Against the Managers

The left may prefer to talk about a supposed “precarization,” of the college educated, and the right may be more comfortable talking about ”useless college degrees,” but neither side denies the facts on the ground: that for some time now, the West has been using a massive expansion of higher education to create a new class of functionaries—”knowledge-workers” and would-be managers—in numbers far in excess of what the labor market can or could absorb. Yet, it is only just now that we are seeing, with clear eyes, that this class of people (which, again, nobody denies the existence of) might begin acting as a class.

One could argue we’ve been here before. During the Springtime of Nations that swept Europe in 1848, the students of Vienna were enduring their own “lost decade,” and were consequently far more militant and revolutionary than the workers they presumed to speak for. To be a student in Vienna back then usually meant graduating into a job with the imperial bureaucracy. But the job market for that line of work had been dismal for some time, owing to years of strained financials within the Austrian empire. Of course, the speed by which revolution spread through Europe in 1848 couldn’t be due to “French cultural imperialism” alone. New ideas about constitutionalism and national liberation spread most rapidly in places where conditions were just right (Germany, Italy, Hungary, etc), and fizzled out in places where they weren’t (the United States, Great Britain).

Rather than try to pin the blame on American television, or even social media, it behooves us to recognize that the conditions for this new “Springtime of the Managers” are just as ripe in London and Berlin as they are in Portland and New York City. What we have now on the left and right—on both sides of the Atlantic—is an open and bitter class war. It is a conflict between a growing cadre of imperial lords and the peasantry they hope to subjugate; between the managers and petty nobility of the much-prophesied “knowledge economy” and those they aim to manage.

Just as few took the existence of this class of people seriously, no one took the existence of this class war seriously until recently. The left was forced to outright deny it because they were already on the side against the working classes, and any acknowledgment of that fact would destroy their legitimacy. What is East Germany, without Communism? Nothing; it is merely part of greater Germany. The left faced a similar dilemma, and so the charade, emptied of all class conflicts in favor of “cultural” ones, had to be maintained.

Meanwhile, a minority of left intellectuals have already begun jettisoning ideological ties to a people it no longer belonged to or recognized. In the UK, thinkers like Paul Mason diligently sought to replace workers with young (educated) people who have a smartphone as the natural constituency of the left. In the US, Nathan J. Robinson, the publisher of Current Affairs magazine, pleaded for the left to finally abandon Marxism and historical materialism in favor of couching its arguments in moral terms. These characters were, almost without exception, mocked and ridiculed. But time has vindicated them. It is now clear that they took heat not because they suggested a new and different strategy, but because they were advancing the end to the left’s doublespeak and doublethink. The left had long since abandoned the workers; Mason and Robinson were merely preparing the ideological contingency plan for when the workers would abandon the left, as has now well and truly happened.