Episode #066 // The Professional Managerial Class // with Catherine Liu

 In Episode 66 we discuss how a relatively small class of professionals, who do not own the means of production, side with those who do and work against social change to elevate workers’ conditions.

The Professional Managerial Class as a “middle layer” has tokenized self-optimization and hustle mentality and created a system of supposed moral superiority which works in favor of conserving their position of relative wealth and power. Spoiler alert: If you’re reading this, you’re probably part of the “PMC” ;)

The episode in a nutshell: Mary-Jane ponders the come-back of the term “class”, Catherine depicts PMC rhetoric as a secular way to moralize class difference and Human realizes how the tokenization of good deeds (virtue signaling) can hinder actual progress.

Shownotes:

• Catherine Liu, Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, Book (Erscheint auf Deutsch im Januar 2023)
• Catherine Liu, American Idyll: academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique, Buch
• Sigfried Kracauer, Die Angestellten, Book 
• C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, Book 
• Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State, Book 
• Wolfgang M. Schmitt & Stefan Schulz, Die Neuen Zanziger - Salon, Podcast (Paywall)

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

One thing that really struck me in your book was this moral high ground. Well, working class is actually in itself despicable. They don't do the things that we do, they don't know how to behave. If they would only manage themselves correctly, or they could have everything they want, but they don't, so therefore, whatever.

SPEAKER_03 0:15

The evolution of capitalism, this class becomes more and more striated because capital becomes more and more complex and it needs more managers to manage, you know, production lines and today logistics.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Money, money, I want more money, I want more. I don't even know why.

unknown 0:29

Why, why, why, why, why, why, why?

SPEAKER_02 0:32

Hi, and welcome to corporate therapy. We are switching things up a little bit today. As you can tell, this will be an English episode. However, some things never change, and in this case, it's a good thing because of course Human is here as usual. Hi, Human. Hi, Mary. But we're also joined today from California in the United States by author Catherine Liu. Hi, Catherine, how's it going?

SPEAKER_03 0:59

Hi, hi, good, thanks.

SPEAKER_02 1:01

Currently, with the podcast, we're trying to take a step away from topics that are only within corporates or organizations to also look at larger structures in which they operate. Um, so we've done a few episodes on environment, on economics, um, but also on what or on the way that society shapes and interacts with businesses in business and non-business contexts. Um for example, through moral demands in in different contexts. Um and we found out there's some conflicting ideals and ideas on what moral, what is moral and who can decide what is moral. And on the other hand, we've had many episodes in which we've concluded something along the lines of yeah, this may be true for knowledge work or for white collar jobs. Um, or in German we would probably make the distinction between this is for Arbeitnehmer, but maybe not for arbeiter. Um, and so basically that was the backdrop uh on which I was listening, and I believe Human, you did too, uh, one of my favorite podcasts, uh Die neue Zwanziger Salon by Wolfgang M. Schmidt and uh Stefan Schulz, who were reviewing your book, Virtue Hoarders. Oh, and actually, I don't even think that I I waited for the review, just heard the announcement. I was like, oh, this sounds interesting, I'm gonna read it. Um, you have to send me the link. I didn't know I will. Uh it's in German, but I will. Um and I think Virtual Hoarders is the title, but I think it's hard to translate to German. And it's coming out in German in January. So do you have a title yet?

SPEAKER_03 2:38

Yeah, it's called uh the Tugendpechter. Tugendpechter?

SPEAKER_02 2:44

Yeah. Okay. Tugendpechter. Yeah, I was trying to translate it for myself, so something along the line with Tugendhamsterer or something.

SPEAKER_03 2:51

Um, yeah, Tugendhamster would have been perfect because Hamstern is one of my favorite German words. But I also think it takes away a bit of the womph of what virtual horas means. I know hamsters are cute, actually, and um adorable. And uh, I'll just tell you a short story about how I came to know about hamsters. I was um in the Rheinland in the 90s, um, and I was dating a German who's now my husband, and I saw these signs in stores that said hamsterpreis. And I was like, how can these Germans be buying so many hamsters? Like everything is hamster, like okay, I understand that you can have some hamsters, but every single freaking store from Hail T to, you know, whatever, like Wolfgog, we're all like going hamster price. I'm like, every store is selling hamsters? That's crazy. And then they explained to me that it was about the post-war period when Germans were collecting food and they were calling it Humpstad because there was nothing and everyone had to hoard things. So Humpston would be cute. Like it would be cute. It would make the PMC really cute. Like, oh, we're just deprived. So maybe we need to Hamstad. Not the best translation then. No, but cute, cute, cute. Yeah. For the for my um for my rap, um, my dubstep collaboration with like um uh German house party house music DJ, we can make it. Very good, very good. Yeah, make it more fun.

SPEAKER_02 4:20

But I'll just I'll just try to like do a free translation uh in not a catchy title. But basically, virtual hoarders means the light that for sight. Um, and you describe them as a class, the professional managerial class, and how they as basically as today's ruling class stand in the way of political and social changes that would benefit work the working class. Um now you're a professor for film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, and you research intellectual history, class politics, inequality, uh with theoretical backgrounds in critical theory, psychoanalysis, and I think you also have like some sort of a regional focus on the US and Asia, if I understand correctly.

SPEAKER_03 5:09

Um I do a lot of stuff on Sinophone cinema and um also history. Yeah, uh history is a place and in my critique of postmodernism. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:24

And so we've already had a few words that maybe aren't uh in everybody's everyday vocabulary. Um so maybe to start the podcast off, you can just tell us how why did you study the professional managerial class and what are they? What does that mean?

SPEAKER_03 5:44

So um there's there's two definitions. I'm gonna start with the first one that has to do with a German author, Siegfried Kackaer, who wrote a book called Die Angestellte, and that was a sort of pioneering work of left-wing sociology. And he was studying Germany between the wars, especially these white-collar workers, die Angestellte, who didn't were not paid by the hour, but they included people who worked in offices, but also um sales clerks and department stores. And he did this kind of informal sociology of this new class that was conglomerating around Berlin. They'd often um Berlin was seeing this kind of massive urbanization. And two of the things that struck me about this sociology was one, it's really neglected in terms of left-wing thinking about class, and two, um, see Wright Mills's book, White Collar. And Sea Wright Mills, as an American left-wing sociologist, um, really owed a lot to Kakauer. And one of the things that Kakauer's question was, is um, why are some people so um susceptible to both Nazi propaganda and advertising? And he said, this particular class, not the working class, but die Angestalte, they thought themselves superior to the working class because they didn't hurt their bodies at work. They identified with the capitalists, but they were also living in this kind of delusion of their own importance and superiority because at any moment they were disposable. They also didn't make a lot of money, they lived in quite miserable conditions in interwar Berlin. And um, there was one figure that really, you know, he interviews a number of figures, Berliners, and there's one figure that really struck me was um he interviewed this white-collar um clerical worker, and uh he was um uh helping his boss, you know, um trim the fat, as people like to say um now, but in those days, like basically firing other people. And um Kakawa asks him, so how would you feel if you had to fire yourself? And he said, Well, of course, that I would fire myself because that's for the good of the company. And, you know, um, Kakawa doesn't make a lot of um commentary on this, but he just sort of leaves that there on the table. And there's another um young sales clerk woman from um the countryside who works in, I don't, I want to say she works at Kardeve, you know, big giant department store, and she's around luxury all day long, but she lives in this cold little cold water flat. And um, she she's having an affair with one of her clients who's married, and she doesn't care because she's just about, you know, um having fun. She's into consumerism, into this idea of like going out to the nightclubs dancing. And the ending of this um interview is really striking to me too. Um, Kakawa writes, um, thousands of young women come from the German countryside to Berlin every year like this, and by 24, 25, they've disappeared. We don't know where they go. And I just thought it was really compelling. So that's the um the sort of left-wing sociology thing, this intermediary class, this class that looks down on um blue-collar workers, working class. You know, of course, the working class is very radicalized in Berlin at this point. And then you have this kind of reactionary. Some people like to call them petty bourgeois because they feel like we can't invent a new class outside of Marx, but they're not petty bourgeois because petty bourgeois are shopkeepers, you know, they're the people who own your little bakery. They actually own like small means of production. So you own nothing but their labor power, like the working class. The evolution of capitalism, this class becomes more and more striated because capital becomes more and more complex and it needs, you know, more and more managers, foreman, engineers to manage, you know, production lines and today logistics. It's interesting that what's happening now is that the coders are trying to invent AI to make themselves, the highest level PMC, also obsolete, because it's better for the bosses. Anyway, so um the the kind of intermediate class that I'm talking about might be understood under feudalism as part of the clarity. Because in um Europe, which is what I mostly know, um, even by the 18th century, there are very, very, very few people who are literate, right? So if you think before the 18th century, most people are illiterate. You have a tyrant, you have nobility who are fighting each other, and then you have this clarity, which is interpreting the scripture. So this is why this cryptomoralism of this class makes total sense, because the West is not secularized. And um, they talk about, you know, the East is being dominated by ideology and superstition, but this class is really dominated by ideology and superstition and about itself and keeps reproducing itself and its morality. But so they were most so the pre the feudal primogenitors of this class are cleric, are church church people. And they're literate, they're very smart, they're having debates, they're um they're serving the king, the the absolute monarch. My favorite member of the proto-PMC, which who is a courtier, and I've written a lot about that, and um, I also love like the German word, the Hoffling, like a little member of court. Um, they are um the Cardinal Richelieu. He was not only Cardinal for Louis XIV, he manages finances, managed taxation, and helped finance all of his wars, helped consolidate um Louis XIV's power, and also was strategic about creating these sumptuary um occasions where the nobility had to participate and lose a lot of time on their land and spend a lot of money trying to present themselves at Versailles to the king, like absolutely smart um executor of the absolute monarchy. So, this class, I like to call them also a courtier class of capitalism, because obviously we have a lot of remnants of feudalism in the ansean regime in the industrial era, the democratic era, the post-feudal era. Um, this is the other thing why I think Marxism is so important today and why it's not taught in the American school system and increasingly not taught in the German school system, as I've learned, is that um it actually offers you a really Marxism offers you a really compelling vision of history with an epic view. And it makes you understand your stakes in it. The PMC and the professionalization of history would much rather have history be a series of like unlinked facts that you can only find in an archive. And um, it's all about specialization and narrowing, narrowing of scope. I think the Marxist scope is about creating a wider scope with which to understand why our contemporary situation is embedded in history. In the United States, then, this class is very weak. In the beginning of the 20th century, doctors, lawyers, professionals make up probably 3% of the entire labor force. Today, they make up about 25% of the labor force. One of the things that happens in the US is farming becomes more efficient. So you have large numbers of farmers in 1900. Now today you have very few agricultural workers, um, also a large number of industrial workers. Um, US is fewer industrial workers than say Britain or even Germany at the time, but it industrializes very quickly, then um post-de-industrialization lowers those numbers of workers. But let me say this: the number of people who've been to college who can claim some kind of membership in this class is still a distinct minority in the United States. That's 25% of the population. Um, and six, you know, let between 25 and 33% of the population, let's say. And then most Americans, 66% of Americans, have not been to college. I think the number is higher in Germany. Um, and of course, within the college education, now you have these very elite colleges. Germany's trained to imitate the US in this, which trains the upper-level PMC, the Ivy Leagues, the you know, the finance guys, the tech guys, even the ones who drop out, like Mark Zuckerberg went to Harvard. And then you have like all of these other less prestigious, you know, lower tier schools that people still go to now in order, because they feel the college credentials necessary to get a better job. Um, there are no good jobs now. I someone was telling me that you have to either be a coder or a doctor if you're in your 20s to um actually find any kind of economic security in the United States. So the PMC is actually destroying itself, but it has historically helped capital um cut labor costs, uh, accumulate capital. It's presided over a period of time from 70s to now that has seen um growing inequality, accumulation of wealth at the top. And Barbara and John Ehrenreich wrote in 77, this is very particular to the United States, but Germany, you're on your way. Good, good job. You're imitating America very well. Um they um this liberal PMC class is dominating progressive left political spaces, is completely taking it over. There are very few organic working class people or labor organizers who come up through the Democratic Party, it's probably zero now, but um, you know, one of the balances of um having a left liberal um political force is that you would have some people who represent working class union interests, and then some people who represent, you know, the um liberal um elites, white-collar workers. Now you have white-collar workers dominating almost every aspect of um progressive politics. And in 77, the Aaron Reichs already saw this. And this was really powerful. What was really peculiar was they were attacked by the left and virtually silenced and um pushed out of leftist political organizations. Aaron Reich went on to have a very successful career as a writer of very of very good well books that sold very, very well, nickeled and dimed, fear of falling. Um, she was pushed out of the left in some ways because of this really controversial statement that they were like um that about the PMC and the left, you know, 68ers, I'm still mad about this, were like, how could you invent a new class? You guys are fake Marxists. Well, good luck, you know, you argued about being who was really Marxist, and then, you know, um basically capitalism stole your lunch. So also a lot of the um um leftists who criticized Aaron Reich, the Ehrenreich went on to have very successful careers in academia, like Stanley Aronowitz, working on cultural studies, a form of a methodology that I've criticized in um my previous book, American Idol. It's a kind of left progressive um methodology of studying popular culture without dealing with class at all, or without dealing with economic um strife or class conflict at all. So that was a very, very long answer to your question. Many people have asked me that question. Each time I tried to define it in a slightly different way for the audience, but I think it's a really important thing to understand theoretically, historically, and politically.

