The Managerial Class
Published on 16 October 2024
In classical Marxism one’s class is determined by one’s role in the production process. From Weber to Bourdieu sociologists instead put an ever-greater emphasis put on social class. The two concepts are explicitly merged, somewhat incoherently, by modern social scientists under the notion of ‘socio-economic status’.
The primacy of social class was one reason the Ehrenreichs lumped together both professionals and managers in the ‘professional-managerial class’, which they did in reaction to the rise of the New Left and the upper-middle class replacing the working-class as the dominant constituency of left-wing politics. And insofar as social class goes this clustering was apposite; managers and professionals both go to the same schools, attend the same parties, and live in the same neighbourhoods.
My thesis though is that Marx was right. If you want to understand historical development you should focus on the economic interests which tend to congeal into class interests. For example, there was a brief moment where the downwardly mobile landed gentry had the same social standing as the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie and they mingled in the same circles, but one would have made very poor historical predictions if one had conflated the two classes which had clearly distinct interests.
Early 20th century left-wing politics took a lot of energy from the fact that workers hated their bosses. Indeed, they hated their bosses a lot more than the shareholder of whom they had only a vague notion. But as education came to be used as a proxy for social class, and as industries segregated by education, this natural antagonism no longer engendered class conflict. People hate their bosses more than ever, but now their bosses are very often from the same social class as they are, so that this antipathy can not find political expression. By defining ‘class’ in such an obtuse way, the left made class-consciousness impossible.
A modernised Marxian class-analysis would reorient itself back towards how production processes are organised. It would revive classic distinction between line workers and staff workers. Line workers are those who do the actual work indispensable to the business, e.g. the workers who produce the product or the sales people who sell it. They are contraposed to staff workers, i.e. the parasitical class of managers and administrative workers with no ready-identifiable skills who act in a supervisory or administrative role. This class derives its income from rent-seeking, profiting from the fact that shareholders have extremely little control over how their corporations are run, which allows those who’ve been delegated said powers to enrich themselves.
Observe that many line-workers, especially of the professional variety, have the career strategy of acquiring difficult-to-attain skills to increase their own bargaining power and ensure that they can always find a job elsewhere if laid-off. Whereas staff workers, i.e. managers and administrators instead focus their energies on embedding themselves within organisations through networking and politicking. While statistical bureaus will call these administrators professionals (if they have degrees and don’t have direct reports), this is largely the consequence of credential inflation. Henceforth I will equate high-skill professionals with line-worker in the industries that only hire educated workers, and incorporate administrative workers and the pseudo-professionals in the back-office into the ‘managerial class’. So in this schema: academics and software engineers say are a type of line-worker, no different from say an electrician or assembly line worker, whereas HR and management are staff workers and members of the ‘managerial class’.
There is a perpetual simmering conflict between these two classes. Virtually all managerial strategies are principally devised to shift power from workers to managers. Managerialism, as an ideology, can best be understood as a weapon used by the managerial class to accumulate power and control within organisations. For instance, Agile is an attempt to disempower engineers, reducing their autonomy and increasing the power of management. By making the work of the engineer legible to the manager (who is technically illiterate), it allows for micro-management and other domineering strategies. That Agile almost certainly reduces productivity is besides the point, companies are run by and for managers, not shareholders.
So too with open plan offices, which naturally increase distractions and make workers less productive. But the point is to make it easier for managers to see what they’re doing. The managers themselves retain offices for obvious reasons (thus refuting the specious pretence of ‘improving communication’ – if so it’d be especially important for managers not to be siloed away from their workers.)
To maximise their own power, the managerial class seek to make the line workers as dependent as possible on them in a way that doesn’t require any meaningful work from the managers. One common strategy is to create processes which require sign-offs from management, e.g. they might decide that to install software requires their written approval. This has nothing to do with IT security, but rather reinforces the power hierarchy within the organisation.
Typically, the most independent workers are skilled professionals as they’re capable of working autonomously, their skills make them less replaceable than most working-class line-workers, and the fact they’re typically more intelligent than their managers creates a tension between the formal hierarchy expressed in the org-chart and natural hierarchy which would emerge in its absence. Managers most fears being told that they don’t know what they’re talking about by someone who does.
To counter this threat of subversion, there are two informal rules carefully observed by managers where I work in government. Firstly, that skilled work should as much as possible be outsourced to contractors. Contractors have very little institutional power and can only really do what they’re told, so this greatly weakens the power of the professionals. Secondly, that professionals should under no circumstances be paid more than a manager. This means that pay is uncompetitive for skilled worker, unless you become a contractor, at which point you’re no longer able to meaningfully compete in the power-struggle with the managers.
Managerialism is forever incorporating new methods into its arsenal. These might be technological, for instance using digital technologies to enable constant surveillance of workers. Or they might be ideological, a recent addition to which is DEI. By asserting that say software engineers are all subconsciously racist, it justifies the expansion of the managerial class and their intervention in hiring technical talent and so forth. The resulting parallel structure looks something like the Red Army. The professional officer corps was indispensable if the Soviets wished to wage war, so the managerial class added political commissars to look over their shoulders and keep the professionals in their place.
Sometimes these tools are political policies. Globalising the labour market for highly-skilled professionals has eroded their potential bargaining power. Silicon Valley would be much more powerful if it hadn’t been filled up with politically-apathetic immigrants, we don’t tend to see similar mass-imports of managerial/administrative workers. There is a pretense that STEM is an inferior form of brainwork which can be consigned to low-status foreigners, that in some ways being good at say maths is an indication you’re lacking the sort of qualities needed to wield real power.
The reader should be able to furnish more examples from their own experience, given how prevalent this phenomenon is. From the scientist labouring under paperwork and ethics committee approvals to the artist who has to deal with meddling studio executives, wherever you find high-skilled professionals you’ll find the managerial class trying to make their job more difficult.
So to recapitulate, a neomarxian class analysis might enumerate the following categories:
- lumpenproletariat – criminals and welfare dependants
- small businessmen
- line workers – which includes most skilled professionals
- managerial class – managers and administrators
- capital owners
The important point, recognised by Burnham et al. is that overwhelmingly it’s the managerial class (i.e. staff workers) which wields power in modern society. They can flagrantly set-fire to shareholder value (e.g. making a transgender woman the face of Bud Light) and there’s nothing shareholders can do about it. The point I’m clarifying, especially given the recent resurgence of the term ‘PMC’, is that most genuinely skilled professionals are not of this class.
It might be objected at this point that professionals and managers currently vote as a bloc. While true, this is partly the result of political strategists assuming that the two will always vote together so no effort has ever been attempted to wedge them. Secondly, in a two-party system the natural tendency is towards roughly equal voting coalitions. The PMC, constituting nearly half the electorate, were the right size for such an alliance. The staggering growth of the administrative/managerial class means that this coalition will grow too large to be sustainable. Thirdly, social class has been diminishing in importance for centuries, and the cachet associated with higher education especially so. The traditional dividing line between a professional and a skilled tradesman is weaker than ever (largely a historical artifact associated with which occupations had an apprenticeship system). All these trends point towards a likely fracturing of the PMC as a voting bloc in the 21st century.