authorities.” That would be great if they were dedicated to what Jaspers calls a community of truth-seekers. Instead, academia has become woke insurance for big corporations who only care about not getting sued. Academic freedom has thus given way to self-censorship, which is a natural reaction when professors are getting fired for saying anything that might run counter to what we are supposed to believe and say.
Within universities themselves, there are walls that serve not to protect the denizens, or their work, but to separate the fields of study. There is a healthy amount of separation; we can’t have people using microscopes to study literature, we can’t have chemists using paintbrushes and pottery wheels, but these walls must be permeable enough to allow information, and people, to flow freely throughout the departments. Currently, with universities, and the products they produce, being situated as economic enhancements rather than actual truth, or Truth, university departments are so separated from each other that we wind up with individuals who know everything that it is possible for one to know about, say, lemurs or art history or music theory, and next to nothing about anything else. That might be extreme, but it is not too far a leap to posit a world class expert in evolutionary biology who believes in trickle-down economics, and I personally know medical doctors who believe the Earth is six-thousand years old; our fields of expertise are kept intentionally discrete so as to increase immediate efficiency (rather than long-term quality) and return on investment and, ultimately, institutional control from the top down. A bunch of artificial idiot savants, only without the cool rain man superpowers, a bunch of highly trained experts who can be applied to a given problem in the economic system of a given organization, but remain dispossessed of the whole Truth and estranged from their own humanity and that of all others.
We need experts, we need people who can tell us all about a given thing. Where would we be without experts? Well, we’re finally approaching a point in history where the answer to this question, the very question itself, might need to be rethunk; but we’re not there yet, and until we get there, society would crumble without experts. We need rocket scientists and chemists and anthropologists and even art historians, they provide the substrate through and upon which society itself blossoms, they give us the things we take for granted. I would argue we might take a fair bit of ground back from the experts, our Society of Control is possible only through state approved and mandated experts (or pseudo-state organizations that have all the same real force of a state with none of the supposed legitimacy or accountability entailed in stateness), but I also don’t think that anybody would prefer a reversion to the fucking stone age, or even a step back ten years!
The university is not a church, no religious order, no mystery, nor is it a place for prophets and apostles. Its principle is to furnish all tools and offer all possibilities in the province of the intellect, to direct the individual to the frontiers, to refer the learner back to himself for all his decisions, to his own sense of responsibility[iv]
The university keeps itself distinct from sects, churches, and fanatical groups, which seek to impose their own outlook upon others. The university does this because it wants to thrive in freedom only and would perish rather than carefully shelter itself from unfamiliar ideas and withdraw from intellectual conflict where fundamentals are involved.[v]
While we need walls to ensure the ability of those engaged in the search for Truth to continue working unimpeded, we must take care to ensure that we don’t erect prohibitive barriers to entry into the university, though there should be a formal process. There shouldn’t be free and open access to those who would come and go willy-nilly, taking from the university, and thus society at large, without ever working toward greater needs. There shouldn’t be uninitiated eyes observing the wicked workings of those committed to Truth and the uncovering of it. There shouldn’t be investors and military liaisons and government regulators roaming the halls. There shouldn’t be entrenched old men who do nothing at all but sit and wait for privileged youths to come to them with pieces of paper to sign. There shouldn’t be astronomical tuition fees and legacy admissions rackets and traditions of exclusion, while there should be a method of ensuring that dedicated and able students from far and wide are recruited and granted entry, while the dilettantes and the dilly-dalliers are denied.
All of university life depends upon the nature of the people participating in it. The character of a given university is determined by the professors appointed to it. Every university is dependent upon the kind of persons it can attract. The truest idea of the university is all in vain if the people who could realize it are no longer around. If these people exist, however, it becomes a question of life and death to the university to find and attract them.[vi]
The researchers and technicians, the students and teachers, the people whose job it is to be entirely devoted to The University and to Truth, need society to prop them up. You can’t very well research quantum physics or molecular chemistry or microbiology, or history or art or music, if you’re taken over worrying about paying bills or feeding kids or playing empty games of social status. But that’s just the problem: the invention of the PMC, its role in the reproduction of class society, has turned a legitimate need for dedicated truth-seekers into an inherent justification of meritocracy for a class of people obsessed with social status, i.e. recognition.
