Like my base assumption is that she's wrong. If you think the PMC is an actual class then you're also only one step away from 🤡
https://twitter.com/jacob__posts/status/1367492298783744001?s=19
Like my base assumption is that she's wrong. If you think the PMC is an actual class then you're also only one step away from 🤡
https://twitter.com/jacob__posts/status/1367492298783744001?s=19
Modern finance capital has changed the nature of centralization of the heads of these firms, but the mode of production has not changed. The petite bourgeois still exists, they're not the PMC and PMC is generally a term for one group of petite bourgeois to try and distance themselves from another group of petite bourgeois who have more cringe affects. Actually examining how managers fit into production, their role in the finance capital era, is a worthwhile endeavor. PMC as a concept approaches instead the cultural norms and signifers, grouping together members of the proletariat with petty bourgeoisie due to "professionalism".
It identifies a class tier that comes out of corporate governance. One that is fills some necessary managerial role within Capitalism, both socially (creating the illusion of upward mobility) and economically (by quite literally managing lower-tier workers). A culture surrounds the class, and that episode was mostly poking fun at the attempts to market to people within the class through status symbols. But this thread seems to confuse Chapo-as-Observational-Comedy with the PMC-as-class-tier.
People are only able to indulge in these cultural consumerist fetishes because they have surplus disposable income. And they have that income because of their class status. And they have that class status because they fill a necessary position in the capitalist class hierarchy.
That the fetishes the class adopts are so absurd is something the Pod is making jokes about. Much in the same way they love to make fun of proletariat movie propaganda coming out of the Evangelical community.
I never had an issue with the premise of the episode itself. My issue is that it's not a useful class identifier or analysis, by leftists like Amber when she's doing more serious writing outside of comedy podcasts, and that it combines the necessary managerial role, something that was already observed in Capital by Marx as the stock corporation grew and became fully realized in 20th century shareholders management, and where petty bourgeois would work better to refer to them, with "professional", which is based around the culture shared of similar educational setting to the managers and similar basic cultural outlook and affect. It's not that the culture surrounds the class, it's that PMC assumes there's a coherent class there when there isn't. Proletariat members of the PMC (which exist because of the innate focus of the concept on culture itself as class) are not able to indulge in the cultural consumerism, do not have that class status or relation to production. It's entirely fine to criticize superstructural things-that's a large part of the podcast, after all. Managerial class would work better, since that's the vital part of it as class in relation to production.
The episode itself shows some of its actual utility though-for some professionals, themselves well off, to try and pretend they're not actually professionals and anything like the peers they criticize.
I'm getting some serious "We Live In A Society" vibes off this line.
Amber.