CONCEPT
The Professional-Managerial Class
The Ehrenreichs' 1977 concept for salaried mental workers who neither own the means of production nor operate its machinery — the class whose expertise-based position AI has made structurally vulnerable for the first time.
Introduced by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in a 1977 essay in Radical America, the professional-managerial class (PMC) designates the salaried mental workers whose function is the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations. Engineers, teachers, social workers, writers, accountants, middle managers, administrators, scientists — all occupy a structural position between capital and labor, drawing their authority from expertise rather than from ownership or from organized collective power. The category has remained analytically productive for fifty years because it names a real structural position that neither Marxist labor theory nor standard liberal sociology captures adequately. AI has turned the PMC from an abstract analytical category into the population whose labor is being repriced in real time.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The PMC's security has always depended not on wealth, which can be stored, or on collective bargaining power, which can be organized, but on the continued scarcity of the specific expertise that justifies its position.