The

The Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood, a challenge to orthodoxy today,

two guests, Lili Geism and Brent Siebel, in a long single segment,

talking about professional class liberalism, followed by a brief reprise of a 2019 interview with Gabriel Winant for some further historical context.

Maybe it's just the world I live in, but for years now, it's been hard to avoid criticism of the professional managerial class,

a.k. The term was coined by Barbara and John Erinreich in a pair of essays from 1977.

Their original definition? We define that professional managerial class is consisting 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. Close quote. That's a broad category

and includes lawyers, doctors, architects, middle managers, social workers, nurses, and teachers,

and many more. While the Aaron Reich social workers, nurses, and teachers, and many more.

While the Aaron Reich's original analysis was rich and complex,

the concept has been banalized into an epithet by the likes of Catherine Liu and Amber Frost,

one that signals their contempt for their own stratum in a misplaced allegiance to a partly

fantastic working class.

To the Frost-Lew tenancy, the PMC is the base for what

they dismiss as identity politics. Things are more complicated than that, as is what they call

identity politics, but that's a separate issue. In recent decades, the PMC has been splitting

into a true elite, partners in law and accounting firms, for example, who can really rake it in,

and a much less elite, often poorly paid and insecurely employed group like university adjuncts.

Even public school teachers operating under regime of constant budgetary tightness

...