RIP, the Professional-Managerial Class (1976 – 2026)

It’s the old story. First success, then hubris and, inevitably, nemesis

[The Nazis and Communists] came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?
George Orwell, 1984, 1949

The person who no longer owns his own “means of production” but is dependent on others, on the system for his livelihood is post-bourgeois… this produces not just an economic but a psychological shift in the people. Among other things, it produces a loss of a sense of agency, as people feel at the mercy of large, impersonal forces and institutions they cannot understand or control. Post-bourgeois attitudes are very different from bourgeois ones. The transition to the managerial from the bourgeois economy opens the door for bourgeois values (the Protestant ethic) to be replaced.
Aaron M. Renn, 14/5/25

It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data science, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person – AI is coming for you… I am not talking about your job at Fiverr. I am talking about your ability to stay in your profession in the industry.
Micha Kaufman, Fiverr founder and CEO, internal (then external) email, 9/4/25

FT graph (shared on X by Garrison Lovely)

So there I was luxuriating in a characteristically magisterial N.S. Lyons post that, as our American friends say, confirmed all my priors.

While drinking in Lyons’ account of how the institutionally, culturally and politically influential Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) has ruthlessly imposed its sensibilities on Anglosphere and Western European democracies in recent decades, I came across the following passage:

It is no wonder that some of our elites today speak openly of replacing humanity. First, of replacing human self-governance with rule by the ultimate manager: algorithmic artificial intelligence — a cold, all-knowing calculator that appears to know no irrationality, no bias, no emotion, no humanity. And then, of replacing Man entirely with his machine, completing our own abolition in the name of a sterile new silicon genesis.

How do we escape this inhuman, totalitarian future? It’s true that many around the world are already in political revolt against managerialism, pitting a reassertion of democratic power against the oligarchic, with us Americans leading the way.

I hesitate to quibble with the Great Man’s elegant wordsmithery. But on first glance you might assume Lyons is suggesting the PMC has been mobilising to finally rid itself of those tiresome, mouth-breathing, reactionary proles.

In fact, it’s the plutocratic overclass that’s salivating at the prospect of leveraging AI to disintermediate both the working class and the PMC, which has been getting ideas above its station over the last decade.

Y’all don’t know what it’s like being male, middle class and white
Universities evolved from monasteries and have been in existence for centuries. But until a few decades ago, a vanishingly small proportion of the population had more than a few years of education, if that. For instance, less than one in twenty Americans had a degree in 1940. The handful of individuals who were lettered hailed near exclusively from the upper rungs of the socio-economic ladder.

Post-WWII, university education became vastly more accessible. By the early 1970s, academics, journalists, politicians and the general public were noticing the arrival of a distinct new class. Indeed, it was initially even referred to as the ‘New Class’ before being labelled the Professional-Managerial Class by the late, great Barbara Ehrenreich.

James Burnham had pioneered the idea that a class of technocrats were gaining ever-greater societal clout in his 1941 classic The Managerial Revolution. But there were comparatively few university-educated technocrats in the first half of the 20^th century. Nowhere near enough for a fully-fledged social class.

The Boomers were the first generation to benefit from mass university education. Not coincidentally, they chose to comprehensively remodel their societies, insouciantly bulldozing plenty of Chesterton’s fences in the process.

The lettered Boomers – and, subsequently, their Gen X/Y/Z offspring – dispensed with the Old Left focus on improving the material circumstances of the common man, preferring to obsess over more glamorous and less personally unsettling issues relating to gender, sexuality and race.

To quote Lyons one final time:

Of course, it just so happens that the core beliefs they hold and champion all benefit their material interests. For while the ideology of liberal managerialism may present itself in the lofty language of moral values, philosophical principles, and social goods, it also conveniently serves to rationalize and justify the continual expansion of managerial power into all areas of state, economy, and culture. It also just happens to elevate the professional managerial class to a position of comfortable moral superiority over the rest of society — and in particular over the working classes.

A dirty deal
The PMC’s abandonment of economic Marxism for the cultural variety in the late 1960s was a Faustian pact. The deal was that PMCers no longer had to feel the slightest guilt about their class privilege. It was newly possible, indeed common, to champion progressive causes while shamelessly enjoying an above-average income. Or at least, as with academics, artists and journalists, an above-average capacity to shamelessly impose your worldview on others.

The fixation with identity politics frolics – rather than the traditional and more difficult Leftist goal of redistributing wealth and power downwards – allowed the PMC to frictionlessly partner with the billionaire class in pursuit of its class interests. The imposition of mass migration on societies that never voted for it is the most notorious example of many such plutocrat-PMC stitch-ups.

Granted, hyper-focusing on an endless succession of identity politics cause célèbres allowed PMCers to turn a blind eye to their own often considerable economic privilege. But it resulted in, well, a hyper-focus on an endless succession of identity politics cause célèbres. Ever more esoteric campaigns – NASA hoisting the intersex sigil, anyone? – that 70-80 per cent of voters were either indifferent or actively hostile to.

Not that the PMC ever paid much attention to the misplaced concerns of the benighted masses. After all, once it had completed its long march, it was well-positioned to pursue its noble historical mission. That is, ‘encouraging’ the close-minded commoners to become less sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic/xenophobic/ climate-change denialist.

And what higher goal could there be in life for a civic-minded PMCer than helping uneducated, low information, non-elite human capital comprehend they should be worrying far less about stagnant incomes, unaffordable housing and growing wealth inequality and far more about adopting the appropriate neo-pronouns, eschewing mansplaining and posting black squares on social media?

