Radicalised Bureaucracies

The New Guardians of Progress

Abandoned auditorium, Université Val-Benoît, Liege, Belgium. Image courtesy of: Reddit. r/abandoned

Over the last half decade or so, there has been a resurgence of interest in the idea of the Professional Managerial Class. PMC motives and activities have been scrutinised from multiple vantage points and using a range of labels. Identifying the PMC as the “professional bourgeoisie”—comprising “lawyers, doctors, professors, K-12 teachers, journalists, nonprofit workers, and many of the clergy”—Michael Lind positions them as one component part of an “overclass” that has “run amok” since the 1970s. This overclass, he writes, has carried out a systematic assault on both the economic foundations and “cultural dignity” of the working class, leading eventually to an international “populist rebellion.”¹ Nancy Fraser interprets these events in terms of what she calls “progressive neoliberalism.” Reducing what had formerly been expansive ideals of social liberation to the self-serving slogans of “meritocracy, diversity, and empowerment” in the culture industries and corporate workplace, the progressive-aligned professions entered into a virtual alliance with “Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood.” Over the course of the 1990s, hollow PMC ideals of “diversity and empowerment” ultimately came to provide cover for ruthless neoliberal economic policies, which “devastated manufacturing” and permanently blighted millions of what had been “once middle-class lives.”²

For Catherine Liu, writing in Virtue Hoarders, the PMC are essentially middlemen and moral rent-seekers. Strategically positioning themselves as the agents of change or dispensers of “help,” they instead convert working-class desires for economic emancipation into essentially moral or cultural problems, soluble ultimately in the realms of symbolism, rhetoric, and representation.³ Emphasising the complexity of any issue, the PMC advocate for the construction of ever-expanding, PMC-staffed bureaucracies—and ever-ramifying forms of PMC expertise—to address them. Shunning mere material redistribution as reductive, exclusionary, or perhaps even “bro-ish,” they focus instead on the symbolic recognition of minority-group interests. Members of historically oppressed groups appointed to board-member or CEO positions become “role models” or signifiers of wider group “uplift.”⁴ Positive representations of marginalised identity groups on screen or on the page, meanwhile, become forms of “redress” or way-stations in an ongoing “historical reckoning” for past wrongs. Writing in forums like The New Yorker or The London Review of Books, the symbolic analysts of the PMC in turn explain how these representations are “doing the work” of historical reparation, while inevitably suggesting that such a project has “only just begun” and that “much more, of course, remains to do.”

The recent spate of PMC critique has often focused on the issues of manners, mores, and orientations. Liu represents her book as a “polemical account of [PMC] morals,” the point of which is to “weaken its power over the way we think about politics.”⁵ Fraser similarly identifies what she calls the “confidence” that “progressive professionals and symbolic workers” have “that they represent the advance guard of humanity’s progression to moral cosmopolitanism and cognitive enlightenment.”⁶ Echoing Liu’s accusation that the PMC elite seem to regard themselves as “the most culturally and affectively advanced people in human history,” Fraser writes that:

This sense of cultural superiority has been central to this stratum’s identity and posture. But it also functions as a Bourdieusian strategy of “distinction,” imbuing progressive neoliberalism with a superior “tone,” which has devolved all too easily into moralizing, finger-pointing, and talking down to rural and working-class people, with the insinuation that they were culturally backward or stupid.⁷

Sceptical analyses of PMC critiques have sometimes attributed their negativity purely to intra-PMC political divisions. For Gabriel Winant, the revival of anti-PMC discourse in the mid-2010s was largely an outgrowth of disagreements between the rival support bases of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. “The PMC,” from this angle, is simply a snippet of old sociological discourse taken out of its theoretical context by Bernie Bros, Dirtbag Leftists, and other assorted Chapo Trap House listeners and reforged into a convenient rhetorical slur to aim at Warren voters.⁸ The ideological breadth and relative longevity of the “PMC discourse” resurgence—as well as its uptake and reception well beyond American borders—suggest, however, that there are larger and more resilient issues at stake than a simple squabble between rival factions within the Democratic Party. The various flavours of revived PMC critique are best seen as responses to—and attempts to make sense of—a nexus of interrelated cultural and economic phenomena stemming from the behaviour, activities, and outsized influence of PMC elites and elite aspirants.