SPEAKER_02 17:56

I think one word, and also this is what you ended on, is really interesting in this um professional managerial class or PMC in short. And that's class. Um because if I if I look at German sociology, um there was a period where German sociology moved completely away from using class as a category of anything. So it moved from class, which in German is klasse, to like a m a different word, which is uh Schicht, which I would translate with layer. Um I'm not sure if that's Stratum. Stratum, yeah. Stratum. Yeah, and milieu is again a different thing because it doesn't read like milieu doesn't look so much at the at the um at the economic um positions. Whereas Schicht does not.

SPEAKER_03 18:45

I love German borrowing of French words. I'd like to like do a whole analysis of the enbourgeoisement of Germany. I like words like zalon and zison. Like, why can't you have a German word for that? But no, that's not jalousie is my favorite, is the thing that's milieu is uh I like to uh yeah, I like to hope that I can speak.

SPEAKER_02 19:04

So the uh the Yeah. But I think one really interesting thing is because they moved away from class because class l l is more fixed in like you basically you belong to a class, but there's uh and there's class struggle. Whereas in in Schicht uh or stratum, it it implies that there's movement between uh the different strata, right? You can move up more easily. And that was basically the the thought in well, the past 50 years of German sociology was like, okay, we don't need the word class anymore, we have Schicht, and then at some point we uh sociology moved completely away and going, no, it's actually all individualized. And uh at some point I feel like this has like been also like the political stance that it is completely individual and up to you where you land in uh well in the social sphere. And now I feel like there's a shift going back to no, maybe there are classes and we have to use the term. So I think it's really interesting that you use the term class.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

Yeah, I just want to say I think in the last years we had a in Germany a kind of a revolution from the more or less prominent scientists in sociology, especially Andreas Reckwitz, who basically brought in the class terminology with his books like The Singularity and so on and so forth. And now we have it back like in late capitalism, we have more a class thinking, which is kind of quite interesting because he has um he explains in Germany that in late-state capitalism, where a lot of the production is outsourced or is um done through automatization, that we have two basically two beside the capitalist class and so forth, we have like the service class and we have like the knowledge class, which basically would I mean everyone in knowledge class would fall under PMC uh category as far as as far as I understood, which means that everyone who is listening to this podcast is probably a member of the PMC. It's probably a member of the class.

SPEAKER_03 20:54

Yes. So the other thing is like classically speaking, and I've you know been criticized by orthodox Marxists for not being Marxist by using this term. Um, if you think about um class through Marx, through the lens of Marx, first it's collective, not individualized, as you were saying, but I'll come back to that. But second, but secondly, it's about our relationship to the mode of production, right? So there used to be in the 19th and early 20th century, almost up to you know the 70s, an incredible industrial workforce that was present that in industrialized countries, right? And um they were in in 1947, right after World War II, four million American workers were on strike at any given time because we Americans had won the war, but the workers felt like they deserved more. Um there was enormous amounts of worker unrest with large working class populations, neighborhoods. They were not called what you could call them with a strong working class culture, like rooted. A lot of suffering, of course, with regard to mining and you know, just hard industrial labor. And what happened to this, what happened to this class in deindustrialization, as Human was talking about, America outsourced industrial production, began it in 72, 73. And it found cheap labor sources in East Asia. And it's in large part responsible for the rise of the Asian tiger economies from Taiwan to South Korea. And a lot of the industrial production was happening there. From the 90s on, the 90s phase of globalization moved even more industry to China then, because China had been opening up. So a lot of the dirty industries that make capitalism possible, like steel production, which had been centered in Pennsylvania, now are in my father's province, in Shandong province, right? And you have the rust belt in the United States, sort of this society that just collapsed, basically, in the heartland. And this kind of productive labor, like industrial labor, extractive labor, is still the source of surplus value in capitalism. It's just that we've managed to squeeze the labor costs of productive labor so small that and um to be such a tiny part of like capitalization that there is more surplus value to go around. And that surplus value is used to pay off the professional managerial class to pro and the professional managerial class is as parasitic on the surplus value as the capitalist, but it obviously doesn't own the means of production. It has to work in information and content production to reproduce the status quo. This is literally what the Aaron Reichs say. It's a class that reproduces the ideological underpinnings of capitalism. And it has, and because that sur that share of surplus value continues to grow and wages are continually compressed, you have more of that surplus value to distribute on the part of the capitalist. So that's sort of the classical Marxist explanation for how you can have this parasitic class intermediate between in a productive, extractive, industrial working class, capitalists, the owners of capital who are actually very, very few, right? You can count, I'm I'm not saying you can count them on your fingertips, but you probably could count them. But you can't count the working class and actually the intermediate class as much bigger. Now, what's happened is you also have this aspirational PMC because, as you were saying, Mary, the idea of neoliberalism is that, you know, we can have trickle-down economies and everyone can, you know, move up within the strata. What happened that the projection of the economy when you talk about strata or milieu instead of class is first you take out the Marxist idea, which is that class struggle is the only engine of history. And this, and every time there's a real historical change in a revolution, either from feudalism to mercantile capitalism, from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism, from industrial capitalism to post-industrial capitalism, from what we have now to God knows what comes next, there's a massive change in the modes of production, right? But when you have like 50 years of neoliberalism and we just feud the Soviet Union, communism sucks, capitalism is one, what we have then is this projection of an immovable natural formation. Stratum are strata are geological. It's like here are the igneous strata, I know nothing about geology. And then the other stratum, and we just keep moving up until we bubble up into the top strata of, and then and then everything is good. As long as we can keep moving people up that social elevator. Well, what Marx says is much more about the differences between classes, the different modes of relation to the modes of production, create incredible conflict and violence. And he talks about this like as a part of the working day. Like the capitalist, the manager, at this point, because the capitalist doesn't come down and tell you what to do now, the manager tries to extract as much labor from you as possible during the day without killing you. This is like very primitive industrial capitalism. But now the manager wants to make you happy, give you wellness modules, and extract as much labor from you as an information worker by extracting compliance from you. So the idea for a class is that it's collective, it forms the sub, the objective situation forms a subjective viewpoint. When you talk about strata in this neoliberal way, you think like the subjective person, the individual, the subjective agent forges a path up the strata. This is a myth. But it's a very, very powerful myth. For instance, in the United in the University of California, we don't call students who come from working class families working class. A working class family is defined by um one or two parents not having completed higher education, right? Not having completed college. So I would have I would fall into that category. But they don't call you working class, they call you first generation. And they don't call you first generation because they it's too long to make it Silicon Valley. They call it you first gen. So when you're a first gen student, you have all these special provisions because the idea is that you're moving yourself and your family into the white-collar world, into the PMC world, into college education, and then you know, you're leaving your non-college educated family behind, you're leaving that milieu behind. You're moving into another milieu. The thing about the class formation is your class, your relation to the means of production has defined you. So if you think this way, you're probably, you know, inculcated very well in the professional managerial class attitude about managing yourself and managing others. And it seems as if this is the natural air we breathe because this is how ideological reproduction works.

