Degrowth and the Professional Managerial Class

By Emma River-Roberts
March 8, 2024
Source: Class and Degrowth


It may have taken the degrowth movement the best part of fifty years and a vocal alignment with ecosocialism to actually start talking about class politics, but we’re here now at least. This novel interest has brought with it a barrage of questions pertaining to how working class consciousness and power can be rebuilt from the ground-up – elements that are necessary preconditions to our mass mobilisation and emancipation. However, helping to achieve this will forever remain out of the movement’s capabilities unless they begin to critically reflect upon the social dynamics of the movement itself. That is, that it’s mostly comprised of individuals belonging to the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), and the specific challenges that this creates in regards to the working class and movement building.

In Bridging the Class Divide, Linda Stout observes that organisations and movements often fall apart because they fail to organise across class lines. She stresses that organising across class lines doesn’t just entail bringing in a greater diversity of people, but actively working to create the conditions that enable these diverse groups to work together. In other words, consideration must be explicitly given to not only the classed-differences that arise in matters such as disparate preferences for communication styles, but also to the existing state of relations between different groups. In cases where these existing state of relations are contentious to any degree, steps must be taken to ascertain what the root cause of these issues are and how this can be remediated. Otherwise, collaboration across groups will most likely be transient and subsequently ineffective at best, non-existent at worst.

The existing state of relations between the working class and PMC are, broadly speaking, ambivalent at best. As highlighted by Catherine Liu in Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, the working-classes continue to be treated with nothing but contempt:

“The professional managerial class (PMC) has been fighting a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but against the working classes… They still believe themselves to be the heroes of history, fighting to defend innocent victims against their evil victimisers, but the working class is not a group they find worth saving, because by PMC standards, they do not behave properly: they are either disengaged politically or too angry to be civil. Liberal members of the credentialed classes love to use the word empower when they talk about “people”, but the use of that word objectifies the recipients of their help while implying that they people have no access to power without them.”

Of course, this doesn’t apply to the entire demographic. However enough of them have – and continue to behave in this way, that it’s become a quintessential form of working class struggle: We continue to be stereotyped in the media, documentaries, social media, by academics, environmental activists, those in professions they deem to be ‘superior’ to ours. Our dialects and languages continue to be penalised and stigmatised, our sense of humour is flagged as inappropriate, our appearance is seen as something to be laughed at, even our homes are labelled as grossly inferior and inhabited by society’s worse. We’re excluded from actively participating in civil society organisations, and we know that unless we make ourselves ‘palatable’ in PMC spaces – that is, downplaying our working-classness and trying to present ourselves as middle class, we’ll probably be treated like second-rate citizens.[1] In the eyes of others, our differences mean that we’re unworthy of respect in all its forms, legitimising our systematic and social exclusion from participation in mainstream society, and ruthlessly tearing every single component of our cultures, values and practices to shreds in the process.

These examples aren’t anecdotal: I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’ve never met another working class person – from both the global North and South, who doesn’t have handfuls of personal experiences such as these. The PMC have self-internalised and reproduced the oppressive nature of successive states, alienating us for the conditions of our existence that we never chose but were born into – it’s irrefutable that they played a monumental part in the ruthless decimation of working class consciousness and power, pulling it right down to the ground where it continues to lay in tatters to this day.[2] If the reader is dubious about what I’m saying here, instead of perpetually theorising the nature of our existence from a physical and philosophical distance, go and find a working class person, ask if any of the aforementioned applies to them and how they have been personally affected by it.

Being cognizant of this side of our struggle is therefore vital. Not just to understand our history and who we are as people, but also because this longstanding marginalisation has impacted how many of the working class view and interact with the PMC themselves – including those of the PMC who belong to environmental movements. There are countless working class people with the means to mobilise who actively shy away from PMC-led spaces for many reasons, making their retreat a form of self-preservation against the very people who purport to be standing in alliance with them. For obvious reasons, this has ramifications when it comes to movement building strategies in all their forms.