The accelerating standardisation of (and sensitivity to) language and morality that we have witnessed over the past decade—the viral spread throughout the culture of a kind of pseudo-academic cant composed of decontextualised snippets of ’90s and ’00s academic theory, such as “intersectional,” “decolonise,” “positionality,” “performative,” “privilege,” and “problematise”—is one marker of PMC influence. As quotations from “French Theory” did in the ’80s and ’90s, these collocations act as status markers for those who use them, ways of demonstrating one’s ease with the new terminology and (thus) one’s degree of cultural capital.⁹ On another level, however, this new lingua franca enables a variety of rhetorical and expert strategies. It can imbue whatever it is applied to with a kind of charisma, drawing it into a shared cultural orbit of progress, uplift, and moral righteousness. The recent campaigns by both established institutions (schools and universities) and recreational affinity groups (hiking and knitting) to “decolonise” their practices fit this profile.¹⁰

These campaigns (and the policy documents and statements associated with them) confer a kind of quasi-spiritual seriousness on their operations via a synchronised process of renewal and recuperation. Each participant in the activist network joins a virtual congregation of other institutions, each committed to “doing the work.”¹¹ A dynamic of acceleration emerges as institutions or associations encourage each other to produce ever yet more “serious” statements of moral commitment via the feedback mechanisms of their interlinked social media accounts. The imperatives involved— “decolonise!”; “make your practices more intersectional!”—meanwhile, invite or assume the guidance of ever-accumulating layers of PMC experts and systems of knowledge production and intellectual surveillance.

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The "new managerialism" imposed on institutions by the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s brought with it its own global lingua franca. Institutions and professions globally were compelled to reimagine themselves in the language of “excellence,” “accountability,” “transparency,” “efficiency,” "value for money," and “impact on the community.”¹² Under the terms of the new "audit culture," every aspect of both workplace and worker became calculable and subject to rating, ranking, and continuous assessment. The adoption of new workplace practices like external benchmarking and the performance review brought each individual worker under the panoptic gaze of an ever-expanding workplace bureaucracy. A managerial template that was exported across the public sector during this period, audit culture resulted in a stifling uniformity. Every new sector "colonised" by audit logic began to assume the same shape, the same bloodless and technical languages, the same practices.¹³ Whatever was distinctive or special about the institution before its subjection to the culture of audit began to wither away. These organisational changes were reflected on the micro-level of "inner life," as professionals assimilated the new languages and assumptions into speech and habit. As one university dean remarked to a colleague in the mid-2000s, "I keep finding myself using words like 'continuous improvement', 'performance', and 'outcomes' even though I hate this management-speak."¹⁴

The new managerial cliques ascendant within institutions in the 2020s have begun to speak in rather different terms. Cultural organisations and universities no longer restrict themselves to the bloodlessly technocratic language of the new managerialism, preferring instead to describe internal reforms and new staffing policies in the moralised and insistent vocabulary of Critical Social Justice: equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-"hate." A new ethically inflected culture of legitimation is emerging. “Passion,” "inclusivity," and a sense of moral “commitment” to “radical change” replace “value for money” and “cost effectiveness” as the external justifications for an institution’s future right to exist. These changes in keywords ultimately reflect the evolving nature of neoliberalism itself—its ability to both absorb (and redirect) external critique for its own purposes, as well as its increasing attention to the moral and ethical dimensions of capitalism, visible most prominently in the areas of climate change and the emerging (and highly lucrative) “environmental crisis industry.”¹⁵ The political and managerial exploitation of the state of moral emergency has become the norm. People are now conditioned to accepting radical changes in their working lives (and severe assaults on their standards of living) as long as these are packaged as the natural and appropriate responses to a pressing existential crisis.¹⁶

Threatened institutions, as Jean Baudrillard once observed, become adept at "speak[ing] of themselves through denial"; of "simulating" their own "death, to escape their real death throes." In this way, he writes, "power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy."¹⁷ The apparently transmogrified, newly "legitimate" artistic and academic institutions of the 2020s claim to be undergoing moral and ethical transformations much more profound and meaningful than the merely technocratic reforms and restructurings of the classic neoliberal period. By performatively confronting "past evils," including (most strikingly) their own former missions and operations, they claim to be joining the right side of history. A public confession of past wrongs committed, and "harm" inflicted, enables them to engage in "healing," renewal, and self-legitimation via the processes of "reflection" and "self-examination." It is as though bureaucracy has "got religion." Old works are judged by newly streamlined presentist standards. New publicity statements are issued and "ambitious" new internal policies and procedures put in place.¹⁸ By engaging in sustained self-critique, institutions seek to occupy all points of view, including marginal and oppositional ones.¹⁹ In this way, they can renew their moral foundations via a disavowal of their own authority. They become institutions whose power and legitimacy lie precisely in compelling others to confront "institutional power."

Despite the often overwhelmingly emotive and radically therapeutic rhetorics involved, however, these bodies seem set to continue working within the broader logics of audit culture and professional-managerial control. That is, they will continue to reduce complex problems of economics and social justice to the much more simple "problematics" of language, symbolism, and metrication. “If,” as François Cusset writes, “signs are all that remain,” then it follows that “social problems can be resolved in text.”²⁰ Social justice can be administered via the interpretive labour of "representation" and "recognition" carried out though the timely and expert interventions of credential-bearing symbolic analysts.²¹ This belief system is (understandably) intoxicatingly attractive to elements within a professional-managerial class that have seen their material prospects decline (and the competition for spaces among their ranks greatly increase) since the financial crisis of 2008.²² It reframes administration and bureaucracy in the far more compelling languages of justice, reparation, and moral mission, suggesting that symbol manipulation has the potential for radical (even revolutionary) praxis.

