We live now in a world cast in the image of the professional managerial class, or PMC (translation - Technocratic Bureaucrats).Our politics—from the response to Trump and Brexit to the Covid crisis and now anti-Russian hysteria—reflects their whims, prejudices, and psychopathologies. Every few months, they launch a new crusade that serves their interests (the ever transitioning mini-narratives that replace our meta-narratives). Black Lives Matter became an occasion to present populist political movements as inveterately racist. Covid permitted them to arrange more favorable working conditions, while presenting truckers and others as dangerous extremists. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine became the occasion for presenting their enemies as the agents, or unwitting dupes, of the Kremlin.

The PMC doesn’t have the numbers of the working class nor the economic power of the capitalist class. So what explains its influence over contemporary society? Many Marxists today seem to eschew class explanations, which are derided as “class reductionist” or as misogynistic or racist to the extent they marginalize gendered or racial forms of oppression. Yet the “vulgar” Marxist account, in fact, gives a compelling account of the basic structure of class conflict today—and of the PMC’s position in society. Indeed, one might even argue that these days, the more “vulgar” the Marxism, the more accurate a picture of society it will tend to offer.

On what we might then call a particularly vulgar Marxist account, it is class struggle that provides not just the motor to history, but also gives the capitalist class its dynamism and historically progressive role. It isn’t the innate genius and inventiveness of the bourgeoisie that drives society forward, but the threat of rule by the proletariat. The defeat of organized labor across the globe beginning in the 1970s was also a defeat for the capitalist class. For without class struggle, the capitalist class sooner or later runs adrift.

“Whereas once we lived under bourgeois rule, we now live under PMC management.”

In essence, our current society is what it looks like when a capitalist class “rules” without the motor force of class struggle originating from an organized working class. To be clear, the defeat of the working class isn’t an abolition of class society; rather, it provides, in the broadest terms possible, an opportunity for the middle classes to attempt to stamp their own character on society.

Enter the PMC. Across the West, the PMC enjoys a high degree of integration, both sociologically and culturally. Their use of social-media platforms, particularly Twitter, and cultural conformity help promote a coherent identity; the nongovernmental organizations they almost exclusively staff help to train them in the modes of activism, protocols, and language necessary for their collective political action. They see themselves as the political conscience of the whole of society. They represent the general interests of reason and, as it would develop during the pandemic, “The Science.”...

Very information read worth finishing the article...