Welcome to confronting capitalism.

I'm Melissa Nashek, and I'm here, as always, with Vivek Chipper, a professor of sociology at NYU and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy. How's it going, V?

It's going great, Melissa. Good to be back with you. Yeah, I'm really excited to be back and to talk about our topic today, which is the PMC, drum roll please, also known as the

professional managerial class. This was a concept that was really a big source of debate when I

joined the left. So it was pretty cool revisiting some old pieces and looking back at essays that I was reading at that time when I was participating

in these debates.

And I started, of course, with the essay that kind of kicked all this off, which was Barbara

and John Aaron Reich's 1977 essay, the Professional Managerial Class.

Looking back, especially on that essay, I think this

concept of the PMC is really important for a couple of reasons. On the one hand, I think it helps

this make sense of just what is going on in American politics and why there is so much contradiction

and so much activity that just seems irrational.

But on the other hand, I think it also serves as a really interesting example of how

concepts that have become very ideologically loaded and used differently by various intellectuals

can have a big impact on their political analysis.

Yeah, you know, it's a concept that's everywhere now in the rhetoric of the left, and it's really mostly the left that uses it. And it

has some purchase on actual strata within capitalism, but it also, I think, in some ways,

obscures important differences within

those strata. And those differences are important for politics. So I think both because

it's used so widely today and because it has its limits as well as its uses, it's good to try

to get some clarity on what the concept

means and how it might be politically relevant. Yeah, I agree. Maybe we should start with the

...