SPEAKER_01 29:03

Just to understand, I'm trying to play the naive one. Um, there are those we could call them narratives or uh examples where people demonstrate like that they worked hard, they studied hard, and now they own their own company and own money and have uh whatever. I mean, that's the story people tell if someone says there is class and class is some uh is something which is fixed and so on and so forth. Uh and they explain, but look, did they change the class? Is that possible?

SPEAKER_03 29:36

So they they've they have social mobility. So someone from a working class background has become very wealthy by through hard work and entrepreneurship. Did they change their relationship to the means of production? Yes, because you're saying they own the means of production now, right? Maybe their father went to work and a factory worked for someone else, now they own a small company. Then you could say like they went from working class to pity bourgeois. Yeah. And and that and and they and that um one thing that I wanted to ask you was in your projected individual, did he or she go to college?

SPEAKER_01 30:10

I mean, I'm thinking about Germany, so therefore, going to college is uh uh is much easier than it is in the US.

SPEAKER_02 30:16

Quick uh quick uh stats. I looked it up. Um and apparently currently, this is uh numbers from 2020 uh 2021. 30% of the 25 to 64 year olds have a finished degree. However, 56% start university uh in 2021 of eligible of their cohort. So uh in those 30%, there are still a lot of people who come from different generations when they did a lot of apprenticeships and stuff, and college wasn't that big of a thing, but now 56% of a cohort start university. I don't know if they finish.

SPEAKER_03 30:58

And then thir and then 30% is how about out of the whole German population, how many people have what's a percentage who have college degrees?

SPEAKER_02 31:06

Currently uh I only have the numbers for 25 to 64 year olds. Um that's 30 percent.

SPEAKER_03 31:12

Why do they have this? It's of the potential working. Oh, right, because they're like little kids. Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay, so it's about the same. It's a it's a America's supposed to be like 33. 33% with college degrees, 66 without. Yeah, so it's similar. So you say it's easier, it's cheaper to go to university. So your personality.

SPEAKER_02 31:33

I also would say now, like my generation, it's a lot higher. I would say my my generation, about 50% went to university.

SPEAKER_01 31:42

Uh at least started it. Maybe maybe to uh to to to make my argument a little more specific or to come already with a conclusion, this is where I'm interested, uh, how you guys think about this. My thesis would be that of course more people today go in Germany uh in college, and so and it's more affordable because you have in Germany uh colleges for free or universities for free. If you are low income, you get uh you get like um funding, state funding for it, and and so on and so forth. But I think when I look at people I know who went through it and have today a good life or not, one thing what I always observe is that most of those people work in, even though they have their own company and so on and so forth, they always work in, I would call it knowledge service work. That means that the the production uh things they have are basically their cognitive energy. I don't know a lot of people who actually were able to start a company which is produced industry or something, right? Like which has like uh something which can last longer than your brain can last. I mean, at the end, what Germany, I mean Germany, we're talking about cars and so on and so forth, right? We're talking about products, those production means are not distributed, right? So I think that, and this is a little bit after also like going through your book. What came to my mind is that even though we would argue that more people today doing startup or whatever, most of them are doing PMC work. That means yes, you own a company, but your company has no asset except yourself, or maybe some people you convince to follow you and you are now doing sales and try to sell cognitive labor. But at the end, you are-I mean, to to be uh a little bit radical, at the end, why your company functions is based on uh digital platforms, which if they don't exist, your company's dead. So basically, those means you don't have, and we are in an upspiral economic phase. That means that of course people are asking for consulting or whatever, but at the end, what means are true assets which m which are not distributed. And therefore, I I'm not really sure if people are able to go beyond this level of, oh, I have a, I don't know, I started a Bitcoin startup and now have some money, but maybe not tomorrow if the Bitcoin falls down.

SPEAKER_03 34:04

You know, you know, in Piketty's um analyses of the French economy and since the 19th century, and I think this would probably be the case in Germany as well, he shows that you know the greatest source of wealth is still inherited wealth. And since the 19th century, and France did a lot of good um tax analyses. So that's this hidden truth, that's the hidden secret of democracy and industrial capitalism is that there's still few um powerful families that hold the means of production, like you know, Krupps, Tucson Corps, and um Mercedes, BMW, Volkswagen. Yeah, they're all they're all held, you know, it's still held by a tiny cabal of people. And these, you know, st what you're talking about with regard to the sort of um salesmanship of the platforms and this kind of ineffable content production for the younger class, for the younger people, you know, aspirational PMC, those kinds of things, I would actually now put under the um um rubric of what Piketty called like the mercantile right. Because the the real PMC live liberal left, they're like green party politicians or professors, or they work for an NGO. And these are the people who really um imbibe these kinds of like liberal values, and a lot of them exported from the United States, liberal slash neoliberal values. Because I'll give you an example of someone who is, you know, really moved up with regard economically, but doesn't absorb and has not absorbed most PMC values. Like a friend of mine is um Puerto Rican American. She never went to college. She's one of the wealthiest people I know now. She was homeless, she was a teen mom. She had a label company, she had many companies. She's she just worked her ass off. She listened to self-help tapes. She's now um, she sold her company. She still works for it a little bit. She never went to college, extremely wealthy. She has no professional managerial class liberal um ideas. I don't know if she's we don't talk politics. Um she's a very, very, you know, smart person, very well traveled by now. But um, like she does not, you know, do any of those identity politics things that make up the liberal PMC ideology. You know, she could be like, oh, I'm Latinx, or, you know, she could promote herself as like, I'm a woman of color, you know, entrepreneur, owner of my own company, but she doesn't know that language. She doesn't want to know that language. We don't talk that language. And it's so, and it's so interesting to me because she is that person that you've taught that you were talking about human from another generation. She actually did build a company. They made labels. So they actually have a manufacturing line, they do sales. And what is she really a member of the PM professional manager of class? Well, she has to manage a lot of people, but she doesn't have the PMC liberal worldview, that hegemonic worldview that dominates my profession. And that is, I think, the dominant mode of liberalism and progressive politics in the post-industrial world. Unfortunately, Germany has decided to follow the US and all of these things. And I don't know what happened to German critical skepticism, but especially the Greens, I have a real, you know, um extram of them, but they want to be the 51st state of a failed empire. I'm like, why? Why would you want to be like America? Um, I have my theories about that. It's because all of you watch streaming meet American TV shows and you thought you were Americans.

SPEAKER_01 37:54

Yeah, I mean uh cultural hegemony. One thing which came to my mind as we were explaining is that, especially when I think about Germany, is that a lot of things that today we call entrepreneurship and so on and so forth are basically outsourced um things company used to do before. I used to work, I used to work for a quite big consulting company, and I had a project which was in New York working with technology startups uh for a venture capital program. And and I remember how I mean there were all privileged people, right? I mean, working there, you are privileged, uh having the money to live in New York in Manhattan. But nevertheless, one thing was which was quite interesting for me, first of all, all of them had a good education, and they all were working like really, really hard, like hundreds of hours for basically zero salary. What? Yeah, basically zero salary. They were their own companies, right? So arm and entrepreneur, that's my company, and so on and so forth. But obviously, the venture capital system and the corporates backing that venture capital system, they were profiting from the innovation those companies were creating. If one of those failed, it's not their investment. But if one of those were uh skyrocketing up and so on and so forth, they would get the benefits, right? That they would there were early investors and so on and so forth. And I thought to myself, actually, I talked to one of the companies, and I'm like, but what you're doing, you're basically outsourcing your innovation work into young people and giving telling them nice narrative about how amazing it is to be a Silicon Valley startup entrepreneur, giving them zero uh salary, and they are working their ass off because of that narrative. And the the crazy thing is that more and more people in Silicon Valley or uh in the startups in the US were understanding this. Um, we had a podcast with Arjun Daub, he's a professor in in Stanford. He was also telling us that this his students are starting to ask different questions from their employee, um from their employer uh before. And I think this is one thing which is quite tricky in neoliberalism uh in terms of what is really entrepreneurship, so capitalist, and what is actually outsourced and narratived and just bought back from the companies because it is cheaper with the narrative and so on and so forth.