Capital and recognition
Capital pulled a switcheroo regarding recognition. There is a healthy type of recognition, when I see some part of myself reflected, or represented, in the world around me: another person, an object or an event, a condition, those photos and mementos I was talking about earlier that we hang on our walls to remind us that we are here and we are real and the things that matter really do matter, in some sense anyway. This recognition stimulates us, draws out the self hidden deep under layers and layers of identity, masks, and all that. This recognition isn’t necessarily a good thing, or necessarily a bad thing, how we respond to it and how we use it to our advantage/disadvantage is where that distinction is made; it simply is a fact of the human experience.
This recognition can create a reason to start a relationship with another person, or to fully engage with a thing outside oneself, but it can also lead one astray, cause one to see oneself where they are not and trade a robust self-image for empty reinforcement. When I do something awesome, my peer group will recognize it; they’ll recognize the skill and the effort I put in, they’ll recognize the singular provenance of this thing, they’ll recognize the value that I place on the thing even if it doesn’t carry the same value to them. This recognition has been privatized, due to the atomization of people through Capital’s stranglehold on every bit of The Human Experience.
The debasement of the individual, the deskilling of workers, and the devalorizing of families and communities has been carried out by the complete mechanization and commoditization of everything.
We have no source of these human give-and-takes outside of some platform or economic structure—I can’t “be seen” unless I’m involved in something “productive” from the point of view of Capital, social movements (ideology), work (obviously), recreational activities that depend upon the purchase of things from stores and gas from gas stations and incessant posts on platforms and all that, online groups or “communities” that generate data (the new ground upon which Capital rests).
Along with the complete capture of these human interactions, there has been a conflation of recognition and empty reinforcement. We don’t see ourselves reflected or represented in the world anymore, we only see ourselves reflected in personal praise and glory and narratives that confirm our own personal perspectives. I want to suggest that this is why the PMC and everyone influenced by its values, mode, and mindset tend to go for human interest stories as opposed to solid structural analysis.
Human interest stories are great, of course. We love to hear from those who have lived to tell. And I am no different. I have lived through a lot of fucked up shit. I like to talk about it, but I also like to pretend that I don’t like to talk about it because it makes me feel cool and mysterious and shit. The thing is, none of the fucked up shit I’ve been through matters, in any real way. Sure, it matters, but it’s also all bullshit; even if I lived a perfect life the world would be just as fucked up a place as it is now, and I would probably be a bigger idiot and wouldn’t be writing anything other than sexts to some equally vacuous person, so yeah. I can’t help but interpret the world through my own particular lens, but I can’t let that stand in the way of Truth.
Capital loves it when we enter the belly button zone, when we start to huff our own farts and think they contain some existential truth. If I join a group centered around my particularities, one that gives me this empty reinforcement and takes any impetus I might have toward emancipation and redirects it into something that has already been captured, hashtags and categories and “being seen doing the thing,” then anything I could possibly do is only going to reify or reproduce all that I claim to be opposed to. Read the Situationists, they did this better, but I’m talking about the same thing, and it’s only gotten worse since Debord was murdered.
I honestly think the thrust of the PMC argument is not that there is a new class, or a new derivative or transitional class, that occupies a middle ground between workers and owners (or Capital itself, as even owners are quite impotent when it comes to the algorithmic operation of our economy), which is all self-evident if one takes an honest look at the state of things. Rather, there has been a fundamental shift in the way Capital operates, one that’s difficult to pin down and thus often gets rejected in favor of having arguments in which one might find some recognition.
I’m inclined to state that the PMC argument presaged and prefigured Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism, or something similar, but that’s neither here nor wherever you are. It’s too late to do anything about the changes we’re arguing about, trying to decide if they happened or not, but it’s not too late to take seriously the idea that there still are people situated in positions that give them access to some form of power; why would anybody want to give up on that in favor of some petty recognition?
