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File: 1764886450577.jpeg (223.91 KB, 587x544, 314812DF-6222-4F8E-B25A-D….jpeg)

 

I’m honestly curious to know what exactly makes the PMC (university professors, doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, artists, those types of people) adhere to the belief system they do. Namely, the psychology behind what’s often termed as “petit-bourgeois radicalism.”

I recently read through two of Caleb Maupin’s books (The American Years of Lead and the one on Trotsky and the Neocons). Maupin asserts that intellectual elites (PMC) are heavily into salon culture and edgy things that have aristocratic connotations. For instance, intellectual elites (PMC) are the ones who hold an overly-romantic view of revolution and romanticize terrorism and political violence. They’re the ones that conjure up images of a big apocalyptic revolution similar to the Christian rapture whereby every little aspect of the existing society is destroyed. He also heavily emphasized that the PMC hates the genuine working/class, because they see them as a threat to their power, so they deliberately manipulate working-class movements in order to offset and eventually dissolve them. Plus, they love sexual promiscuity and use “leftism” in order to promote it.

Last night, I watched a video on Sublation Media between Doug Alain and Chris Cutrone. Cutrone made the point that the PMC romanticize terrorism, mass destruction involving killing and raping, and the “noble death” because the PMC are “gangsters.” Not gangsters the way the ultra-rich capitalists are, but gangsters nonetheless.

My understanding is, intellectual elites love these things like violence and terror for the exact same reason they love modern “art” like Jackson Pollock and jazz and rap “music”: it’s all deeply irrational. They reject historical progress, favour the lumpen and those on the margins of society over the genuine proletariat, and promote destruction because they hate rationality. All of the things they promote as “leftism” are actually deeply aristocratic values: it’s the aristocracy that loves violence, sexual indulgence and a rejection of logic and linear time. I see it like this: intellectual elites, being Nietzscheans at heart, hate rationality and linear progress because they see those things as boxes that limit their ability to indulge, but also the fact that they already have their privileged positions and don’t need a proletarian revolution to have their basic needs met. In fact, a proletarian revolution would mean they lose their privileges and end up working in the fields. That’s also why they favour the lumpen: a “leftist” revolution lead by the lumpen would pose zero threat to them. After all, the marginalized find allies in college professors promoting queer studies and doctors handing out narcan, do they not?

Am I right or is there more to it?

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/02/identity-and-the-professional-managerial-class.html

>>2583956
Care to give a TL;DR summary?

>>2583942
>Maupin asserts that intellectual elites (PMC) are heavily into salon culture and edgy things that have aristocratic connotations.

I don't think so. It really depends on which sections of the PMC you're talking about, but generally speaking, whether they're "liberal" or "conservative" neither one has much more than a pretense towards intellectual pursuits like "salon culture." The pretense gives the credentials they base their careers on the veneer of intellectualism, as something more than just a piece of paper their mommy and daddy bought them, but intellectuslism among the upper classes is all but dead. Developing the intellect means developing conviction, and convictions are career poison.

>He also heavily emphasized that the PMC hates the genuine working/class, because they see them as a threat to their power, so they deliberately manipulate working-class movements in order to offset and eventually dissolve them.

Yeah, true. They're the plantation overseers of society, and sympathizing with the field slaves is anathema to The Career, which is what the pmc worships.

>the PMC are “gangsters.”

I think they romanticize things because their class position and world view requires insulation from material reality. The only aristocratic pretenses that they actually believe in is that they're materially rewarded for being "right." For Republican PMCs it's "God's blessing" and for the Democrats it's "being a good fucking person," but the result of both is that they get wealthier and are granted more of the fruits of their even wealthier patrons. That ultimately means they're ever increasingly insulated from the reality of their actions and decisions and the results of all the people they crush to get where they are. For normal, well developed people, coming into contact with the human cost of cutting healthcare or bombing another country is cause for soul searching at the very least. But that's the thing people with convictions do, and the pmc carefully select that kind of thing out.