Frustratingly, the movement remains largely reluctant to address this issue – and more often than not, it’s not mentioned at all. But rather avoiding it entirely, or downplaying the problem by stipulating that Marx and Engels were white middle class individuals from the global North, and suggesting that perhaps all the degrowth movement needs is time to connect with others, we need to be confronting this head-on. All of the empirical evidence, lived-experiences and personal testimonies points to this being an issue in need of remediation, to varying degrees across the global North and South, so we need to stop pretending like it isn’t something worthy of critical conversation. I can assure the reader that this won’t go away on its own no matter how cataclysmic our conditions may become in the future. The left is losing the climate class war, and sitting around waiting for time to heal all wounds or ignoring this issue entirely will only incur us further losses.

Emphasising the problems between the working class and PMC doesn’t create an ‘us and them’ mentality, so long as the reader is able to adopt a truly objective stance and be willing to engage in a continuous process of critical self-reflection – even if it may apply to them, and even if it’s an uncomfortable truth. We can’t afford to be anything but bluntly pragmatic. Or, to quote Marx:

“Everyone will have to admit to himself that he has no idea what the future ought to be… It is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the world through criticism of the old one…. If constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.”

If people are truly serious about the emancipation of the working class then they must take the time to learn about our sources of de-emancipation – we can’t ‘build the struggle’ unless we fully comprehend and acknowledge the multifarious forms that it takes in the lives of the working class. We can’t expect to bring anyone on board otherwise, and it’s vacuously naïve to believe that a global struggle against the bourgeoise is enough by itself to unite people across class factions – it isn’t. If it was, it would’ve worked by now.

If the reader still needs convincing allow me to put this another way – it’s taken half a century to bring class politics to the top of degrowth’s agenda. After half a century, people are still grappling with the question of attracting working class people to the movement. Now of course it’s grown in size and popularity since then – exponentially so, but it remains predominantly comprised of white PMC individuals from the global North. Degrowth has effectively sat on the shelf for long enough that it’s become the stale ham sandwich of movements, devoid of a demographic representation that reflects the heterogeneity of society, deprived of the voices and perspectives that a heterogenous demographic brings with it, and subsequently incapable of becoming a serious contender for mass politics. Maybe – just maybe, it’s time to start thinking about how the social dynamics of the movement have inadvertently contributed to this, and how this can be redressed. These issues can be remediated, but only if the movement is willing to be pragmatic and open to critical self-reflection on their limitations in this light.

Adopting ecosocialist principles and practices is a monumental step in the right direction. However socialist theory isn’t a panacea for the working class, and even with this shift in approach this still doesn’t alter a given individual’s demographic. It doesn’t matter what people’s intentions are – it doesn’t matter that some PMC activists would never dream to treat others in this way, what matters is how they are perceived by the very people that they are trying to reach.

PMC-dominated spaces/movements are unattractive to much of the working class for many reasons to the extent that they avoid them entirely (I will unpack this further in Part II, including the challenges of PMC spaces/movements that are inherently academic in nature). Most of these issues have their roots in the historic systematic and social marginalisation abetted by the PMC – they are issues so entrenched that it has culminated in the working class struggle becoming a socially dyadic one: It exists as a struggle against the bourgeoise and the PMC. Understanding this forms part of the crucial foundational knowledge that anyone must have in their repertoire if they are to successfully engage with the working class.

TBC

[1] At the grand old age of 32 I’ve decided that I’m fed up with trying to make myself a ‘palatable’ working class person and I won’t be doing this anymore. The only occasions where I will ever tone down my dialect is in front of audiences/people whose first language isn’t English, because I’ve found that they find it difficult to understand what I’m trying to say at times – and I’ll never have a problem with toning it down for that.

[2] For further reading see: David Graeber’s ‘Anthropology and the Rise of the Professional-Managerial Class’