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PMC control as opposed to what? The last I checked Musk was both professional and managerial. It's not a term I've ever heard used by anyone other than an online conservative who isn't exactly blue collar.
As opposed to founder control. It's right there in the original post.
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That probably says more about you than it does about anyone else, because the term comes from some leftist trying to reconcile the classical Marxist view of society with the fact that the majority of the oppression of the working class nowadays is coming from people who aren't the owners of the means of production.
I agree that Rov is dismissing a valid issue for bad reasons and it is fair to talk of PMC, but as far as I am aware the concept of the Managerial class has its origin in James Burnham's Managerial Revolution. Who is an individual who moved from being a Trotskyist to being a right winger. I believe he wasn't a Trotskyist by the time he wrote the Managerial Revolution but he wrote it at a point where it was just a few years after he broke from Trotskyism, and that intellectual legacy still shaped to an extend the way he analyzed things.
As Bartender_Venator points out we are both right. It's a laundered term specifically coined to avoid it's association with the right.
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Sometimes an insult is just too effective to pass up. People with more money than me, but less agency than the ultra rich? Tempting targets.
It’s definitely been picked up by the right opposition. I suspect that “bourgeoisie” has already been watered down enough to make it less useful for socialists. That leaves conservatives putting a label to their outgroup.
That's the opposite of what the term is about. HR has lots of agency, but they don't get paid terribly much where I'm from.
But so what? I get that we have cooties, but I can't imagine dropping an idea I formulated because people I don't like picked it up. Though as Bartender_Venator explains this is more of a case of "always has been", but that still makes it a weird example of "Eww, a rightoid said it? Gotta drop it!", which I find incredibly childish.
It may not be central to the term, but it’s the main reason that term caught on.
Marxists wanted to expand their class struggle from “labor vs. capital” to “labor vs. capital and capital accessories.” Reactionaries wanted to assert a class struggle between their audience and some sort of cultural bourgeoisie. They converged on similar groups of targets because ambiguously well-off, ambiguously powerful professionals are a really hateable outgroup. More potential believers have encountered a blank face bureaucrat or a petty tyrant of a manager than have interacted with a classic bourgeois.
I would guess that the Marxists got their wish. Today, the layman assumes socialists have it out for anyone above the median income. The perceived class divide has moved past PMCs.
That tide has yet to come in for reactionaries. They’re more likely to keep using the term because they’re still convincing the public.
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Specifically, it's a term originating in the 70s, used to obscure the fact that the idea was coined by James Burnham, a former Marxist-turned-anti-Communist, in the 40s - thereby making the idea safe for Leftist intellectuals to discuss. Burnham simply called them the Managerial Class.
The more you know, thanks!
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