A game is haunting the office — the game of politics. Across the professional class, the players have joined in to oppose the game, but still choose to take it on its own terms: underleveling, insufficient recognition of talent, “living up to company principles.”
The professional class chafes against its bonds, but these are bonds of a new type: not complaints of shared squalor and collective struggle, but of ethics, of recognition, of influence — and, perhaps most importantly, of advancement.
It’s a pattern of workplace struggle erupting across the salaried industries: AI Ethics researcher Dr. Timnit Gebru was fired from Google last year after pushing for publication of a paper critical of her employer. A new Gimlet podcast series on the toxic culture at Bon Appetit magazine led to the podcast itself reckoning with its own demons.
A common strain of the American Affairs left positions this Professional Managerial Class uprising as distracting from “real” working class movements — nothing more than the Worst Class which accumulates virtue like Marx’s Moneybags hoards surplus value, whining and braying in its “opportunist” fashion as a “multiply-articulated assemblage” of adaptation and shifting allegiance in place of a class character.
But these critiques can feel a bit knee-jerk and ungenerous in their analysis. To me, this “professional rebellion” demonstrates that the professional class may be finally be developing a character, but that class character is struggling to escape the history and language of competition, meritocracy, and virtue that were foundational to its development.
What the professional class becomes is an open question, and one that any member of this “Worst Class” should take seriously in following and developing.
What is a professional?
In trying to develop an analysis of professional-class rebellion, we must first define the class in question. We can distinguish a class by two factors: its shared form of activity within production, and its position within the broader social relations of production.
Jeff Schmidt’s Disciplined Minds provides a great exploration of the “ideological work” of the professional class, which can be distinguished from nonprofessional labor in its requirement that those who perform it must develop creative solutions within ill-defined, but nevertheless very strong boundaries:
Professionals sell to their employers more than their ordinary labor power, their ability to carry out instructions. They also sell their ideological labor power, their ability to extend those instructions to new situations (…) Those in charge can trust professionals to make some decisions that must be made ideologically; nonprofessionals are trusted to make only decisions that can be made mechanically. Professionals implement their employers’ attitudes as well as their employers’ lists of instructions; nonprofessionals are only required to implement the instructions.
To Schmidt, it’s the political component of professional work that defines the class’ activity, and also much of its alienation:
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction is the professionals lack of control over the “political” component of his or her creative work (...) Today’s disillusioned professionals entered their fields expecting to do work that would “make a difference” in the world and add meaning to their lives (…) In fact, professional education and employment push people to accept a role in which they do not make a significant difference, a politically subordinate role.
Just as capitalism appropriates the productive capacity of human labor for a system outside of the worker’s control, so too does professional work rob the professional worker of the human creative capacity involved in production. And, as Schmidt argues, this creative capacity is deeply tied up in the work of navigating and mediating contradictory social forces, for the benefit of one’s employer.
Professionals look beneath the surface of their technical work and see a world of contending social forces. Where the nonprofessional might see only technical details, the professional sees sides of debates being supported, points of view being advanced and interests being served. Professionals are extremely sensitive to the underlying issues, and little subtext slips by them unnoticed.
In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Friedrich Engels outlines a broad process of capitalist social development in which the accumulation of capital and development into larger and larger joint ventures begins to show the historical obsolescence of the capitalist class itself.
At the beginning of capitalism’s development, the bourgeoisie held a creative and revolutionary role in casting off the shackles of feudalism. By organizing production not as isolated single-proprietor workshops or plots of land, but with many people working side-by-side or in interconnected specialized processes, the bourgeoisie of early capitalist development unlocked a new productive power. But this development contains a deep antagonism between the increasingly social nature of production and the individual appropriation of that social process by individual producers:
This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all important fields of production and in all manufacturing countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residuum, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialized production with capitalistic appropriation.
Then, as this contradiction develops further including crises of production and rebellions within the factories, the increasingly social nature of production develops into the establishment of major social institutions built to manage these massive accumulations of productive force:
The period of industrial high pressure, with its unbounded inflation of credit, not less than the crash itself, by the collapse of great capitalist establishments, tends to bring about that form of the socialization of great masses of the means of production which we meet with in the different kinds of joint-stock companies (...) The whole of a particular industry is turned into one gigantic joint-stock company; internal competition gives place to the internal monopoly of this one company.