>My understanding is, intellectual elites love these things like violence and terror for the exact same reason they love modern “art” like Jackson Pollock and jazz and rap “music”: it’s all deeply irrational.

Rationality is a matter of whatever you're measuring it against. The PMC's irrationality is a measure of what they have to and are willing to do in order to secure their class position. Since it's unlimited, they can be no proportionality, because acting "rationally" would mean the elimination of their class and probably themselves.

>After all, the marginalized find allies in college professors promoting queer studies and doctors handing out narcan, do they not?

The marginalized have to take what they can get but that's because their class position makes them deeply vulnerable and thus exploitable, not because they are natural allies of the pmc.

>>2583942
Ehhh I think it’s silly to refer to jazz and rap music in quotation marks—they’re music too, not any lesser cause it ain’t Bach or whatever.

That said if I could put some of my own hypotheses forward, I think part of it is a recognition of their own impotence within the Capitalist system. They’re “ideas guys”, shorn of an actual relationship to violence, they rely on what amounts to patronage from others pretty often or appealing to a narrow scope of acolytes and sycophants. Like think about the relations of someone like Stephen Pinker with power; he has to be a kiss ass to richer men than him who like his ideas that reinforce their class position. Being in the “PMC” means you’ve got status above the masses but you still are a dependent, you still have someone above you.

And here’s the thing: a lot of people above you are fucking stupid. Apparently some of Elon Musk’s programmers had to build a program to mimic complicated code because Elon would sweep into the office and start barking at them to make specific coding changes and most of his demands just caused stuff to break. So you’re paid well, you’re given a status above the common worker, but you still feel like for all your brains you’re powerless and ruled by idiots.

Romanticized violence becomes a frequent fantasy for these types because they feel constrained by the rules of small minds, and because they feel their powerlessness more acutely than someone—say—working in a WalMart and getting idiotic demands from corporate. Service workers have no status, they aren’t told they’re special or heroes or whatever, their jobs aren’t ever considered something they “earned” through merit, they don’t have a degree functioning as some “I’m better than you” slip.

So PMC are told they’re part of the select, but they feel constrained, they can see their merits as clearly superior to those of their bosses, but they recognize their ideas on their own are limp. It’s not a matter of proving them right, or being persuasive, but of being given patronage by someone above you.

So that builds contempt, I think. Envy. They see themselves as above the workers and the bosses but still subject to bosses.

>>2583942
>a proletarian revolution would mean they lose their privileges and end up working in the fields

.

>the PMC (university professors, doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, artists, those types of people)

Why would socialists make doctors and engineers work as farmhands? This sounds like your own description of the PMC:

> intellectual elites (PMC) are the ones who hold an overly-romantic view of revolution and romanticize terrorism and political violence. They’re the ones that conjure up images of a big apocalyptic revolution similar to the Christian rapture whereby every little aspect of the existing society is destroyed.

Also many revolutions did try to destroy all vestiges of the previous regime so I dunno seems kinda accurate although you could say it's something to avoid if you can but good luck telling that to the excited crowds. Even in ancient societies the victors would smash the idols of their enemies.

>>2583942
It's not that they hate rationality, it's that they have high openness to experience. They are in many ways basically just the dispositional opposite of rightoids ( see >>2546215 ) They are tolerant and they enjoy novelty. Where rationality delivers novelty it's fine, but where it delivers mundanity it's condemned in a romantic sort of way.

This is, incidentally, the correct worldview. The PMC are basically good people. The more proletarianized they become, the better they will become. A proletarian revolution would send them to the fields only in the dreams of LARPers who are themselves usually novelty-seeking PMC-adjacent little freaks who've got ideas above (below?) their station. The revolution will, in fact, need doctors and nurses and teachers and central planners and railway timetable designers and theatre reviewers and all sorts of other people who don't fit with your discount khmer rouge fantasies. And a good thing, too!
Even their anti-rationalism has its merits as a sort of error checking. Inject too high a dose of a rightoid striver's mindset into a could-be PMC-type and you wind up with the rationalist community telling you why we've got to sacrifice all the starving children of the third world to Elon Musk today so that we increase our odds of building gigantic fleets of spaceships where our great great great great… great grandchildren and their pet shrimp can all be kept permanently hooked to an opium drip, because after all the math says that's the utility maximizing option…

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>>2583991
>khmer rouge
<OP post implying that a revolution "whereby every little aspect of the existing society is destroyed" can't end up with people working in the fields

>>2583967
You should just read it but

>So what have I learned from writing this down?

