https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tFtR-ZYafo
I love some materialist Marxist critique. But hey I also like non-materialist post-structuralist critique!
If I am able to follow Catherine Liu's theory, and I doubt I can, if a programmer refuses a managerial track, then they are still part of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) but just at the bottom.
If we use the PMC definition as workers who do not use their body to labor, I wonder if we have a real understanding of these jobs. For a long time, I have considered that the oft characterized white collar programmer job is at some levels more blue or grey than white. There is a body denying aspect of being strapped to a keyboard that feels like it takes a toll on the body. I have envy of all my embodied contractor (not tech) friends even as they become less able in old age but are making the same wages. Tech nerds late in life often start using their body again to recover what was lost. In her book 2021, Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, Catherine describes the hoax called the Sokal Affair, perpetrated by a physicist who praised postmodern ideas as being reflective of advanced science which then was celebrated by postmodern journalists, not knowing they had been put on. The post-modern journalists did not really understand advanced science. I don't know if Catherine is a secret coder... but I wonder if she understands this class of workers very well. As she describes it, the PMC's value product is appropriate empathy at the appropriate time and that will be among the last things the AI does well. Maybe AI eats the PMC, and automation eats the working class? The bottom rung of PMC is implementing automation for the capitalists. The upper echelon of PMC is creating the AI tech to obsolete the entire PMC?
The one thing the Neo Liberals and these Socialists have in common is they always apologize for anecdotal evidence.