But, crucially, the actual people doing this social management are no longer the owners of capital but salaried employees carrying out this process as part of their hired labor:
If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies, trusts, and State property, show how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first, the capitalistic mode of production forces out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus-population.
With this in mind, we can define the professional class as those who perform the social functions of the shrinking bourgeoisie in designing and managing production, but without the relations of ownership that define that class.
This class is then socially conditioned to identify with the capitalists, either through ideological apparatuses like higher education, or systems that serve to mask the antagonism by offering:
Opportunities for advancement within the system — the selection of a “chosen few” lower-ranked employees given the opportunity to take on greater responsibility
Compensation that is tied, at least loosely, to the performance of the company — think startup founders and employees who are more akin to employees of venture capital firms than capitalists themselves, paid below-market wages augmented with the promise of ascension to the capitalist class if their company is successful
Signals of personal moral virtue, with the opportunity to consider oneself as embodying a higher level of self-actualization than the working class
Fits and starts toward class character
But the professional class’ social identification with the capitalists seems to be slipping, at least among a certain segment. Lower-level employees started an internal firestorm at Bon Appetit around the consistent lack of advancement opportunities for people of color. Employees at Google formed a union calling for “solidarity, democracy, and social and economic justice.”
But while these movements towards class organization represent genuine progress towards the professional class recognizing the contradictions inherent in its own formation, the forms this struggle takes are heavily conditioned by the language used by that class in its ordinary activity. Professional rebellion is held back by its own inability to reckon with its true role in production and the limitations of professional-style activity to achieve the goals it sets out for itself.
Centering “talent” and personal advancement
Much of the rebellion at companies like Bon Appetit and Google starts with real problems of exploitation. This includes universally-applicable working condition issues (long hours, low pay, alienation from the products of labor), and ways in which those issues are distributed in lopsided ways against certain groups, generally through people of color being systematically denied the opportunity to escape these issues by advancing to a higher tier of work.
But much of the ways these conditions are discussed, particularly the firing of Drs. Timnit Gebru and Meg Mitchell from Google, reifies the fetishism of personal advancement and situates the problem not as one of exploitation and collective struggle, but as an obstacle to the personal advancement or good work of singularly talented professionals.
Here we see the limits of “talent” as an object for analysis. The company itself claims to hire talented people and let them do good work, but since these people are prevented from doing their talented work, this shows the hypocrisy of the company.
It’s important to note here that this hypocrisy is absolutely a real one! Google as a company is only invested in talent so far as it helps its bottom line, and its claims otherwise are obviously disingenuous. But if the “solution” is posited as getting out of the way of these talented professionals, this moves the conversation away from the company’s bottom line and the systems that reinforce it, and towards a recapitulation of the very meritocracy and competition between individuals that defines the professional class’ activity in production.
Language of “trauma” and retribution
The discussion of the problems within these professional workplaces is then articulated in what Catherine Liu calls “the language of visibility, managerialism, and an instrumentalized and reified notion of trauma.”
“We have this new ‘visibilization of trauma’ as part of a way of moving the conversation away from the fundamental ravages of socioeconomic inequality, the destruction of working class life, the destruction of the future that capitalism has wrought in the United States,” Liu said on a recent episode of the global politics podcast Aufhebunga Bunga. “And we displace it onto these distinct traumatic events for which we then demand reparation, we demand justice.”
Responding to her point, show host Philip Cunliffe noted that AOC’s Instagram live explication of her personal trauma during the January 6 riots is then used to develop a call for more state violence. An articulation of these struggles over working conditions as personal traumas to be repaired can be counterproductive in that it distracts us from the real contradictions and collective stake professionals have in protection from retaliatory firings or agitating for better compensation.
But where Liu and others seem to see in this language of “trauma” a system of professional-class virtue hoarding and characterless opportunism, I see a class hitting up against the limitations of its own language. It’s worth noting that the collective aspect of this struggle is not entirely absent: both Meg Mitchell’s discussion of her firing and Eric Edding’s exposure of a toxic workplace environment at Gimlet come in the context of unionization drives that they are part of; Mitchell as a member of the newly-formed Alphabet Worker’s Union, and Edding discussing his negative experience with PJ Vogt and Sruthi Pinnamaneni as the Gimlet union was forming.