Abandoned lecture hall, Université Val-Benoît, Liege, Belgium. Image: Twitter, @alexdumarey (23 April 2018).

In their moral seriousness, today's self-consciously radicalising professionals bear more than a passing resemblance to the PMC radicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Confronted with a litany of political failure—the dissipation of the anti-war street protest movement; the defeat of Left candidates at the ballot box and the rise of the reactionary Right; the general retreat from what had (briefly) seemed to be pre-revolutionary conditions—PMC elements at the tail end of the '60s instead turned to the universities and the professions to effect radical social change. In doing so, they directed their "self-contempt," generational anger, and the moral disgust stemming from their own complicity in the system against the institutions of which they were a part.²³ Yet, as Barbara and John Ehrenreich observe, they ultimately found such critical postures "difficult ... to sustain." An open hostility towards institutions on behalf of their own employees (what the Ehrenreichs call "negative class consciousness"), despite a brief period of radical chic, did not survive the economic doldrums of the early 1970s.²⁴ At best, idealistic young PMCs found themselves directed into institutional policy making in areas such as affirmative action, their critical energies finally (and decisively) absorbed by the system itself.²⁵

Generalising about the history of American radicalism from the vantage point of 1969, Christopher Lasch observed that,

the radical dissociation of the young from the adult world is no mere political fashion of the moment; it is a built-in feature of societies in which the institutional links between generations have broken down.²⁶

The current moment of academic and professional-class radicalism bears many of the same hallmarks. Confronted by a series of political failures and unresolved material crises—the demise of the 2010s populist left in the US and the UK with the final defeats of Sanders and Corbyn; the collapse of the academic job market; the global student debt crisis; the failure of street protest movements to bring about single-payer health care (in the US) or an end to the student fees regime (in the UK); the emergence and political success of Right populism; the growing sense of an existential "climate emergency"—energies on the progressive Left have again turned inwards, against the "reality-defining" institutions in an idealistic attempt to define a new reality. A sense of generational betrayal (on one hand) and utopian renewal (on the other) abounds. To judge by the some of the rhetoric involved, a truly revolutionary prospect seems to lie ahead: the rise of the liberatory institution; the bureaucracy of radical love and self-care. Yet, given the available historical precedents, and the persistence of the audit culture model within the institutions themselves, how much will really change?

Cynically surveying the self-confounding hypocrisies of academic anti-institutionalism in the late 1990s, Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant remarked that, "cultural imperialism (American or otherwise) never imposes itself better than when it is served by progressive intellectuals" who perceive themselves to be working in the interests of the marginalised.²⁷ Although they pose as critiques of capitalism, the moralising managerial techniques and new social norms championed by the New New Left seem like intensifications rather than negations of neoliberal audit culture. In their zeal to address "misrepresentations," these new programmes not only displace issues of economic redistribution into the arena of culture.²⁸ They also involve a radically simplifying vision of the world—a bureaucratic "heads-up display"—in which social change can be effected via a kind of cultural reformatting or "database engineering."²⁹ While the old neoliberalism operated under the mantra of TINA (there is no alternative), its contemporary progressive counterpart recalls what Baudrillard called "the unchecked proliferation of the Good." This regime displays "a radical will to do good without opposition" while labelling any resistance to its precepts with a wildly emotive language of moral opprobrium and harm attribution.³⁰ It is a culture of the Same that is deeply hostile to genuine Otherness even as it employs a surface rhetoric of "embracing diversity."

Working on the terrain of emotion, belief, and perception itself, today's moral audit culture represents a radical new form of neoliberal transparency, one predicated on an ongoing (and perhaps endless) process of self-exposure (and self-implication).³¹ In this way, progressive ideals of norm-breaking and radical borderlessness promise instead to unleash a system of total (and tyrannical) transparency. Such a regime, as the sociologist David Ashley observes, is inherently expansionary. Its versions of "inclusivity" and the "responsibility to protect" recognise no legitimate boundaries to their own power, enabling "organisational rationality to breach and to colonise what used to be regarded as private, 'inner', or morally autonomous domains of feeling and subjectivity" in the interests of full (moral) disclosure.³² Imperialising technocracies never operate more efficiently than when they can pose as the "guardians of progress" and "the legitimate definers of the common good."³³ What better form of imperial power, then, than the "decolonial" one—that which obstinately refuses to recognise that it is an empire at all?