SPEAKER_03 40:11

I think this is uh So this is like so what you're describing would have been like in Xerox Park or the 1950s and 60s, um, a research and development core of a large corporation. And when you had that, and there was a corporate commitment to um pay people a good living, give them health insurance and a pension. These VCs don't have to do any of that anymore because they just want, you know, if there's a you and and the young people have been willing to do this because they want to be, you know, that unicorn that makes, you know, a billion dollars. But in the meantime, you know, they don't have pensions, they don't have, they pay their own health insurance, and um, they're contractors. One of the great myths of the 1980s and 90s was that these research and development groups within corporations, they had become too smug, people were not creative anymore, and this kind of like desperation and um being out there by yourself, being free of being a contractor, made people more creative somehow. But many of the innovations that we know today came out of these large research and development companies, um, parts of large corporations in America, some of them financed by the Department of Defense. But, you know, there was like um a lot of teamwork. What's happened is um, you know, it's still about the logic of compressing wages, and VCs have venture capitalists right now have benefited from 50 years of neoliberalism and they have too much money.

SPEAKER_01 41:48

I mean, private equity and VC.

SPEAKER_03 41:49

They don't need, you know, that that literally is a whore. They have hoards of money. It's not being reinvested in the economy, it's not being taxed properly. And so they they can burn it on, you know, 50 million, they can burn it on 500 startups if one works out, that's great. Um, all the other losses, they um chalk up to tax loss to losses. And then you have, you know, um young people whose best years of their lives were spent um doing this thing that suddenly has disappeared or they have no proprietary value over. This is like I'm not crazy about the Google unions or all these other things, but there has to be some kind of consciousness of how like the best of years of your life as a thinking person are just extracted from you in this way with no guarantee of any kind of stable narrative of employment, because that would make you smug and not um creative. I mean, I'm not gonna cry me a river for these coders and these entrepreneurs, but at the same time, um, it's an increasing winner takes all um mentality. And the other thing is that half these things that they're innovating have no social utility whatsoever. Just none. Despite them telling me. I mean, they're bullshit things. Yeah, that no, I mean, it's like what what is the what are they working on? Like 3D wearable computers. I was thinking uh 3D printing, oh yeah, wearable computing, like um AI, AI um guided software so that I can see like my you know see advertisements all the time for my zero You shouldn't start uh talking about cryptocurrencies.

SPEAKER_01 43:33

Oh that's a whole mess in itself. But maybe maybe two thoughts and then kicking into yeah, and kicking to Mary. Two thoughts which actually um I know if you if you um heard about uh Mariana Matsukato, who was researching. She she's an economist, but one would call her not mainstream. And she was researching so she has a book, which is one of her first books was um Uh state entrepreneurship or so. And uh she was basically debunking the narrative of entrepreneurship in the US and explaining that what we call Silicon Valley today was basically created by NASA uh because of the uh Moonshot thing, and all the innovations we today think they're so amazing and so on and so forth, they came. All technical innovations are state-funded. From then people from NASA went, I mean, NASA was managing 400,000 people back then, and then people were going and starting their own companies basically with state-funded research on those topics. And one other thing she was uh explaining, which I I thought was really interesting for the time, was that the state was committing companies to reinvest specific part of their uh of their profit to uh research. So Bell Labs, for example, was not created because ATT thought it was amazing to do big research. No, but because the state committed them. And today it is completely the opposite. Today uh the state goes to Elon Musk and hopes that the he and his genius do some hyperloop things. I don't know what. I think here we have a big um uh and uh it's a narrative switch, right? Because we know that it was like that, and then because of Rang and Fetcher and so on so forth, today we have this narrative of state is not innovative, state is not possible to do things, and so on so forth, and we have to do make the uh innov innovation people do it.

SPEAKER_02 45:30

I I think the example of you know the the venture capital uh startup scene in New York that you uh experienced, Human, with um, you know, people working basically for free in the hopes of creating something that will then be bought for a lot of money. And that's but in this is like a double class indication because so this is pretty much the aspirational PMC, right? And they already need to have a certain economic standing to even be able to do that because who like who can afford not having money and working for years without having a salary on the hopes of then like getting like getting the great idea out into the world and making millions? I mean, you already need to have some sort of financial backing from somebody, and probably that is family and uh I don't know, maybe your friend's good enough that will uh spot you enough.

SPEAKER_03 46:31

But I don't I don't actually Yeah, I don't understand how you mean like they're given s money for the startup, but they're often not paid a salary, but they have money, right? It's part of the startup.

SPEAKER_02 46:42

Well, I mean so it's part of the try to raise money, right, in rounds, and then maybe you can give yourself a salary that is enough to be. But even to just get to the to the first funding round, I think is quite a thing, a stretch. So basically, this is an accepted form of putting your labor on basic working for somebody else, right? This is like an accepted form of, oh, but you're trying to better yourself. So you're trying to have this great idea.

SPEAKER_03 47:09

Whereas you describe in your book Well, you're not supposed you don't have a boss. You're you you've gotten VC funding, but you're working exactly and you do it smartly, right?

SPEAKER_02 47:18

Because you're managing yourself, you're managing your time, you're doing all the great things. And I think one one thing that really struck me in your book was this moral high ground that you describe of the PMC, where they go, well working class is actually in itself despicable. Like we don't, you know, they don't do the things that we do, they don't know how to behave. If they would only manage themselves correctly, you know, they could have everything they want, but they don't, so therefore, whatever. So this this sort of looking down on the working class.

SPEAKER_03 47:51

This well, there's just like um a lot of the um things that happened in the after 68 with the innovations of an elite being more and more wealthy, was that um consumption habits became defining, um became moralized. So, like um uh if I was like a 68er and I was open to yoga, it's because I'm so cosmopolitan and non-racist, and I do my yoga, and I have like my uh and I'm so open to other people. And then there are these working class idiots who are racist, who don't do yoga, and who are you know really fat and they drink beer, and you can you can hate the working class now on the level of consumption, on this kind of consumption superiority. I mean, I'm not saying that Victorian elites or you know, wasp elites of the United States really um didn't look down on the working class. They might have ignored them. There was no, um, they didn't uh they were afraid of them. And now, um, but with the PMC, they they layered a level of like political, spiritual consumption enlightenment onto their own practices. Like they could afford to do all these things um to themselves to optimize themselves. And then people who can't are just idiots and they want to be um just like the PMC. So um you have within this kind of like self-optimization thing a new wave of incorporating it into um large organizations, like in wellness programs. Every corporate um entity in the United States, and thank you, Germany. You've also imitated US very well on this. You call it Wellness, not wellness, but Wellness with a German accent is we saw this, we saw this ad once in um some um train station for like a getaway weekend, Wellness und Kuscheln. I was like, oh my God. So, so, but they're all part of like an large organization now. Rather than paying people more, and I wrote a business insider op-ed about this, um, mental health improves dramatically if you people are paid more. This is proven in every single study, but no um employer wants to pay their um employees more, but they will have wellness programs for you. And these wellness programs will tell you like time to get up and go take a walk or um breathe. And they're invasive, they're tracking, they're they're tracking you, and um, every large organization in the US has a wellness program now.

SPEAKER_01 50:30

Yeah, I would say in Germany we have similar things. And I mean what we see today when we look in organizations is that there is a strong focus on what they call mindset. Mindset.

SPEAKER_03 50:44

Oh, the English, the world, the English word. Don't don't come up with a germ, don't use a German word when you can use it in English.

SPEAKER_01 50:51

Uh so uh yeah, in Germany you have a s similar thing, which is all uh programs which are created for for the workforce are basically individual programs. Also, the mindset uh thing means that the problem is in the mindset of the individuals, and now we have programs. For example, we have trainings, workshops, retreats, so that your mindset opens up and you as the individual uh can now be enlightened or whatever it is required.

SPEAKER_03 51:20

So you A better worker. But a better worker.

SPEAKER_02 51:22

Um we we have a um podcast coming up with um Judith Muster, who's a German sociologist, and she just wrote a book called The The Humanization of the Organization, why it's maybe not the best idea. And one of the trends that she identifies is the psychologicization of everything, making everything psychol uh psychological. So if you're not a good worker, then something may be wrong with you instead of the circumstances in which you are working. So, as you say, right, pay is a really important factor of can people basically like put their mind on other things than being worried if we don't pay them enough? No. But we will ignore it and make it their problem that they are not performing in the way that the company would like them to perform or whatever.

SPEAKER_03 52:06

So these are all parts of human resources, and now in the United States, and I think you're also imitating them, Go Germany, is um now under human resources we have wellness programs and we also have diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. So there are more and more invasive pro training programs within large corporations to um control their employees, not just at work, but outside of work. And that I think is also really important with regard to the history of the PMC, because what you have without the hourly wage worker is that when I punch out, if I'm a blue-collar worker, I'm done for the day. So from you, the boss can have me from nine to five with like a half hour for lunch, but at 5 p.m., I can be my own person again. Like I, you know, I can drive home, I can do my own thing, I can listen to my own music, I can, you know, be angry, I can do whatever. I I have freedom. And this is what unions and what Marx fought for too, like the struggle for the containment of the working day, so that the capitalists didn't, you know, suck the life out of you continuously for the entire um for your entire lifetime, these boundaries were really clear. But one of the things that's happened under neoliberalism with Silicon Valley startup culture, with um um this US-led um hegemony about the ideas of work is that there's there are no boundaries anymore. It's completely fluid. I mean, if you think about that horrible book Sheryl Sandberg wrote about leaning in, you know, she actually gives you a schedule where you wake up and the first thing you do is work, then you feed your family, then you go back to work, then you, you know, go to, then you're you can take calls in your car when you're there you're being driven to Facebook, but there's like no moment when you're not working or thinking about how to optimize your performance at work. And that is a PMC thing. Like the the relief of getting off of a job, a physical job, um, a service job, is that your mind is your own again. But the PMC end of work has no mind as your own again. You are um hustling all the time. Your 24 hour seven hustle may or may not be rewarded at the end, but that's seen as the highest value of work. There's no autonomous worker skepticism about these direct these dis what they are basically are disciplinary directives that come from um the ideal of the 24-7 work world. And Melissa Gregg wrote a book about this called Cold Intimacies about how teams performed in companies in the age of the smartphone. And she noticed that the people who really wanted to be distinguished on their team had the shortest response time to group emails. I mean, this was before Slack, right? So this meant that if you got an email from a supervisor at 12.01 a.m., you were vying for the position, the poll position of responding at 12.03 a.m. to the team manager's um demands. The um idea is that you are never separated from your devices, and they're making our devices even more attractive and dopamine-filled, so that everything gets mediated through that, including constant contact with work. And this is one of the scariest things about how the managerialism of the professional managerial class has um just taken away any kind of um work, worker autonomy and wants to take away any kind of worker consciousness of their own um, I don't know, let's use the word freedom. Freedom. Let's use that primitive word.