>First, calling the PMC a class is analytically useful.  Per the Ehrenreichs’ 1977 definition, the PMC consists of “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”  The PMC has identifiable class interests and is at least somewhat conscious of itself as a class. The position of the PMC has some inherent challenges and contradictions based on class interests that are inherently adverse to both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

>Second, the ideology and reproductive strategy of the PMC for the last 30 years has created additional challenges for individual members of the PMC.  The PMC ideology is enervating for many people, and aspiring PMC youth cannot count on achieving satisfactory roles even if they comply with all the practical and ideological demands.

>Third, the PMC is minimally organized as a class and acts in its own class interest only in the very broadest terms.  It is second nature for the PMC to view creating more rules and more PMC jobs enforcing those rules as the solution to every problem, but the PMC appear to have no competent class leadership or strategy to keep the proliferating PMC jobs from being devalued and proletarianized.  They are being squeezed economically, and we are going through a phase where neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat is listening to the PMC’s expert pronouncements.  In fact, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat seem to be uniting behind, of all people, the anti-expert, Donald Trump!

>Fourth, as Erik Erikson explained, a mismatch between the expectations of young people and the ideologies and roles being offered to them goes hand in hand with instability.  Based on the PMC’s current inability to reproduce itself effectively and its increasingly antagonistic relationship with the proletariat, the PMC may be contributing more to the downfall of a balanced and prosperous capitalist order than to reproducing it.

>>2583988
>Why would socialists make doctors and engineers work as farmhands?

They wouldn't. "The PMC" is a large and nebulous grouping under which professionals such as "doctors" (which itself includes but isn't exclusive to medical physicians) theoretically belong, but which also includes all the bachelor-bearing middle managers of corporate America. Basically they
1. Have some kind of institutionally provided credential, like a bachelor's degree
2. They manage people or resources without themselves owning them
3. They perform some kind of intellectually significant but not necessarily materially productive labor
4. Their class position is tied to a greater or lesser degree by the management of symbolic capital, "clout".

So no, unless there was some kind of disaster where manual labor was in dire emergency need, doctors aren't going to be sent to the fields. But there are lots of people posting on blue sky and twitter right now about drumpf or transhumanists or whatever that would definitely be in danger of that.

>>2584008
having asked and failed on this point in /leftybritpol/ i'll introduce it as an aside here: what does a socialist service economy look like?
either via international division of labour (in the plain english meaning of those terms, not the old concept) or via handwave-y automation or outright magic or the assumption of say - the nauruan economy - where it's clearly a niche case where primary agricultural or secondary manufacturing work is inappropriate to local conditions.

this seems to me an interesting imaginative exercise, hopefully removed from the over-answered question of what a socialist manufacturing state or agricultural commune would look like.

>>2584013
What do you mean by a "service economy?" Things like taxi service? Hospitality? Medical?

>>2583942
You're vastly overthinking the labor aristocracy and bureaucrat-comprador capitalists to justify your homophobia. Judith Butler is not a representative of queer people anymore than Duterte is a representative of Philippino people.

>>2584019
essentially, yes. specific definitions are something i'd leave open to whoever's doing the imagining (given artists, for example, are an edge-case.), but the thrust of it should be: not extracting or manufacturing physical commodities. (which is well covered ground.)

>>2584013
>>2584029
I mean, speaking as a service worker myself, I've given some thought to this and I think it'd be a kind of return to localism within the framework of the established "supermarket" model. I'm sorry if that sounds confusing, let me try and explain.