Narratives of trauma and personal growth are deeply-baked into the cultural language of the professional class. Though the power of this language within professional organizing circles is something that needs to be worked through, I think it would be silly to expect a class so trained in self-analysis and self-promotion to lose its attachment to these cultural forms overnight. The important question is whether the structures of organization the professionals are building have the capacity to break that attachment.
Rejection of majority struggle
The crucial point of departure that seems to be at play in many professional organizing drives is a differing opinion on the transformative power of collective, majority-conditioned struggle. This is particularly visible in the “minority union” structure established by the Alphabet Worker’s Union, and differing accounts in public statements about why it’s being established this way.
A minority or (“solidarity”) union, which starts to develop collective power before being able to win a workplace majority, can be a useful tool for organizing under adverse conditions. And one could easily argue that a company of 200,000 mostly-remote workers like Alphabet is an incredibly adverse condition for union organizing. But as Dominic King writes, the need to build toward majority actions can easily be lost in the hubub around “collective” struggle:
There is a danger here that minority unionism today will simply be “union” minoritarianism. Rather than the carefully identified leaders so crucial to building majority support, a mere handful of activists is sufficient to form a minority union. This is not William Z. Foster’s “militant minority,” working within already existing mass organizations to radicalize them, but rather a grouplet of self-identified workplace “radicals” for whom winning majorities is not even an explicit goal, let alone a necessary precondition for the exertion of real power.
The demands described in the Times article certainly seem quite different from the traditional bread-and-butter workplace demands. Tech workers gravitate toward things like banning Trump from their platforms and gender and racial equity within their companies, two demands to which many Silicon Valley executives are probably quite sympathetic—unlike, of course, higher wages, the imposition of “just cause” for discharge, a binding workplace grievance procedure, contractually mandated shop-floor rights, and ultimately more democratic control over the workplace. In the case of demands for informal and extralegal tech censorship over ideologues like Trump, insofar they result in the narrowing of the space for the exercise of civic liberties as a whole, one might even deem this expression of workplace “antagonism” a kind of class collaboration.
In place of “union minoritarianism”, Dominic King advocates in favor of a “collective strategy forged… not around a common identification but rather common interests and priorities.”
This ambivalence towards majority power can be seen all over the place within professional organizing circles.
A former draft of the FAQs for the newly-formed Medium Workers Union argued that “it’s easy for democratic systems to lead to a tyranny of the majority.” When asked by Bloomberg how the Alphabet Workers Union can make executives do anything without the power of collective bargaining, an organizer responded that “sometimes it just takes a small group of workers coming together and talking to the right 10 people in management or spreading the right email.”
Core to socialist theory is the transformative power of the working class’ shared interest in overturning the capitalist mode production. This isn’t to say that the majority of workers organically hold revolutionary Marxist views, but that the end goal of an organizer needs to remain rooted in developing and exerting power on behalf of the majority of society. Professional-class organizers abandon majority struggle at their peril. To do so can only be a solvent for the type of solidarity needed to bring about the very change many of the professional-class “radicals” claim to be interested in.
When River writes for Twink Revolution on the risk of “left-wing blowhards who would sell their grandmother’s Medicare card to see themselves on the front page of the Huffington Post,” we must reckon with the logic instilled in the professional class that front-page exposure is itself a step towards Medicare For All.
What’s next
Though I share the analysis of Catherine Liu, Dominic King, and others that the prospects for these professional rebellions are not exactly promising, I urge an ounce of caution in denouncing them out of hand. I hold a growing sense that the “characterless” professional class may be finally growing a character, but the nature of that character remains up-for-grabs. Whether these contradictory positions and strategic dead-ends are growing pains toward real, effective struggle or simply signs of the class’ ultimate rotten nature is, to me, an open question.
The professional class is a living testament that the capitalist class has outlived its usefulness, as the social functions of ideology and management are increasingly held by salaried employees. In order to carry that testament to its logical conclusion, professionals must acknowledge that it is not their individual virtue and talent that puts them in that role, but the historical necessity of a new system of production. That will require the professionals to let down the ladders and bring all the working classes onboard the ship so we can all decide, collectively, where to steer it.