1. Michael Lind, “The Double Horseshoe Theory of Class Politics,” The Bellows (16 July 2020); Michael Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite (New York: Atlantic, 2020), pp. 131-2.

2. Nancy Fraser, “The End of Progressive Neoliberalism,” Dissent (2 January 2017); Nancy Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond,” American Affairs, 1:4 (2017), pp. 48-9.

3. Catherine Liu, Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), pp. 1-2.

4. Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Trouble with Uplift”, The Baffler, 41 (September 2018).

5. Liu, Virtue Hoarders, p. 6.

6. Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), p. 208.

7. Liu, Virtue Hoarders, p. 4; Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism, p. 208.

8. Gabriel Winant, “Professional-Managerial Chasm,” n+1 Magazine (10 October 2019).

9. David Brooks, “Blame the Bobos,” The Atlantic (September 2021), p. 64.

10. For a perceptive and revealing account of these dynamics, see Ryan Grim, “Elephant in the Zoom,” The Intercept (13 June 2022).

11. See Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora, “Today, the Self is the Battlefield of Politics. Blame Michel Foucault,” The Guardian (15 June 2021), and Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora, “Politics as a Confession: Confronting the Enemy Within,” Political Theology (2022), pp. 1-16.

12. See Cris Shore and Susan Wright, “Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education,” in Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy, edited by Marilyn Strathern (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 60.

13. Cris Shore and Susan Wright, “Audit Culture Revisited: Rankings, Ratings, and the Reassembling of Society,” Current Anthropology, 56:3 (2015), pp. 423; 425.

14. Cris Shore, “Audit Culture and Illiberal Governance: Universities and the Politics of Accountability,” Anthropological Theory, 8:3 (2008), p. 283.

15. See, for instance, Thomas Raymen and Oliver Smith, “The Post-Covid Future of the Environmental Crisis Industry and its Implications for Green Criminology and Zemiology,” Journal of Contemporary Crime, Harm, and Ethics, 1:1 (2021), pp. 63-87, and Simon Winlow and Emma Winlow, “Is the Neoliberal Era Coming to an End? Ideology, History and Macroeconomic Change in the Shadow of COVID-19,” Journal of Contemporary Crime, Harm, and Ethics, 2:1 (2022), pp. 1-23. See also the essays in the special section on “Bureaucratization of Utopia,” edited by Julie Billaud and Jane K. Cowan, Social Anthropology, 28:1 (2020).

16. Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 96.

17. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 19.

18. For commentaries on this vein of recent institutional rhetoric and practice, see Alice Gribbin, “The Great Debasement,” Tablet Magazine (26 May 2022); Alexander Adams, Artivism: The Battle for Museums in the Era of Postmodernism (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2022); Helen Lewis, “The Scapegoat,” The Atlantic (November 2022), pp. 58-68; Geoff Shullenberger, “No Night at the Museum,” Compact Magazine (29 November 2022); and Alastair Sooke, “Is the Universal Museum about to Become a Thing of the Past?”, Daily Telegraph (29 November 2022), p. 8.

19. Cf. Jean Baudrillard and Aude Lancelin, “The Matrix Decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur Interview With Jean Baudrillard,” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 1:2 (2004).

20. François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, translated by Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 155.

21. Cf. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition,” New Left Review, 3 (2000), p. 107.

22. On the political affiliations and affects of the downwardly mobile PMC, see Hans-Georg Betz, “Postmodernism and the New Middle Class,” Theory, Culture & Society, 9 (1992), pp. 106-8; Winant, “Professional-Managerial Chasm”; and Julius Krein, “The Real Class War,” American Affairs, 3:4 (2019), pp. 158; 160-1.

23. Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Knopf, 1969), p. 31.

24. Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, “The New Left: A Case Study in Professional-Managerial Class Radicalism,” Radical America, 11:3 (1977), pp. 15-17.

25. Paul Piccone, “Artificial Negativity as a Bureaucratic Tool? Reply to Roe,” Telos, 86 (1990), pp. 127-40.

26. Lasch, Agony of the American Left, pp. 30-1.

27. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” Theory, Culture & Society, 16:1 (1999), p. 51.

28. Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition,” p. 107.

29. Cf. David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (London: Melville House, 2015), p. 46; and Thomas Raymen, The Enigma of Social Harm: The Problem of Liberalism (London: Routledge, 2023), pp. 202-8.

30. Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power, translated by Ames Hodges (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2010), pp. 109-10.

31. Marilyn Strathern, “The Tyranny of Transparency,” British Educational Research Journal, 26:3 (2000), p. 312.

32. David Ashley, History Without a Subject: The Postmodern Condition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 201.

33. Hansfried Kellner and Peter L. Berger, “Life-style Engineering: Some Theoretical Reflections,” in Hidden Technocrats: The New Class and New Capitalism, edited by Hansfried Kellner and Frank W. Heuberger (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992), p. 11.