SPEAKER_02 55:55

I mean, everybody's finding their um source of enlightenment at work, right? So why would you want anything but work?

SPEAKER_03 56:03

Yeah, yeah. Everything your pleasure too. Your pleasure, enlightenment, everything. Yeah, exactly. Fulfillment. Yeah, what would you do? Fulfillment. Yeah, what would you do if you weren't at work, right? We need to know what to do.

SPEAKER_01 56:15

Working. But but I think in Germany, there I think actually that's uh general management term, is the term uh work-life blending. So blending each together, which comes is a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, they promote it as a good thing that we are blending work and life together. There used to be work like that. You can have more life work becomes part of your life and it's not separated, it is one thing, which obviously is desirable.

SPEAKER_02 56:43

Well, it's marketed as desirable, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:45

But and it's always neglecting that when you work, you you don't own yourself. But I think what is fascinating for me, especially if if I look at your book, is the title, obviously. Before I I asked the specific question, there is there is a concept, especially in consulting, which was uh which is actually an interesting example for work-life blending, which is called the magic roundabout. I don't know if you heard ever heard about the cosmos of magic roundabout. Yeah. So look, a magic roundabout is the following concept. And young professionals, when they start in consulting or investment or whatever, they pride themselves with having a lot of those magic roundabouts in the first week or months. A magic roundabout is the following. Think about you're working and your boss comes and says, Look, we have this great opportunity, please create a PowerPoint presentation. Then you see that's a lot of work. So you work the whole day and the whole night. And let's say around six in the morning, the work is not done. You grab a uh you grab a taxi, drive home, tell the taxi, please stay here, go up, change your clothes, make yourself a little bit fresh, go back in a taxi, go back into the office and work again. That's called a magic roundabout, which, as I said, people pride themselves on how many they have in the first week, months, and so on and so forth.

SPEAKER_03 58:00

Oh, just basically not sleeping. Yeah, just working. I I don't see what's magic about it. And the roundabout is the taxi waiting for you. You go in the door and you come back out the door.

SPEAKER_01 58:10

And now now my now my question in terms of the title of the book. You say it's virtue hoarding. And basically, it's when I was reading the title, I was like, it sounds like there is a fetish character, so there is a token, which basically is kind of uh a fantastic thing which you are you want a lot of so you can pride themselves. Uh what do you mean with uh uh with uh the title virtue hoarders, which the PMC does, right? So that's the crazy.

SPEAKER_03 58:39

Right, right, right, right. Just so there oh, the magic roundabout is a fantastic way of thinking about it. I I was thinking about it as a secular way of moralizing class difference. Number one, a secular moralization of class difference. And number two, I was thinking also about how um Marx describes primitive accumulation, right? There's um when the and one of his descriptions of primitive accumulation has to do with the aristocrats um suddenly realized a few the landed gentry, let's put it that way, um, suddenly realizing all these fields that um people were putting their sheep on in northern England, they actually suddenly decided they owned them. So they put fencing around these fields that had been part of the commons. And this act of primitive accumulation, which was just hoarding the land, drove the peasants into the cities, made them unemployed, but also um um free to be exploited by the by English industry, right? And so when you have a group of people who take something which hasn't been commodified and fences it off and takes it for their own, that is hoarding of the greatest order. That's an incredible um violent um move that you know is the is the baseline of private property. Like primitive accumulation and hoarding have also taken place, like more recently in the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union, and in China, where you had like um collectively owned mines, for instance, and that this is how the oligarchs became oligarchs. They decided like they owned it and they were gonna sell it to, you know, um some German, Indian, American um mining company. It's like you were just the foreman of this mine, and suddenly you're like, I own it. Okay, you can have it for a billion dollars, you can have the mineral rights. It happened in China as well as in um the former the former Soviet Union, and these moments of like massive accumulation, they take on a kind of power. Now, of course, I'm using something that is immaterial and using it as a metaphor for a material act of um stripping away things from people, but um I do believe that there is a kind of civic virtue that's necessary for functioning politics, right? For the functioning polis. If we wanted to be very idealistic and just say, like in the Greek demos, every citizen has to have a certain kind of virtue. You have to be able to sacrifice for the greater good, you have to be able to be in some way stoic, you have to be in some honest and truthful. But how does a class like the professional managerial class, which I've described as both sycophantic and deceptive, take this immaterial thing called virtue and actually appropriate it completely for itself in the form of consumption and lifestyle habits, milieu, habits of milieu. And I mean, if you look at um German, the German situation now, you have these enclaves of these enlightened PMC people in Berlin, in um all over, all over Germany with their consumption habits and their lifestyles and their, you know, their green, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And there used to be like a more, much more powerful working class presence throughout all of the major German cities, throughout the Hohlgebiet. I mean, people who, you know, ate, you know, you could get cheap food on the street and eat, you know, in Berlin you still have a little bit. Like you can have a beer at 10 a.m. You can, you know, in England, you could go to the pub, you can have Koivust and Funkfurt for very little money. You fed yourself, you had to go back into the factory, and you took up a kind of urban space. There, it's gone now. Like all urbanism is like some kind of cleaned up, weird Silicon Valley type thing, or like cutesy, hipster, schoenaberg, mitta, berg, kind of, you know, um consumption things that have just occupied the city. We've turned um all of um, you know, the advanced economies into basically post-industrial stages for the performance of this kind of consumption. And we've just taken the working class, which are still the majority of people, and completely marginalized them. In France, you put them in the suburbs, you put them in the housing projects. Um in the United States, you put them in these neighborhoods that are undesirable, that no one wants to live in. More and more people are being pushed out into exurbs or, you know, tenement housing. And um, you have like more economic segregation than you've ever had in these post-industrial advanced countries. And yet the dream of the PMC is to give a lot of lip service to diversity. And they've completely worked in the opposite way to work against economic diversity, to destroy, you know, working class bases and economies and cultures, media, if you like, in throughout the industrialized world. And then everyone's like, oh no, why are people, why do people hate us? Because what we should talk about is Brexit and Trump. People actually really hate this class. And there is going to be a reaction from the right if there isn't an organized left to take care of it. But since the PMC has been occupying the or the forms of political agitation on the left, it's going to be the right rejection of PMC liberalism that's going to all come and bite us in the ass, and everyone's going to be like, why did people in Manchester vote against BREC, vote against the European Union? Because the European Union is like the avatar of your the European professional managerial class. I mean, that's what Brussels is. Brussels is like the Aztec Empire, you know, um ziggurat to the um European PMC. I've never been there, but I'm just I'm just uh matching to my mind.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:42

Brussels is a nice city.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:47

I'm just thinking about the um the agencies of the EU. Brussels has like, I'm sure Brussels.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:52

There are a couple of things uh which went through my mind when you were talking about, but I think one one thing which I was thinking of was quite funny or differently. I think this is the realm where we start to talk about ideology. I think so. This is how I understood, and maybe you can correct me if I'm completely wrong, is that you got the capitalist class, you got the working class. And then the a third class basically emerged, and what they did, they created out of nothing, basically, right? They created uh a fantastic thing which uh is virtue. They they created this virtue as a token. Basically, it is an object object cause of desire, right? So there is a thing which we need to desire, which is created out of nothing, right? I mean, that's the ideological part. And uh the thing the idea about that, the idea about the virtue thing is that is we can now signal virtue, basically as a currency, to say things are good or bad. But by doing this, we are creating difference. So we are uh creating a separation between us and the working class, which we Maybe say, oh, we need to help them, blah, blah, blah. And on the other side, we create difference between the capitalist class, which obviously it is on vogue to be they're they're the bad guys. Yeah. So they're now the bad guys. And now we create a difference between those two. And in order to sustain our symbolic role and our um imaginary roles, right? We need to sustain the differences, um, which means that uh by doing so, we cannot critique the underlying problems, which I think uh why I came up with this is I was uh watching an interview uh with a uh quite critical journalist who was talking to a person who is responsible for environmental uh stuff. And he is I would say liberal left, and he was describing a lot of real problems, which I would say maybe conservatives wouldn't talk about. But one thing he didn't want to talk about, which is critique on capitalism and growth. I think that was quite interesting for me because obviously uh explaining that there are those problems is sustaining his role, but he's not critiquing the underlying system, which uh left liberates maybe are.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:14

