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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   32223 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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I think you are using "PMC" in a non-standard way if you think that partners in law firms are not part of it.

I think he's using it in the way it was originally intended. Partners aren't PMC because they're partial owners of the company, so they belong squarely in the capitalist class. PMC was supposed to reserved for people with control over capital without direct ownership of it.

If most successful professionals are excluded from the professional-managerial class because they are partners in their firms, then surely it would just be the managerial class?

The original Barbara Ehrenreich essay defining the term is less helpful that I would expect. It defines "self-employed professionals" as part of the legacy petit bourgeoisie (which she calls the "old middle class" and consistently with mainstream Marxist theory but incorrectly predicts is on the way to extinction) when she is trying to define the PMC at the beginning, but later on in the article she gives accountancy as an example of a core PMC job even though accountants are frequently self-employed professionals. Ehrenreich also says that class should be defined based on the economic substance and cultural context of class relationships, not on legal forms. The emphasis of the article is on the role of the PMC in disciplining the working class to accept capitalism, not how they get paid.

Having read the essay, it is obvious that Ehrenreich didn't think about lawyers while writing it, but based on what she did say I think she would call it as follows:

  • I think she would assign all lawyers who work for large businesses (or government departments that interact with them) into the PMC, with the distinction between in-house lawyers, associates in law firms, and partners in law firms as formal rather than real - they are all boot-boys for the real capitalists who are paid for their skilled labour, not for access to their own capital. The exception is that a subset of Biglaw partners are sufficiently close to power that they are part of the ruling class. (Ehrenreich talks about this in the context of the management hierarchy of large companies, where she says there is obviously a fuzzy boundary between middle managers who are PMC and executives who are functionally part of the capitalist ruling class even if as non-owners they are not technically bourgeois on a strict Marxist basis).
  • She would definitely put all white-collar professionals in the criminal justice system including lawyers into the PMC on functional grounds, again regardless of how they get paid.
  • The partners in the small law firm that does small business and private client work are petit bourgeois. The status of the associates is not clear - they are not performing PMC functions, so they probably count as skilled workers. This type of firm doesn't have very many associates anyway because a competent lawyer with 5-10 years' experience who still isn't made a partner is better off starting their own firm than continuing to work as an associate.

Ehrenreich explicitly says that trying to assign non-petit bourgeois status to individuals based on asset ownership was foolish as of 1977 when she wrote the essay because the function of the bourgeoisie was mostly being performed by large companies with non-owner senior management. So I don't think she would find the argument that partners in law firms are capitalists exploiting the associates decisive.

If most successful professionals are excluded from the professional-managerial class because they are partners in their firms, then surely it would just be the managerial class?

No, the PMC specifically includes professionals who were traditionally owners of their own firms (petite bourgoise in Marxist terms, I believe) but are today employed in a corporate environment.

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