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
Many PMCers continue to insist the PMC-and-plutocrat-friendly world they created then oversaw benefited all classes.

Noah Smith (Stanford, University of Michigan, Stony Brook University) recently insisted that the idea that the middle class has been hollowed out is a myth, that “Americans, as a people, are startlingly rich”, and that rather than ending up overeducated and underemployed, “Americans are instead flooding into higher-skilled professional service jobs”.

Smith’s thinkpiece may have been inspired by a similar effort from Nathan Cofnas (Columbia, Cambridge, Oxford). Cofnas recently sighed,

The benefits of free trade are counterintuitive, and require a certain degree of intelligence to understand. On average, people who believe in capitalism have higher IQs...

MAGA communism is based on lies and delusions… A reality-based movement needs to accept the following facts:

· until Trump came back the American economy was better than ever

· income inequality has not increased since the 1970s

· taxes are paid mostly by the rich

· people deny the aforementioned facts out of ignorance and/or for political gain

Got that, you low-IQ reality-denying, ignorant, freeloading Commie?

Smith and Cofnas – not to mention Yglesias (Dalton School, Harvard), who also periodically laments his compatriots’ retrograde attraction to ‘nostalgia economics’ – argue everything is tickety-boo. Apparently, the poors have never had it so good. Either in terms of the easy prosperity – abundance, you might even call it – they now enjoy or the enlightened social policies they’ve so undoubtedly benefited from.

I imagine it can only be Joe Sixpack’s false consciousness that prevents him from perceiving just how fortunate he truly is. But I’ll let my fellow Substacker, Librarian of Celaeno, provide an alternate view:

Cofnas claims the smarts are doing a bang-up job running things, that the Biden economy was doing great, etc., before Trump came in and tanked everything. He offers as evidence for this that per capita GDP is up and that workers generally have it better than ever if you do the math right. Understanding the benefits of free trade seems to require a lot of such math, since to stupid people it really doesn’t seem that great when you look around and recall the course of your life for the past thirty years, but since you have to be smart to understand it, perhaps you missed something.

[Cofnas] mentions that “on average, people who believe in capitalism have higher IQs.” Maybe. But in the Soviet Union, all the smart people believed in Marxism, and for the same reason…

Smart people like Cofnas benefit from the existing order, and thus they defend it, their arguments a public declaration of alignment with the regime of managerial rule. The Soviet form of that system failed, and Cofnas, with all the insight and instincts of his peers, seems to miss that the liberal version is itself dying out.

Historian Sir Niall Ferguson (Cambridge, Oxford, NYU, Harvard, LSE, Stanford) fleshed out the analogy in an article entitled ‘We’re All Soviet Now’. Here’s some of the money quotes:

Meanwhile, as in the late Soviet Union, the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in…

In the Soviet Union, the great lies were that the Party and the state existed to serve the interests of the workers and peasants…

The truth was that the nomenklatura (i.e., the elite members) of the Party had rapidly formed a new class with its own often hereditary privileges, consigning the workers and peasants to poverty and servitude… The equivalent falsehoods in late Soviet America are that the institutions controlled by the (Democratic) Party—the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the major foundations, and most of the big corporations—are devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities.

As an aside, if we were to stretch the analogy to breaking point, I'd suggest it’s mid-2000 in Post-Soviet America. Mikhail Gorbachev (i.e. Trump 1.0) has been dispatched, the addled, ineffectual, interregnal Yeltsin (i.e Biden) has been forced out, and there’s very much a new sheriff in town (i.e Putin/Trump 2.0).

Free falling
Ferguson’s article was published a few months before the Tangerine Fuhrer’s re-election. Since Trump returned to the White House at the start of this year, most of the focus has been on his anti-woke – effectively an anti-PMC – counter-revolution.

I don’t deny that recent political developments are significant. Nonetheless, I’d argue the PMC’s death warrant was signed on November 30, 2022, rather than November 5, 2024. The former date was when the first iteration of ChatGPT dropped.

Membership of the PMC, with all the advantages that entails, is premised on being intelligent enough to get through an undergraduate degree.

In ways we are only now beginning to comprehend, the emergence of impressive, freely available artificial intelligence has taken the value of the human variety to zero. That may or may not turn out to be good news for those of modest cognitive ability. It would seem to be disastrous for those who’ve hitherto benefited from the competitive advantage “the smarts” possess.

The PMC’s situation might be less bleak if it hadn’t spent the last half century antagonising the working class and the last decade irritating captains of industry. (It’s all very well for a business to introduce employee affinity groups, broadcast its LBGTI-friendly-employer credentials and even fast-track some members of the sacralised minority de jour into senior roles. But the shareholders and their C-suite representatives took a much dimmer view of, say, staff demanding the new, cash-cow hire be sacked for wrongthink. Or insisting on wearing keffiyehs in customer-facing roles. Or spending hours on the company Slack channel sharing their hot takes on the hot-button issues of the day.)

So here we are. The eternally cocksure, extensively educated and putatively high IQ members of the PMC have managed to launch a two-front war on both the working and ruling class. Friendless, they now face the type of abrupt technological displacement that’s blighted the lives of so many blue-collar workers over the last 45 years.

I’m really beginning to wonder if we PMCers are as clever as we think we are.

Note on headline: History rarely has neat beginning and end points. I’ve chosen the 1976 – 2026 lifespan because ’76 is when proto-neoliberal PMCer Jimmy Carter got elected. (Ehrenreich and her husband also published ‘The Professional-managerial class’ in Radical America around this time.) I’m administering the Last Rites in 2026 because that’s when I expect the mass layoffs of knowledge workers to kick off in earnest.