Yeah, I mean, I think the sort of center left, liberal left, they um they don't want to be associated with critiques of capitalism, absolutely not, because then you you know you look like an ideologue or like you are sympathetic with totalitarianism. So they really hold on to this notion that they're the liberals, they're open-minded, they hold up, uphold liberal values. But I think what's really distinctive about the neoliberalization of the professional managerial class versus its sort of post-Second World War um existence in the United States is that this new PMC liberal elite, they don't care about history and they don't care about culture. Nothing that can be monetized. If anything can't be monetized, they don't care about it. And this is the other thing that I wanted to emphasize was that they believe themselves to be a vanguard elite, which means they do have this kind of revolutionary consciousness, which is not going to touch capitalism, but they believe like they've reinvented ways of the, you know, raising children, eating, having sex. I did talk about this in the book. Like they're just the most advanced people. They don't want to be reminded of the fact that they are the inheritors of the courtiers or the clericy. They don't like, they don't want to have any kind of historical localization. They don't want to be like the tech guys don't want to be reminded that NASA was an important source of all of this research and development, or that Xerox Park, or that Bell Labs contributed, like giant organizations contributed, and the government contributed to their innovations. They have an absolute disdain for history and a complete arrogance about their ignorance. Whereas, like when you think about like the progressive PMC in the United States, they saw themselves as a class distinct from capitalists, distinct from the working class, because they were the conservators of a certain kind of knowledge, they believed in education, they were historical, they might have liked, um, they believed in tradition, certain kinds of traditions. The PMC now is like, styles itself is completely anti-traditional. And it takes itself up in my um profession in this very, very peculiar way, right? So musicology is a discipline that's in deep crisis right now because from within its own the study of music, they want to say that Beethoven and Bach are just white men and should not be listened to. There's like a whole branch of them that are saying, like, um, classical music is just racist and should be thrown away. Like, there's a lot of that impetus there. That's what really scares me. And then they're like, oh yeah, they're the Trumpers, they're so ignorant, they're so Philistine. It's like there's this embedded ignorance and anti-traditionalism within the PMC. And so this is why I, you know, I jokingly say, like, only socialism will save history in the United States, only socialism will save the arts because capitalism and its vanguard elites do not care about this at all. And we're really at the strange cusp right now where a lot of the institutions, hate them or leave them, like the university, um, are being remade in the image of this PMC Vanguard, and there's less and less attention being paid for to um like disciplines like history and you know, and musicology, they're seeing as dry as dust, and there's more and more investment within the American University and all the outward-facing innovation um departments. And there's been no, there, the ways in which like my colleagues in the humanities try to defend the humanities, like I just want to tear my hair out because it's not a they want to stay relevant by being like politically engaged in the most easy forms of, you know, I gotta say it, wokeness possible. So it's being destroyed from within. Um, even this idea of like tradition and preservation, like I believe in that, you know, I'm a Marxist who really believes in tradition and like have paying some kind of respect to tradition. And that's the only way you can really understand what revolution is. But if you don't care about tradition and you think you're revolutionary without a class basis, like you're gonna be ready to destroy. Um, that's like the cultural revolution um angle on the past that I think it's capitalism that's going to execute more than mal. It's the destruction of any memory of the historical past.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:00

Yeah, I mean, that's one thing I think uh already Marx was writing, right? That capitalism destroys uh uh anything historically. Destroys everything.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:08

All that is solid that melts into air. But you know, in the into in the uh post-war period, there was a fear of the Soviet Union, there was American ascendancy with regard to like um we destroyed Europe, so now we have to preserve some of no, we not we destroy the Nazis destroyed Europe, but you know, Europe has to be rebuilt, and so we're gonna help do that. And now it's just like, no, forget it.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:33

I mean, I think I think if you look at uh the I mean our perspective is always from the corporate organizational side, right? So when Mary and I work with organizations, we find a lot of things you are describing. Um and I think if we take is the specific part uh which uh uh professional manager class is I think we can we can find things which uh obviously the left uh is uh criticized for, which is being postmodern relativism, right? And I think one observation which is really frustrating for me is I don't know if you heard the term is something like postmodern leadership, right? Um did you ever uh uh it's a term by Slava, I think Slava Zizek uh used it once, which was this he was describing postmodern leadership in terms of postmodern parenting, basically a new type of leadership, which is uh trying to make uh an argument of we are the same, we are friends, right? Your boss saying to you, we are friends, we are on this, we are there is no hierarchy, same level. And what they are doing is they're they're hiding underlying uh uh um power structures, which basically is now instead of in the past your boss came into the into the office say, look, do the work, right? Do it, and at least at least you you had the chance to uh to fight against it, right? So look, we don't want to do it. So you have the at least the possibility to stand up, right? But postmodern leadership is is reverting this, is is is saying, if you don't want it, maybe something is wrong with you. You don't really want, you don't why do you do why don't you love your job, right? Uh maybe something is wrong with you. And I think this is what we observe a lot is this um uh uh reversal, um, which at the end is creating this postmodern relative style. I think this is quite interesting observation, which um if you look more into uh uh into the left, which basically are in the past getting a lot of criticism for being uh postmodern relatives, but actually, as you said, there's more grounding than we are observing at the PMC level.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:40

Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. The well, the I I don't want to talk about German academia, it's too crazy. But um, I I wouldn't say postmodernists are leftist, but um I this this kind of it's very effectual. It has a lot to do with like the one on affective um manipulation. And this was the other thing that's really powerful about C. Wright Mills' um work on white-collar workers is that he says that the US has become the great sales room. And everyone, and in sales, you try to manipulate other people, right? You try to tell them a story, you try to get them to do what you want to do. But he said in the great sales room of the American um corporation or the American economy, what the white-collar worker is really innovative about, and Adorno wrote about this in ways too, is manipulation of the self. So you have to, you're you're not just manipulating other people, you know, because that can be very tiresome. You've got to motivate yourself. So you've got to manipulate yourself. And I think a lot of the um self-help or business um motivation stuff, that's all about changing yourself, changing how your attitude is, changing um your the way you deal with rejection, changing the way you deal with authority, and all of that self-manipulation, you know, has a long and rich culture in the United States already through self-help. Because there's obviously something about sales, something about this form of capitalism that's very enervating and defeating of people. But if you reprogram yourself, I mean, people really talk about it this way, if you reprogram the way you think about other people, the way you think about yourself, then you're motivated to do more of those roundabout, whatever roundabouts.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:32

Magic roundabouts.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:33

You'll have the motivation to do more magic roundabouts because you've um reprogrammed yourself. Um and I think that the the you know, it's working class people are also one of the greatest consumers of self-help right now in the United States because this kind of self-help like stands in for psychotherapy that people can't afford. So if you can't afford to actually see someone in um someone who could treat your symptoms, then you listen to all of these self-help guys, you listen to their um uh tell their stories, and that gives you that fortifies you, it changes your attitude, it removes you from your context too. Like a lot of self-help um since the 70s and 80s talks about how you can't depend on your family, you can't depend on anyone else, it's all about you, and it's about like breaking the chains of your obligation to um friends and other people because Nadorno talked about this already in the when he was in America after the war. It's like you see other people as possible burdens and um sources of um trouble, and you're always looking for the new connection because that new person will be the networking person who'll help you get to the next level. And anything in the past is about just like dragging you down. So that's like this business self that has to be constantly reconfigured. So you're actually torn from any notion of like civic duty or familial duty or what I was thinking about tradition or religious virtue, and you're just constantly making um opportunities happen, taking advantage of um everything that presents yourself. So um when Adorno analyzed the LA Times astrology column of 1953, he noticed that one of the undercurrents was that there was always a denigration of an old friend and always the promise of the new friend who's gonna bring you all this opportunity. Like an old friend drags you down, don't let them get you negative. Um, a new acquaintance will occur, um, new possibilities occur. And I think that that's still the business mentality today. So everything we think is new in business is actually embedded within 20th century capitalism's manipulation of our effective lives.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:05

Yeah, I think there is an interesting function within capitalism. And I think uh there is a quote of Nietzsche. He was saying something like uh what capitalism does is equating the unequatable and and therefore rendering everything in value, which is then rendered in money, right? And I think this is how value ideology is making anything around us a something which needs to be quantifiable. And um, what you're describing with um self-help is something which if people are on LinkedIn can observe very well. I think LinkedIn is uh a business dystopia, um, which is one thing, I mean, self-help, I would I would say there are three phases. It started with self-help, right? How can I pull myself up? What do I need to do in order to cut the bad things in my life? Family, friends who are dragging me down because in in terms of negative economic uh uh economic anything, this is what I need to do. I have to be good and it's and so on, so forth. Then the next level is self-optimization. Now I am those uh now I am um pulled up and I need to work better, harder. Uh work um still getting up earlier, then I have more hours and be more uh I don't know, successful than others. And the new thing, which I would say new couple of years, is self-commoditization in terms of personal branding. Now I am a brand, I am a commodity, I need to be coherent and so on. And we are not coherent, right? People are uh uh complex, so to say. And this is what you now find on LinkedIn in large. I haven't been on LinkedIn in ages, so yeah, is commodity of the self.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:49

But always but they're always hoping like they're gonna get that job offer, right? Because LinkedIn is about just like get moving yourself up professionally.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:57

Yeah. It's not even just about getting it's not just about getting the new job offer. It's also if you're very visible on LinkedIn and you've built your personal brand, you are more visible within your company. So you might get that promotion or you might be regarded highly, or you may I mean also a thing that is happening all the time is like speaking gigs, right? So that's just publicity and fame, and maybe that won't even translate into anything uh financial, just but but just just visibility on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:28

