Ask Lemmygrad

Is the PMC an actual class? Anarchists think so. Some labor organizers think so (especially those with anarchist tendencies). But the PMC are non-owners. They are more akin to petite bourgeoisie, but with even less reason to be reactionary.

Under socialism, I would like to see the responsibility of oversight and reporting to be through elected representative managers, not overseers - elected by the workers from among their peers, based on those who show the greatest potential for reducing the chaos of work through empathy forged in lived experience.

The PMC has changed over the last century, and it has many segments. Many who would be considered a sort of the PMC are actually intellectual workers solving abstract problems and then trying to implement those solutions in real conditions. I don't know that it makes sense to treat it as a real class.

You can look to the history of previous successful socialist transitions to see how many of the mandarins of the capitalist class were repurposed under socialism. What else would you do with them, and how would things continue to work if you didn’t make use of their relatively unique working knowledge of things?

The PMC is usually considered a much larger group than just the “managers”: it includes the “professionals.” College professors, scientists, engineers, journalists, etc.

Edit to add: It’s not as if these people would have alternatives to socialism after private property is abolished, other than emigration.

Funnily enough the two most proactively agitative people outside of my politically active close friends have been two of my current and previous direct managers

Both are libs with some socdem tendencies, but they also are smart people working as the interface between money and labor. It's hard not to develop at least some kind of class consciousness when you are the person telling people that someone else fired them

Granted, their criticisms are often pretty surface level, but honestly the last time I talked with my current manager face to face it felt like they were inches away from calling for a strike (we are firing 80+ people at our location because the line went up slightly less than last year)

My old manager thaught me how to take advantage of the corporation and the bureaucracy for my and the customer's benefit, and didn't hesitate to explain in detail the many ways the company and the government was fucking up and fucking people over

PMC's are labor aristocracy with usually at least some passive capital from shares or investments, but especially with raises being tied to managerial positions at certain levels depending on the industry (and let's be honest, it's always better to be managed by someone with actual experience), I wouldn't determine class positions from the hierarchy of the system

Related !genzhou@lemmygrad.ml thread: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3187131

I say this, because I hear such disgusted sentiment in Hexbear against them

There's a strain of thought that basically goes, "If one subset of a group gets more crumbs, then they are more likely to side with the givers of the crumbs instead of siding with those who get fewer crumbs." Which... leads to turning the concept of "petite bourgeois" and "professional managerial class" into a meme (strawman?, mememan?) and then shittalking that instead of a more honest and serious analysis.

PMC has a very ''I'm powerless, I was only following orders'' vibe to it

But that exists in any system ngl

The PMC is not a real class as it does not describe the employee relationship to labour and the means of production. The way PMC is talked about online is more like an RPG class in a game than an economic or industrial term. If you have the look of an office worker, if you wear a business shirt, if you don't have calluses, then you are a PMC. Does that sound like a reasonable category to hold?

Here's a good video about it: https://youtu.be/y0KHMHngotM?si=qbUjwXwjsToXQsKx