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Hello and welcome to Behind the News my name is Doug Henwood. The usual two guests today will hear first from the historian Gabriel Wynnant and the professional managerial class and at the bottom of the hour the journalist Alan Beady will explore the International Order in the era of Donald Trump.

First the Professional Managerial Class, aka the PMC.

This stratum was first named in a pair of classic essays from 1977 by Barbara and John Errenrich.

In March just thinking, the PMC occupied the middle between the working class and the bourgeoisie, managing the subordinated on behalf of the

owners. But as the Arrenreich showed, much of the radical left was also drawn

from its ranks something that's still true. Lately the term has taken on new life and descriptions of the social base for centrist

Democrats like Biden and Mayor Pete, sometimes even including Elizabeth Warren.

Gabriel Winant, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, has an essay on the PMC, which he sees as in a process of decomposition on the N-plus-1 magazine website.

Apologies that the audio on my side in these two interviews is suboptimal.

I did my best to fix it with technical magic, but there's only so much Adobe audition can do.

I'll get to the root of the problem so there's no relapse next week.

Here's Gabriel Wienin.

The term professional managerial class, the PMC, is all over the place.

What about the history of this idea?

Where did it come from?

Well, the idea of the PMC has very old kind of precursors going back into the early 20th century and

debates in Europe in particular in Germany and then in the kind of Trotskyist world trying to make sense

of what had happened to the Russian Revolution and how it became bureaucratized.

But in this country, it's formulated in the form in which we know it today in the 1970s.

And the actual phrase comes from Barbara and John Aaron Reich in a pair of essays that they wrote in the late 1970s in the journal Radical America.

And they wrote those essays to try to diagnose what had gone wrong with the new left and they try to

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