The dislocation between the PMC and the rest of the working class – Part 1

A while ago, I caught up with an old friend who I was close to during our postgraduate studies. We hadn’t seen each other for some years as a result of pursuing different paths in different parts of the world and it was great to exchange notes. At one stage during the conversation, she said to me that I had become one of the ‘super elites’, a term that evaded definition but could be sort of teased out by referring to lifestyle choices etc. The most obvious manifestation was the fact that she was visiting my new home in an experimental sustainable housing estate, which apparently marked one demarcation between being an ordinary citizen and one of the ‘super elites’. That group also apparently doesn’t have any power in society like the real elites – the old and new money gang – but is privileged nonetheless. I understand the notion even if it somewhat amorphous. I was reflecting on that conversation as I have been trying to understand why the US voters chose Donald Trump over the seemingly more progressive and decent candidate Kamala Harris. I use that description of Harris guardedly, because if one digs below the surface, even just a bit, it becomes clear that the Democrats were not particularly progressive or decent (Gaza!) at all but more interested in lecturing people they look down on as to how they should behave and look. All that stuff about restoring joy – was really what ‘super elites’ think about and is far removed from the aspirations of the voters who went for Trump. Here are some additional thoughts on that topic.

When my friend brought up the ‘super elite’ categorisation (yes, she admitted membership of the SE club too), I started looking around the cultural studies literature as a way of teasing out the concept and understanding how it might fit with my other work on the political failure of the progressive Left over the last decades.

That is apparently what the ‘super elites’ do – take time to do research and reflect given their jobs typically afford them flexibility and discretion that is denied to other workers by the demands of the profit-seeking capital machine.

In my 2017 book with journalist Thomas Fazi – Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto Books, September 2017) – I started fleshing out that research agenda, which sought to explain the demise of social democracy, particularly in terms of the role that the Left played itself when it adopted the fictions of mainstream macroeconomics.

My subsequent work is seeking to extend those ideas to articulate a progressive pathway to rebuild communities, protect the planet, de-link poor nations from the colonial yoke, define a feasible degrowth strategy, and do something about the obscene inequality that has worsened over the neoliberal years.

The question that I have been grappling with relates to the role of the educated class in leading social change.

How do the concerns and interests of that class provide a communication bridge to the less educated people in society?

While neoliberalism has been slowly but surely hollowing out the middle class, where many of the educated locate, it hasn’t been entirely successful in that quest.

The polarisation that has been occurring in society has pushed the lower ends of the middle class (in income terms) down, while the upper end have largely been able to maintain their material living standards, albeit with increased personal debt burdens.

Neoliberalism though has been extremely damaging to the lower income groups in our societies who have lost full-time career work, even if the previous career path was relatively narrow and short (for example, assembly line worker to leading hand).

The workers who enjoyed security in the post WW2 manufacturing boom in the more advanced nations like the UK, the US, Australia, etc – where well-paid jobs supported by high productivity plants – have seen those jobs vanish and been replaced by casualised jobs with low pay in the service sector.

The neoliberal obsession with privatisation and outsourcing killed millions of well-paid jobs but has also seen the same workers disadvantaged as consumers as utilities have become more expensive and less reliable and privatised companies have reaped massive profits.

Screwed both ways.

Neoliberalism has attacked the foundations of material security for the low income families.

It has degraded public services, dismantled the trade union power which helped these workers gain some semblance of a stake in the capitalist system, it opened the doors for the ridiculous expansion of the financial sector, which has led to massive household debt burdens and lined the pockets of the super rich.

All the promises that ‘freeing up’ the market and getting the state out of our lives would deliver increased prospects of wealth for all has been proven to be an elaborate scam to cover the tracks of those who have been extracting benefits way beyond their contribution on the back of the bulk of the working class.

The educated segment of the working class – the professional and managerial class – have largely been insulated from these ravages for various reasons.

Not completely but mostly.

And their response, has been to develop ‘intellectual plans’, particularly those with a progressive bent, which articulate new visions for society that befit the challenges they define to be important (for themselves and their construction of society).

The problem is that these visions have not been aligned with the aspirations of the less educated workers and the ‘construction of society’ does resonate with that group of workers who are up against an entirely different set of constraints.

I recall that during the first time I went to university as an undergraduate, the world was still coming to terms with the student revolts around the world in the late 1960s, and in Australia, the momentum was maintained somewhat by Australia’s disgraceful involvement in the Vietnam War and the compulsory conscription that the federal government forced onto 20-years old.

At that time, the progressive student movements (ranging from barely progressive to full-blown Marxist revolutionary movements) created what became known as the – Worker Student Alliance – which had the avowed aim of ‘smashing US imperialism’.

Everything was about smashing something in those days – the state, US imperialism, ourselves, whatever.

The WSA arose out of the massive industrial action of 1969 where the co-founder of the Australian Communist Party and senior union official for the – Australian Tramway and Motor Omnibus Employees’ Association – Clarrie O’Shea – was jailed by an industrial court for failing to pay fines that had been imposed on his union for pursuing what were clearly reasonable union actions to defend the conditions of the membership.

The Industrial Judge who imprisoned O’Shea later was appointed (extraordinarily) by the new Labor government in 1972 as the Governor-General of Australia (a colonial relic given we are not a republic) and then sacked that government in 1975 as part of a CIA-led putsch against the progressive Left in Australia.

It was extraordinary because it demonstrated the complete lack of understanding of that government, which had become full of educated lawyers etc parading as progressive politicians.