Capital stumbled upon the realization that “The Maintenance of order can no longer be left to episodic police violence,”[vii] that it is more effective to make people believe they are already living the dream, or on track to achieve it, than to confront them with their very powerlessness. Thus, the progressive leanings of the PMC, which maintain a popular belief in the system itself, manages to reincorporate the regressive position that they are the deserving experts who rose to the top of a meritocracy. They are the deserving and we must respect the democratic process else we become ourselves The Deplorables.
The fact that there is progress creates a sense of progress, a telos that people can buy into and remain unproblematically disengaged. Add to that the fact that it is already a heroic feat for any working people to become engaged when they have no surplus timenergy in the first place, and it’s no wonder that people believe that things which amount to little more than consumer choices (voting, buying cruelty-free pineapples from Whole Foods, etc.) are radical and emancipatory.
We have no power to make meaningful choices, so we convince ourselves that the choices we can make really do matter. We vote Team Blue or Team Red, and consume products and content that gives us a feeling of recognition and belonging. We form parasocial bonds with brands and figures. We give up on the process of becoming human and we let others (entertainers, products, media franchises, and so on) do it for us because we are completely alienated from our own selves and our timenergetic potential to self-actualize in any meaningful ways.
So there I sit, at the dinner table with my college educated friends and family. And if I try to talk theory, they roll their eyes. The fact is, they have their degrees, their opinions, their credentials, and me? I’m that fuck up, burnout, drop out loser whose bullshit they humor because they’re tolerant. And I humor them while they wax righteous about purchases at Whole Foods. I’m an outsider on the inside and it’s weird. These walls are not just between us, they also stand between my deserving self who has something worth saying and that fucked up loser who should shut up and take notes when my betters are speaking.
Does any of it matter? Is it too late to do anything? Is change beyond the scope of what’s possible? I don’t know. It depends on the day. Some days I feel like what I’m doing at Theory Underground is just a way to cope, whereas on other days I feel like there is something genuinely radical about a place where people like me can get a crash course in the Idea of the University, The Professional-Managerial Class, and so much more. The question is whether this is only radical for me, as an individual, or whether this will have broader societal ripple effects. Is it too late? I can’t seem to silence the little voice that says we missed our opportunity.
In the nineteenth century we were still arguing over whether or not humans have souls. Now in the twentieth those of us who do theory stand back in horrow and watch as this dark Machine God devours them.
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This post was an excerpt from Underground Theory: Coming To A City Near You. Enjoy it serially here for free. Each part of Nance’s piee will be published over the next of the Theory Underground tour in Europe (photo below). If you prefer a physical copy, orders within the U.S. can get it at a discount here. Otherwise, I recommend getting it from Amazon. Also, stay tuned for the Audible version of this - in production now!
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Bryce Nance’s Bio:
Nance would've been just another disgruntled denizen of the internet, were it not for the decade spent trying to take his education seriously in order to build himself into a subject with something to contribute to the conversations about The Situation; a decade that led him to the conclusion that a project such as Theory Underground was the only path forward for people such as himself. He has been, and is, many things in this life. From homeless teenage punk rocker to young father holding down multiple jobs while attending (and quickly leaving) university on an academic scholarship, to American soldier in Iraq, to corrections officer and eventually mental health care provider to incarcerated and adjudicated youth, to truck driver, to gig worker, and many things in between. Aside from being published alongside some of biggest names in contemporary theory, and the brightest stars in the underground theory scene, in Underground Theory: Coming To A City Near You (and touring the world in support of the anthology’s release), and Nollie Dolphin Flips, Nance doesn’t have any accomplishments he feels like talking about, but he is immensely grateful for all of your attention!
[i] Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” October, 59 (Winter, 1992): 3-7.
[ii] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol 3., eds. Frederick Engels and David Fernbach (London: New Left Review, 1981 [1894]), 1025.
[iii] Barbara and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” Radical America, vol. 11, issue 2, (March-April 1977): 12.
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