Yeah. Yeah. So I was gonna say, you know, this this notion of um getting rid of the old ties. Um, I knew this is very, very hard. It creates it's necessary to become, in order to become one of these um content producers and one of these jet set professional white-collar types, you have to be disattached, detached from place. You have to be detached from um commit prior commitments. And we know that, and uh, you know, I've seen this with my working class students who come to college very idealistic, very smart, but they're attached to um Southern California. They have working class um families who depend on them for either care or income. So when they want to apply to the PhD programs, and I say, you know, you've got to look, you should look at this, this, and this place, they're like, no, I can't do that because I have to stay in Orange County. I have to stay here. I take care of my father, I, you know, I take care of my siblings. And once you do that, you close down all these opportunities for opportunities for yourself because you, you know, there are only like three universities within driving distance. And you show to an employer or to, you know, a potential um university that you are not willing to move for a job. And that is the mark, and these kinds of that is like the mark of um being fixed in place by working class obligations. And you know, most of my students are very clear about this. They're not like torn, they're not like, oh yeah, I wish I could, you know, become more colored person. They're just like, I have to take care of my father. No one else would take care of him. I had to drive Vermont to his appointments, I need a job here. So once you limit yourself geographically, because you have like family networks that depend upon you, because this is what um poor Americans depend upon, then you basically say, I'm not going to become this detached, you know, I'm um symbolic analyst. That's what Robert Reich talked about in the 90s was that we were going to get these, this level of people who were um able to travel anywhere in the world. They could live in Beijing, Shanghai, Berlin, Los Angeles with complete ease, and and they were going to manipulate symbols. Like, and he talked about this as a good thing, right? Like the working in the old working class days, we manipulated things and we hurt our bodies, but there's going to be this level of the symbolic analyst who is going to be able to manipulate language and images and be anywhere at any time. This was even before the internet really exploded. I mean, I think he's Reich has now become much more, you know, left and he's become much more committed to equality. But this was part of the euphoria of the 90s. Like, you know, the internet has reinvented work. We're going to have these kinds of people. And so that first phase that you're describing, which is the detachment phase and self-manipulation, then self-branding, that that is this thing that most like 66% of Americans who had didn't go to college are not going to be able to do. They're not going to be able to detach themselves in place economically or emotionally. And so the PMC types that can, you know, we are, you know, we're, we're consigned to this level of placelessness. But many of the people who wrote me about my book are first generation, like aspirational PMC types, in a way like myself, who really believed, like drank the Kool-Aid and really believed, like, oh, this is the level of, this is the enlightened way of being. And they move away from their families, they move out of, well, they move out of the milieu of the working class. And then, like, after a few years of working or a decade or two of working in these um environments, you realize what the betrayal is. Like the level of hypocrisy, deceit, domination, irrationality is really intense. And um you and I think one of the things, maybe if you don't come from a PMC family, is that you find it all the more shocking. Because if you look at from the outside, like if you're in this working class family, you're like, oh, my parents are so you know superstitious and crazy, and they're not, they don't, they don't know anything about gender equity and they're racist. And so I'm gonna go into this world where people are gonna be rational and um enlightened, and it's just horrifying for um to discover the levels of domination and exploitation that continue in these.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:08

And I think, I mean, earlier we talked about wellness, right? And if you take this into consideration, then the hypocrisy gets even worse because you're basically detaching like the the meaningful relationships that people have uh in order to be more productive and uh cool, basically. Um and I think there's also another point that goes to what you said earlier about um also within companies we have diversity and equity programs, but they basically do not um go on on a level higher where you see that um in Germany there's been a thing, it was called the feminization of the working world, um, which where you go like in the in the 70s and 80s, uh more and more care jobs became jobs and not like people just in the family cared for kids um because women stayed at home, but then women enter the workforce, so you need more um yeah, jobs for people working in supermarkets, people working in uh old people's homes, people working in uh nurseries and stuff where people go, Well, you basically don't even need qualification for this. Anyone who just like has a feminine touch can do it anyway, right? Like you just need to be nice and friendly and blah, blah. So you have this, and but then you also have women starting to work more in other fields. So then who moves in is migrant workers, is people coming from uh from other countries. Um, and basically these jobs sort of are don't have any recognition, are really badly paid, are looked down upon mostly, like cleaning jobs, for example, all of these things. Um and then you have women and uh people, uh migrant workers coming in, and you go, okay, so well, but if we look at diversity at an economic economic level, then we see here really we have a a problem where people are stuck in a class where they cannot move up or out or anywhere because they're just what would they do? And then other people who could work in the world. Elite diversity. Yeah. Otherwise, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:14

Yeah, they're facilitating this level of elite diversity in these elite workforces. Well, the other thing about the DEI is I feel like it's another way of training workers to comply. Because it doesn't work. First of all, anti-racism training doesn't make people less racist, but if you have to take it at work, then it's just another form of training and um authoritarian authoritarianism. So there is a PMC authoritarianism. Like I was I did some anti-racist training at UCI during the pandemic because we were just you're just craving contact, right? You're completely isolated. I'm teaching online and Zoom. They started offering these modules and I thought you know what what have I got to lose? Well actually a lot but you know there'd be a hundred of us and um the training was often you know based on wrong facts and um it was very like canned like PowerPoints but there were a hundred people at some point and I noticed that a lot of them were younger staff members. And at that point it wasn't compulsory but it's also but it's a part of what human was saying like creating distinction. Like if you do the training then you get a certificate and you look better than your coworker who didn't do the training. And I was just thinking like this is a lot of motivation it's like trying to get brownie points from the superego. Because even though we don't have bosses, we obviously have someone surveilling us all the time because we have all of these trainings are digital and so we get these digital certificates and we get these you know digital recognition. And so we're trying everyone is trying to use these things to gain a little advantage at work. And why not? But is it really going to make you a less racist person? Is it going to make you so the things that we learned were that you know there are very few African Americans in math or physics you know it's really terrible right so you're like oh wow that's really terrible but what will change that in the pipeline is refunding public schools properly um African American students make up the greatest number of people students in poverty many of them don't have they qualify for free meal programs. It's like you can't suddenly make all these math PhDs appear and then like we're all going to hire them. You know last year like everyone was trying to hire the same few people in math who are African Americans because there are just not enough people in the pipeline. So there actually has to be economic redistribution, massive reorganization of public education, public housing like all of those historical things should be talked about. But they just gave us statistics on this and most of the people who are doing it were white or Asian, because that's most people here in California. And so we could all just be like oh my God that's horrible. But it it's like it it's take it's going to take us decades to get out of this and um if your family's homeless, if you don't have enough to eat are you really going to be looking at abstract math problems in 14 and 15? No, you're not. And so there are real material conditions that um make this um make up our situation but none of these were addressed and nobody dared to ask any questions either. It was one of the most deadly like Zoom things.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:41

Like we're all like you know well but also I mean in this training how can you address these things right? Because you're not at the station of addressing them because you're at your university or at your corporation and you're not on a political level discussing these things where these decisions it's totally depoliticized right so it's a totally depoliticized that's the problem.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:02

I think that's that's we are in Germany more and more in a state of anti-politics right in in terms of uh negative politics so to say right doing less politics because companies and individuals will will take uh care of it. Maybe one thing this is an evidence that you are not a lot of linked uh on LinkedIn because if you were you would see that a lot of people that there is a lot of uh training tools have now a functionality that after you uh completing a training you now can post your token on LinkedIn and people celebrate you and I think actually this function is more of a uh super ego big other thing than the AI is doing their job because I think oh it's the mutual policing yes I think that's that's the super ego right there is not there is not the individual who is who is uh controlling us no we are doing uh because we are thinking it is right and this is I think um again um uh in a professional mini jury class is this having those tokens um signaling those virtues without really changing system and if you be uh if to be um more uh critical is taking the radical idea out of um um movements right so that uh making something that commoditized and I think this is what we observe a lot but now now now now a a um maybe a naive question again is what is the problem that the PMC I mean at the end they are not the capitalists they don't own the means of production um why are they a problem? Or are they not? They're just a description that there exists.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:50

Alright so from the okay on on the most superficial like um level of um catharsis and affect they produce a lot of lies that have nothing to do with the real problems that the majority of people in the US and Germany are facing and that level of distrust that their content produces within the public and political culture you know actually produces anger and reaction against anything any collective action that we could be taking for the good for good, right? Even if you're not revolutionary, even if you want just like you know reformist things, they can't even get reformist legislation passed in the United States. You know um the um build back better policies in in in Congress now being stalled because the Republicans are stalling the Democrats themselves aren't don't have a lot of um energy for that. So they stand in the way of even reformist social progress. But I feel like we are and I've written this like in a five alarm emergency on the level of climate on the level of inequality on the level of social unrest on the level of the um of corporate um malfeasance in the world and we need a change but the PMC stands in the way of change even though it pretends to be progressive. The other thing is that it has gotten really good at justifying the transfer of wealth from the bottom up in it's and um that transfer of wealth has been historic since the 70s and even if the top level like the 0.01% gets most of it they get enough of trickle down that this system of like horrific inequality suits them very, very well. And if we think of ourselves let's just think of ourselves not as Marxists but let's think of ourselves as Hegelians for the moment and think that you know human history should is human progress towards the emancipation of the majority of people, towards the aspiration of freedom and dignity for all universalize these universal values that the that you might say are too particular to the West I don't care. We we all want dignity freedom and the just sharing of the public treasure among the majority of human beings they stand in the way of that too. And part of that might be just like someone criticizing go, oh that's so universalist like some people may not want to be free you know what about blah blah blah by creating this kind of like pluralistic difference, dividing us up, it takes us out of this historic struggle. And then let's think about Marx then Marx says the workers have been degraded by the capitalist mode of production and in that sense the PMC it they're workers too and they've been exploited they've internalized the terms of their own exploitation to justify greater exploitation of other workers below them. And that in and of itself is a problem. So in a way we have to emancipate the PMC from its own objection towards the mission of the bosses and say let's not fire ourselves let's not exploit ourselves let's not keep ourselves up 247 to make a fucking PowerPoint for some idiot boss let's think about how we can use we can I guarantee the greatest flourishing for the greatest number of people not the greatest flourishing for the smallest number of people and you know there was a sense like even in sort of in the corporate compact after World War II they thought that they were doing that for their own male white workers that, you know, there was a kind of corporate contract with its employees that's been completely broken today, right? So we have to look at how can we look at make the PMC aware that they are workers just like other workers. I mean that's one thing that how can we break through this ideological fog that we live in like I'm not I don't I don't want them to be helping any workers worker agitation is coming up on its own. Let them just not stand in the way of worker unrest and let them understand that they're being exploited.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:19

