Who Are the Professional Managerial Class and What Do They Do?

A panel featuring Catherine Liu, Gabe Winant, and Peter Ramand engaging the "Professional Managerial Class" (PMC), the salience of the concept today, and its political implications.

Catherine Liu analyzes the neoliberal university, assessing how it has been reorganized as a site of accumulation and structured to serve to capitalist interests. She also examines the role of the PMC within this process.

Gabe Winant reviews Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s concept of the PMC, situating their work in context by analyzing changes within capitalism and the strategic dilemmas faced by the left at the time they were writing. He reflects on these insights and their implications for organizing today.

Pete Ramand brings the work of Erik Olin Wright into conversation with the Ehrenreich’s concept of the PMC. He analyzes divisions within the PMC and the boundary between the PMC and working class, arguing that Wright’s work provides a stronger definitional basis with which to anchor this research agenda. He concludes by illustrating this with analysis from the U.K.

This event was co-sponsored by Conter magazine.

Catherine Liu is the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2021 and The American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. She works on Critical Theory of the old fashioned kind and is engaged in a long term critique of Professional Managerial Class driven liberal politics. She has written an unpublished memoir called Panda Gifts.

Gabriel Winant is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, which investigates the rise of the “service economy” in the aftermath of manufacturing. His second project, tentatively titled Our Weary Years: How the Working Class Survived Industrial America, explores similar problems in an earlier period. His writing also appears frequently in publications such as Dissent, n+1, and The Nation.

Peter Ramand is the coauthor of Yes: The Radical Case for Scottish Independence and the editor of Old Nations, Auld Enemies, New Times: The Selected Works of Tom Nairn. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin Madison. His research primarily engages questions of populism and nationalism using quantitative class analysis in the Neo-Marxist tradition. Pete is a member of the Conter editorial board.