So, Trader Joe's where I work might be a good example of this. Shit one of the company's stated values are "We're a national chain of neighborhood stores", which amounts to a kind of decentralized leadership style and a lot of room for individual expression. All of our art is done by artists working in our backroom, some of my coworkers were also carpenters who'd help design new displays, we get to know some of the people in our locale and you'll get some feelgood stuff like folks giving a shoutout to a special needs guy who shopped in our store, like "Hello Franklin!" on a sign down his favorite aisle.

I think we can experiment less with standardization of aesthetic (you go into any Vons and even if the layout is different it looks like a Vons, for example) but more creativity from the workers themselves.

Like an element of Marx's work that I really likes is he doesn't condescend to workers, he considers most of us as already having the tools necessary to take over our jobs without the imposition of capitalists, and yeah a lot of us have different experiences managing sections of our store, writing orders, etc. And there's a really human drive to kind of leave your mark on it. When I ran liquor I wanted to do a "cocktail of the month" type thing where we'd have little slips of cocktail recipes and organize some products so it could be like "Hey, here's everything you need to make a margarita and here's how!"

So I imagine service would be slower in general, and some business models (like a Starbucks on every street corner, fast food models where you get your coffee or burger quickly and fuck off) may disappear entirely, but the upside is returning a sense of community and creativity to people.

Shit, another example: Fry's Electronics. There were some that had these crazy "Alice in Wonderland" designs and others that went X-Files kind of "UFOs and Greys", the idea that you could go to a store and no-two stores could look alike would be fun.

Or maybe we could go back to the old idea of what a mall could be, a kind of "modern agora" like its designer envisioned. Turn it into a place where you could get just about everything you needed and then have time to rest and just chat with people.

>>2583942
>(university professors, doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, artists, those types of people)
I will start by saying all these people can be in vastly different position in the system, and even inside some of these professions their status (and ideology) can vary widely. Thats the problem with things like "PMC" and "middle class" concepts, these things are so large and vaguely defined, they're usually not very useful (also engineers are not supposed to be PMC iirc).

>edgy things that have aristocratic connotations. For instance, intellectual elites (PMC) are the ones who hold an overly-romantic view of revolution and romanticize terrorism and political violence
revolution and terrorism does not have aristocratic connotations, and your described "PMC" are overwhelmingly against these things and on the contrary vilify revolution and political violence in general. So thats already a loads of bullshit to base a reasoning on.

>They’re the ones that conjure up images of a big apocalyptic revolution
are they really? pmc tend to be reformist imo, and the big apocalyptic revolution is used both by reactionaries to frighten people and revolutionaries who do intend to do a massive upheaval and change things radically. And of course, romantic liberals who will condemn everyone as reformist while not actually doing the work of building a mass party through incremental concrete struggle and gains while still having a revolutionary outlook and being ready to seize an opportunity rather than stay blocked on voooting

>the PMC hates the genuine working/class, because they see them as a threat to their power
I dont think thats true. The petit bourgeois do have this, because they directly struggle against workers on their real daily material interest and risk falling down to their level, but pmc are not threatened in any way by the workers, they have cultural and intellectual capital they cant really loose and dont directly depend on the workers exploitation. They just tend to sing to the tune of the guy with the coin, which explains why they're usually pushed to be mild reformist.

>they deliberately manipulate working-class movements in order to offset and eventually dissolve them
bullshit, they just have naturally the skillset and status to take control and prominent positions in these movements, and they will often fuck up, but that absolutely not deliberate they're just often retards politically

>Plus, they love sexual promiscuity and use “leftism” in order to promote it.
oh, spooked reactionary shit

>PMC romanticize terrorism, mass destruction involving killing and raping, and the “noble death” because the PMC are “gangsters.”
wtf have you ever interacted with these fabled "PMC" who love mass destruction? me never

>like violence and terror for the exact same reason they love modern “art” like Jackson Pollock and jazz and rap “music”: it’s all deeply irrational
this is getting increasingly reactionary and ridiculous, we're reaching pol tier analysis

>After all, the marginalized find allies in college professors promoting queer studies and doctors handing out narcan, do they not?
yeah you're just a thinly veiled polyp, unspook yourself before talking politics