They were all members of the emerging Professional and Managerial Class (PMC) rather than workers who had come up through the trade union movement and were committed to public service, which had been the traditional path for Labor politicians to take.

That Labor government marked the beginning of the ‘new labour’ social democrats who have dominated such parties ever since and represent the problem I am discussing here.

The O’Shea imprisonment led to a massive strike by the Left unions, which the main body of the union movement rejected (the peak bodies at state and national level).

I was still at high school but I remember the huge protests outside the Pentridge Prison where O’Shea was taken.

This period thus saw the emergence of the WSA which was in full swing by the time I went to university.

The mainstream press called the organisation the first ‘terrorist’ group in Australia, although that really just meant that it was part of the Communist bloc.

There were lots of protests and demonstrations etc, particularly as part of the anti-War movement.

But the thing I recall the most is the disjuncture between the university students in the WSA and the workers who we were meant to have solidarity with.

At this time, there were still many large manufacturing plants in Australia and surrounding Monash University, where I started out at, was a concentration of those plants, producing cars, tractors, white goods, trucks, etc.

The WSA would regularly stage ‘rallies’ outside the factories demanding better working conditions and pay.

But the workers generally were not so enamoured by these ‘long-haired, dishevelled’ characters breaking down fences and doing all manner of destructive acts in their name.

I wondered at the time what this ‘Alliance’ actually meant and I recall conversations in the ‘Caf’, which was a meeting point in the student union for the activists (a cafe where you could buy the best toasted cheese sandwiches) where we would reflect on the habits and attitudes of the workers that we were meant to be in an Alliance with.

We mused that a shift to socialism would ‘cure’ these workers of their racist, misogynist, and xenophobic tendencies.

We were completely blithe to how disassociated our futures would be to the reality of our Alliance members.

The UK Guardian article (November 10, 2024) – Cosplaying social justice is the new elitist way of elbowing out the working class – touches on these themes.

In discussing a new book by Musa al-Gharbi – We Have Never Been Woke – the article recounts an anecdote from the book:

Four years later, many of these same students joined Black Lives Matter protests. Al-Gharbi watched as they demonstrated on Broadway in New York’s Upper West Side, oblivious to the “homeless Black men who didn’t even have shoes” sharing the same space. The protesters “were crowding the benches that homeless people were using”, insisting that “Black Lives Matter”, but apparently not “the Black guys right in front of them”.

That reminded me of the tensions within the WSA.

Everybody had good intentions at the time.

It is just that the planes on which they were operating did not intersect.

And in trying to represent a ‘vision’ for the workers, the educated classes just became offensive.

And, of course, many of the activists soon cleaned up their appearances, bought some nice suits (both male and female), once they graduated and went into the workplace as part of the PMC.

Some became politicians and started to mouth the platitudes that we now call ‘wokeness’, although I am never sure where that tendency begins and ends.

The political voice of the PMC have redefined progressiveness away from ‘smashing the state’ towards what it has deemed more acceptable aspirations.

First, it conceded the macroeconomic debate and adopted the fictions of mainstream economists about the government and its finances.

We now have these social democratic politicians raving on about ‘black holes’, and ‘responsible fiscal surpluses’ and all the accompanying metaphors and nomenclature that reinforce the fictions.

The Right, of course, doesn’t trade in those fictions when it suits them to bale out a bankster that has allowed their greed to get ahead of their acumen or when some military supplying corporation wants a massive procurement contract to build weapons to slaughter children in Gaza.

Second, to fill the gap left by the concession to the macroeconomic fictions and the long-standing aim to ‘smash the state’ and unite the working class, the educated Left, which now dominates the social democratic polities around the world, started promoting identity issues and more recently climate issues.

Don’t get me wrong, these issues are critical.

But the concept of economic class was largely abandoned and the educated left felt that had more in common with a female boss who was repressing the workers than the males worker being repressed.

Further these ‘educated aspirations’ are voiced as top-down dictates or judgements on workers then a disconnect emerges.

The PMC have sustainable houses and EVs and then lecture the ‘masses’ about the need for sustainability.

Meanwhile, the PMC looks down on the masses who still pursue housing dreams through the purchase of shoddy homes that have been built by greedy developers and eaten up valuable ‘green’ space.

Or they look down on workers who drive old ‘bangers’ which pump polluting exhaust emissions into atmosphere and who couldn’t afford an EV anyway.

The PMC also tell the workers that gender issues are at the top of the policy pursuits because human dignity is worthy of protection (and I agree with that last aspiration by the way).

The PMC political representatives talk about restoring ‘joy’ when at the same time the workers are struggling to make ends meet as inflation, driven by capitalist price gouging, which lines the pockets of the high income cohorts, and withdrawal of public services, make the lives of these casualised and low paid workers even more of a misery.

So those outside the PMC class might say: ‘Who cares if a ‘man’, who has declared they are a ‘woman’, wins a local ‘womens” running race down at some athletic club when the bulk of workers are abandoning dental care because they can no longer feed their kids properly or face eviction for failing to keep pace with the penurious mortgage schedules imposed by the banksters’.

And some others might say: ‘Who would ever vote for a politician that tells people that Israel has a right to defend itself, when that defense, which in practical terms is not defense at all but genocide and killing family members of the voters the politicians is seeking support from?’

This is the problem.

Conclusion

One book I found really interesting as I try to untangle all this stuff was written by the US cultural theorist – Catherine Liu – and is a brutal critique of the professional-managerial class, a class which the ‘super elite’ typically are part of.

In Part 2 (next week), I will discuss what I learned from that reading plus some more.

That is enough for today!

(c) Copyright 2024 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.