Yeah I mean what you're explaining from a Hegelian perspective is retroactivity in terms of class consciousness in the moment when they when they have class consciousness retroactively they see the structural problems and then that would be helpful enough in so to say but um but but I think I think it's an interesting perspective but uh from a for from a PMC uh point of view they are uh profiting from the system currently they are not the bad guys um they can uh uh I don't know posit things like we need more uh equality and so on so forth um but uh at the same time uh it's kind of an uh interpassivity so yeah people are doing stuff look we are doing those great things and and and uh signaling virtue um but at the end they don't want the I mean why should they want change they don't they don't they don't want change right I mean that's that's not uh uh I mean they are in the best position you put you put your finger on it they don't they don't want to change they pretend they want change I doubt that they're in the best position Human but I think the understanding that you're in like sort of a hamster wheel we call it in German is sort of is not there yet because uh Catherine what you said earlier is you have to self-optimize right you have to keep up you have to keep signaling you have to do all these things you have and that in itself can be quite stressful right so people people are not relaxing being in the PMC people working hard at being in the PMC I I would I would even take it more radically and say that um it's it's hard for any worker to form like a strong sense of autonomous subjectivity and it's hard for the PMC to do that too there's a kind of fragmentation NOE in incapacity actually to have any kind of autonomous skeptical intellectual thoughts like this is or even have an emotional life that um is free from the demands of work.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:34

You know, because when you go on Tinder or grinder you're in the same swipe situation like people are really reduced by PMC values to this kind of like self-optimization self-optimized bot. They've also like in the book that I will I talk a little bit about but I'll talk more about in the next book they've also destroyed like professional managerial class childhood. I don't know if it's the same in Germany but there's so much anxiety in the elites about like the performance my toddler is he or she you know really as talented as the other toddler might have my friend's child speaks five languages but mine only speaks two. What's going on? Oh my God and they've actually destroyed and are destroying like one of the best parts about being human which is being around children and being a child. So they had their values have to be destroyed because they're actually destroying yeah I think that's actually the best argument.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:34

And I think this is where we're talking about the consciousness to to understand that this is what what happening is that they are in an ideological narrative which is postulating that there is progress. And and I think uh one part was quite resonating with me what you were explaining is that uh let's say first gents which I am one of because I'm a migrant so I am in this group and I remember when uh I was working at a bit a big consulting uh company and one point realizing but everyone in this company even the senior partners are fucked up I mean there is no good life here even if you have the best position in this company and and then I thought okay that means starting your own company yeah being startup and hustler and then you understand no it's even worse yeah because you think you don't have a boss no everything is now your boss everything is your boss yeah yeah oh that's a good way of putting it you think you don't have a boss no every boss if you don't have a boss everything is your boss time is your boss time has become your boss every client is your boss yeah in in this is this this is a uh a struggle which then is the question is then we're again in ideological state is how do you close those gaps right and I think what we observe in corporates is first of all high burnout rates right a lot of people having a lot of burnouts then there are two ways they can go even one is the consciousness or what happens a lot is digital detox uh taking uh vacation long vacations oh wellness wellness and wellness or oh now I have to do more mindfulness and doing yoga and meditation and workation and so on so forth like finding now different things who which is explaining your anxiety because you have now your purpose and your job and anything but the kernel of the truth that there is nothing behind the curtain this this doesn't go away right and this but but when they do this kind of digital detox and this self-care it's totally reified and commodified it has to be something they can buy it has to be something you can show off on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_03 1:43:52

But my question for you would be do they actually get better? Do they get over the burnout do they come back more motivated?

SPEAKER_01 1:43:59

Yeah to I mean is it a cure for burnout period of time I'm sure no it it is I'm actually I would be even bruter I think there are people who um who who uh who are able to transcend this by going more into like Buddhist ideology or Buddhist uh spirituality in this in the sense of I am just uh an entity in an ever changing world uh and uh like uh so they can like they they try to uh uh um decouple themselves like they spirit from their body and the reality which again for me is quite ideological and it leaves them politically passive right because basically it's about not about changing relative yeah you're completely relative it's a complete relativist worldview Trump is just a contingent thing which happened blah blah blah blah blah right like taking any accountability and responsibility from yourself uh which maybe has to happen if you don't have it in the first place because you are in this hamster wheel right most of the people do not really recover from burnout beyond like then living from vacation to vacation and one thing what really I'm observing a lot is that what happens is people have like a um they have a phase of like uh high performance they see oh look I I can uh have a great career blah blah blah to the point where they um burn out then having retreats and so on so forth and then always um running after the ideal which they had when they had this amazing peak performance but never getting and then always trying to to um um uh yeah to tweak and see how can I get better, how can I do better morning morning routines and so on so forth to get back to that imaginary ideal state which I used to have well I don't know years ago.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:54

And also the the image is if I just find something that I love then it will all be worth it, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:46:02

It's like if you At work.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:04

At work right like if I if I have a hobby that I can monetize I'll be best off right because then I will do what what I love and then it won't be stressful which I think is the biggest deceit in the history of the world like if you do something you love every day for money you will not love it very long.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:22

Like it will just not work. The underlying problem yeah no it's like Etsy turning every um maker into a peacemaker of the 19th century like let's just disperse the factory again and make your home the factory.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:37

And I mean if you want to like refurbish uh furniture and sell it on eBay do it. But please don't have the expectation that you need to be a girl boss girl bossing on Etsy by doing something that you can do it just means like people have given up changing their conditions at work.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:56

They're just um coping by using all these different um avoidance about the Buddhism thing with it which I think is so I don't know crazy um I tried to explain to a friend of mine years ago who she lived in she worked in corporate America and she was she had been burnt out she was embracing Buddhism and I said to her listen this is and she couldn't understand why I couldn't like affirm her on this because you know every Chinese family is kind of a syncretic Buddhist Confucius mix. And I go you know what it's as if let's say you immigrate to Beijing and you grow up there and suddenly you find in your 30s and 40s that all of your friends have really embraced Episcopalianism. I mean for Germans you have to say Lutheranism like all of your friends are totally into Lutheranism and they keep telling you how this is going to be the way to enlightenment they keep telling you how cool it is and you're like no it's not I grew up with this but nobody's hearing you because they just say oh you don't understand. Exactly exactly and like can you just put yourself in my position like everyone around me is just telling me that this is the way just try to go try to imagine yourself as an immigrant to Beijing having everyone tell you that Christianity is just an amazing religion. And um yeah it's so cool. Jesus Christ is like so cool he's really going to help you. And you're just sitting there going what what has happened? What is this?

SPEAKER_02 1:48:32

But it's also cherry picking everything right like it's oh uh so there's uh Ayurveda which I will now you do and there's meditation from somewhere that I will now do and everything just from far away seems better than anything that is now here to just calm the calm down.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:50

But it's this kind of self-management through exoticization of alternative religions that is like based on like what I was talking to you about before, which was like vanguard forms of consumerism as the way out of capitalist alienation.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:05

And also because earlier you said it's basically it's secular moralism, right? It's and I would say that in uh the Western world if you go, oh I'm I'm reading a book on Buddhism, it's not actually coined as a religion but rather as a self-optimization practice. And therefore it's okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:27

Yeah you know and therefore it is not spiritual or strange or irrational exactly and one one thing is I mean that's my uh subjective observation is that uh the Western form of communitarized Buddhism is quite compatible with the corporate and capitalism idea uh because it's like you are this you're you're decoupling yourself, right? Like this this uh universe and blah blah blah and does and this is quite works quite well if you work in a corporate where you maybe have to do decisions which are I don't know Not nice or whatever, then you can say, look, but that's uh now I'm that's this role, I'm distracted, blah, blah, blah.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:07

I'm detaching myself. Yeah, I'm detaching myself from the material world. And so, you know, in a way, what you know, the left, what the Marxism wants to do is reattach to the materialist conditions of both consciousness and production. And painful that as that may be, there's no way of avoiding that to understand how we've arrived at where we are. There's no escape. And all of these things that we're talking about are very, very well-cultivated PMC escape valves. And they really come after 68, you know, when the Western Western youth discovers the rest of the world and you know wants to throw away religion.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:47

So yes, and I think uh this has been a great, great podcast. Thank you all. Uh thank you. Thank you for talking to us and to talking to um all the the listeners about um about the PMC, about the ideas that come with it or do not come with it because they are ignored uh as historical. And um also I think basically the ending was already a perfect ending. What what you just said. Uh I recommend everybody to to read your book. We'll of course link it in the um description so everybody can find it. Um and we thank you a lot.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:25

And and the German um translation is coming out with the best end. And I'm sorry that I had to do English even though I was making fun of Germany for being the 51st date. I can't understand, I can understand most German, but I, you know, speaking is very funny. Like I'm like a five-year-old. So that's alright. Thank you for being here. It was great. All right, thank thanks so much. Thanks so much for everything.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:52

Money, money, I want more money. I want more. I don't even know why.