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>>2583942
>For instance, intellectual elites (PMC) are the ones who hold an overly-romantic view of revolution and romanticize terrorism and political violence.
lmao the ramblings of a xitter addict who has never conversed with anybody else except his mexican wife who barely speaks english and whom he psychologically tortures for funsies

>>2583987
> So you’re paid well, you’re given a status above the common worker, but you still feel like for all your brains you’re powerless and ruled by idiots.
now this, when I was working as a programmer, I've definitely felt it. Complying with retarded demands you know they're gonna ask you to change again because its stupid, and never having much input on what need to actually get done because despite all the skill, you're still a technician serving the business
but this aint pmc, more like labor aristocracy

>>2583987
four paragraphs to achieve the same jello biafra accomplished in a few verses, 2 minutes and a powerful riff

>>2584013
>what does a socialist service economy look like?
It doesn't, read the political economy textbook. Services don't create value, they only exist to provide benefits to the population under socialism. It's only an economic category because it does employ people and consume resources. That's not a bad thing, by the way, the proportion of such workers is actually expected to increase under socialism as well, but it cannot be the foundation of a productive economy by definition. It can be an extension of the broader economy. If a tourist destination becomes socialist and starts providing those services in a socialist manner they will need to be subsidized like healthcare is subsidized by states today because that's just not a productive sphere. Capital gaslights us into thinking otherwise because of their perspective on the process.

Are engineers PMC? I thought they were just skilled working class…

Who cares what their psychology may or may not be? Bullets still work the same

>>2584052
it's an office worker thing and probably describes most people's experiences doing office work, but it's also the sort of thing that perpetuates the illusion, your boss IS stupid, but it's also a comfy thought, isn't it? it's probably my boss' personal incompetence, toxicity, unfairness or stupidity what makes work suck, or what keeps me from moving vertically in the corporate ladder, or why the corporate structure feels so unfair and then they fantasize "if i could get rid of my boss" or "eventually i will be in my boss' shoes and I will be better" most people in office jobs can't seem to generalize beyond "MY boss sucks", or can't recognize that their boss is there for totally arbitrary reasons, and that probably most bosses would be just as shitty. unless you are somewhat radicalized to begin with, your biggest fantasy is eventually replacing your boss, just bidding for your turn.

>>2584071
it's an arbitrary category and no one knows what PMC describes, really.

>>2584052
>but this aint pmc, more like labor aristocracy

That's a fair point, my bad. Though to salvage it, I'd say in the case of university professors in particular there's a kind of contemptuousness of the fact that for as brilliant as they think their ideas are, society is still ruled by the rich and the stupids. I think there's some old quote by Plato where he said if the state isn't run by "learned warriors" or whatever than it'd be led by cowards and protected by idiots. 'Course that's his justification for elitism but I think we see in a lot of these university types a recognition of their own helplessness. No matter how novel the idea is, no matter how much it penetrates every aspect of our society, its just dead words.

For a more relevant Marx quote you've got the whole "Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it" line. Well I think maybe some of these guys are frustrated that interpretation alone isn't change, but they also realize that they're impotent. Some latch onto the idea of a change wholly outside of human influence which imposes an order on the rest of us, I guess you could call these the Techno-Accelerationists obsessing over AGI. Other times they fantasize about some mythical revolution that they'd, naturally, be the leader of by virtue of their obvious merit where they can have their personal vendettas settled simply by filling out paperwork: "Kill this guy, imprison this guy, kill this guy…"

But I think the more powerless a person perceives themselves the more they fantasize about even wider and more radical change. A powerless guy gets cut off in traffic and he fantasizes about following the other guy home and scaring the shit out of him. A powerless professor gets ignored by his students and his book doesn't sell, and he starts to dream of prison camps and dictatorial power.

>>2584072
>let’s execute doctors guize!!!!

>>2584097
which ones?

>>2584099
What do you mean? What’s the point of killing doctors when doctors are crucial to a healthy society?

>>2584100
ah i thought you were suggesting that we do execute some of the…. uh, particular reactionary professions…..


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