Oh, right listeners, welcome to episode 61 of Know Your Enemy.

I'm Matt Sipman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here with my friend, Sam Edler-Bell.

Hello, Matt.

Sam, this episode we're about to share with listeners is one we didn't expect to record,

but it came together quickly because of the sad news that Barbara Aaron Reich died on

September 1st at the age of 81.

Barbara, of course, was the well-known left-wing writer, journalist, activist, who's probably

most famous for her book, Nickel and Dime, but also in recent years, her papers with her

former husband, John Aaron Reich, on the professional managerial class PMC, became a major

flashpoint in the discourse, so I'm sure a lot of our listeners will know something about

Barbara Aaron Reich, but hopefully this episode takes it a little deeper.

Yeah, I've always been a huge fan of her work.

I've read a bunch of her books.

I reread some of them quickly when we decide we were going to do this episode and definitely

the PMC Wars of the past couple of years, especially during the Bernie primary in 2019-2020,

was really a big flashpoint on the left.

That term is sort of used as a kind of term of abuse on the left, usually one PMC calls

another PMC, a PMC, as if that precludes them from speaking about socialism or something,

but also on the right, Aaron Reich's work has been sort of taken up in a usually quite dishonest

and tendentious way, similarly, to try to demonize some kind of woke middle-class elite.

I think that in the course of this conversation, you'll hear that we dispel a lot of the

misapprehensions about what she meant by that term, and also how her theory about that

...