To me they're like mere servants of the State, like Lenin talked about in "2. What is to Replace the Smashed State Machine?" in his writing "The State and Revolution"
Under Capitalism, they are its privileged knights that try to deflect and control, if not defend directly its image as "the only option", who have their incentive in doing so, with their class status stake being in their duty to shepherd the means of production and its resulting benefits
However, they don't own the means of production, as they merely manage it for the landholding, industrialist, and financier capitalists
On the other hand, under Socialism, while its privileges will be probably be done away, the PM class on its own would innovated upon, for their new duty of overseeing, managing, and reporting the collectivized cooperatives and state-owned enterprises..
Until the final stage of Communism arrives, I think they're pretty handy
I say this, because I hear such disgusted sentiment in Hexbear against them
Is the PMC an actual class? Anarchists think so. Some labor organizers think so (especially those with anarchist tendencies). But the PMC are non-owners. They are more akin to petite bourgeoisie, but with even less reason to be reactionary.
Under socialism, I would like to see the responsibility of oversight and reporting to be through elected representative managers, not overseers - elected by the workers from among their peers, based on those who show the greatest potential for reducing the chaos of work through empathy forged in lived experience.
The PMC has changed over the last century, and it has many segments. Many who would be considered a sort of the PMC are actually intellectual workers solving abstract problems and then trying to implement those solutions in real conditions. I don't know that it makes sense to treat it as a real class.
Who even came up with the term "professional managerial class" anyway? Like are we not allowed to have professionals managers under socialism?
Lenin and Engels used the term labor aristocracy, which is much clearer and to the point anyway.
It's definitely used by anarchists to build a false equivalency between socialism and capitalism because they both have managers who tell you what to do.
PMC are part of the labour aristocracy
Nearly anyone not involved in manufacturing or extraction in the imperial core are part of the labor aristocracy - marketers, influencers, actors, writers, etc.
Hm, you've seem to have done more homework on that work of Lenin I mentioned than me, congrats...
I'll keep that in mind...
And yet so long as they aren't petty proprietors themselves their relationship to production is proletarian, just as it would be if they were a doctor or an engineer.
There's an argument that the PMC doesn't use the means of production and are therefore distinct from the proletariat like the lumpenproletariat are.
Whose argument is that?
Anarchists mostly. I think Malatesta writes about it