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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE PARTY OF BARISTAS  
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Gabriel Winant
September 1, 2026
Dissent Magazine
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_ Noam Scheiber’s Mutiny shows that the labor organizing of the
radicalized PMC is far more than a fit of whimsical proletarian
roleplay. _

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_Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working
Class_Noam ScheiberFarrar, Straus and GirouxISBN-13 9780374610814

It’s been a dramatic spring and summer for the democratic socialist
left. As primary season has gotten underway, left-wing challengers
have begun to break through the dams that largely held in 2016 and
2020. The victories of Chris Rabb, Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila
Chevalier, Melat Kiros, and others have provoked a furious
conversation—encompassing everyone from the center left to the far
right—about democratic socialism. Who are the Democratic Socialists
of America? What does the organization stand for? Whom does it
represent?

Despite the rise of the Squad
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intensified union activity, the movement against the genocide in Gaza
and its electoral expression in the Uncommitted campaign, the
discrediting of Joe Biden and disaster of Kamala Harris, and the
municipal victories of Brandon Johnson, Katie Wilson, and Zohran
Mamdani, the tone of this conversation is puzzlement and surprise. For
Democratic officialdom, the whole Biden-Harris sequence, from the
South Carolina primary in 2020 to the Chicago DNC in 2024, signaled
that the party machinery could not be wrested away from them. Even the
second victory of Donald Trump seemed to announce that American
politics was moving rightward and enjoined liberals to follow. As for
the Republicans, they became persuaded that liberalism was a spent
force and only MAGA had anything to offer. Either way—patriots were
in control.

The rise of the socialist left, however, was something more than they
had reckoned. It was not just the insubstantial fluctuations of youth
culture—nor reducible to memes or TikTok trends—but a phenomenon
with a social basis, developing over years, even decades, and giving
rise to grievances that the political system proved unable to address.
On the left, this phenomenon, along with its ideological emanations,
is much better known. It is more widely discussed, although often
polemically, under the sign of a term loved by few and used by many:
the professional-managerial class, or PMC.

While the complex relationship between the middle class and radical
politics is a very old issue, few—not none, but few—foresaw its
reemergence on the left wing of American politics. While the years of
the Great Recession were littered with commentary on the quirks of the
millennial generation, economically wrongfooted at the beginning of
adulthood and prone thereafter to indulgences like Occupy Wall Street,
Black Lives Matter, and the Bernie Sanders campaigns, it somehow still
failed to sink in that a lasting and meaningful development had taken
place. At each step, the mandarins of the political mainstream
reassured themselves that a tantrum was all they were looking at. And
when that tantrum reached its high pitch this spring and summer, their
own howl went up: these were rich kids, white gentrifiers, engaged in
a kind of extremist fantasy camp. In other words, hysteria, itself a
compensation for complacency, has so far dominated the response.

Noam Scheiber’s new book _Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the
College-Educated Working Class_, by contrast, is the first serious and
fair account of the radicalized PMC from outside its own ranks. The
book documents the rising anger and mobilization in the bottom layers
of this group, which might not fit into the category of “middle
class” at all, despite college diplomas and great expectations.
Scheiber is a labor reporter at the _New York Times_: the renewal of
this beat across print journalism, where it seemed virtually dead a
decade or two ago, is itself a symptom of the phenomenon the book is
about. In a closely reported and often moving and intimate account of
workers’ struggles at Apple and Starbucks and in Hollywood—with
some briefer accounts of organizing in academia and at
Amazon—_Mutiny_ shows that we’ve witnessed something more than a
fit of whimsical proletarian roleplay. The ground has eroded under
what was once the middle class, a rift has begun to open, and people
are scrambling to get out and to give each other a hand up.

The modern middle class emerged in something like its current form in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The consolidation
of large-scale corporate enterprise—industrial capitalism in its
continent-spanning, bureaucratic form—established a vast new labor
market for lawyers, accountants, and engineers. Industrial labor
forces needed to be taught and supervised by teachers, social workers,
nurses, and doctors; and entertained and informed by the emerging new
culture industries—Hearst and Pulitzer, the record industry, radio,
Hollywood. Many of these functions required training at universities,
triggering the expansion of higher education in both scale and scope.
And once the benefits of application of scientific expertise to
practical problems made themselves known, the idea became something of
a mania: scientific housekeeping, scientific philanthropy, scientific
policing.

The economist Thorstein Veblen, imagining in 1921 a future society
governed by a “soviet of technicians,” was one of the first to
observe that this emerging stratum didn’t have the same interests as
employers. The professionals wanted to do things well: to do their
jobs correctly, to follow the science, to profess their ethical codes.
The owners of property, on the other hand, wanted to make money. If
that goal coincided with advancing knowledge or improving the fiber of
society, fine; if not, their employees ought to remember who pays the
bills.

As Veblen saw, the technical professions stood in the middle—not
just in terms of the distributive stratigraphy of the class structure,
but also in terms of social relations. The authority the capitalist
exercised over the technician was quite like the authority that he
exercised over the worker. There was therefore something worker-like
about the new professionals, who after all increasingly did work for
large organizations, many of them for-profit—rather than hanging a
shingle of their own. This parallel seemed especially clear in an era
when skilled manual laborers still held powerful positions in many
factory processes: the engineer and the craftsman thus stood somewhat
in parallel to each other. On the other hand, technicians were also
enemies, competing with craftsmen over a middle niche in the economic
ecology that could not sustain them both. The engineer’s job was to
rationalize production and make the craftsman obsolete, and he had the
enormous advantage of the employer’s support in this pursuit. In the
long view, the engineer won—or rather, the employer did, with the
engineer’s help—and the craftsman became an endangered species, in
turn creating space for the conflict between engineer and employer to
come to the fore periodically. This friction naturally raised the
question of the affiliation between the skilled technician in the
middle, and the more epochal conflict between labor and capital at the
bottom and the top of the pyramid.

Over the twentieth century, the professional middle class oscillated
politically with the times. Early in the twentieth century, commenting
acerbically on the appeal of the Socialist Party of America to
professionals, Leon Trotsky called it a party of dentists. Members of
this social group moved further left in the 1930s with the Popular
Front, presenting themselves as brain workers and culture workers, and
hence part of the working class. In the 1950s, after McCarthyism, they
ran rightward, pursuing the conformist dream of the Organization Man.
The 1960s and 1970s brought another leftward lurch: this was the New
Left, embodied in Mario Savio’s famous rebuke: “We’re a bunch of
raw materials that don’t mean to be—have any process upon us.
Don’t mean to be made into any product! Don’t mean—Don’t mean
to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the
government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone!
We’re human beings!”

It was in the aftermath of this moment that Barbara Ehrenreich and
John Ehrenreich reconstructed Veblen’s account from a Marxist
perspective in the mid-1970s, coining the concept of the “PMC” to
explain both what made the 1960s uprising possible and where its
potential lay, as well as why it had not succeeded. They argued that
the social barriers between the PMC and the working class had been too
great for the New Left to universalize itself, but that the radicalism
of professionals still contained political potential: as capital
ground down the skill and autonomy of professional work, it would
systematically push bottom layers down toward the working class.
Instead, from the 1980s, yuppiedom pulled rightward again at the long
neoliberal end of history, inviting the middle class to take an upward
ride on the escalator of home values, stock options, and 401(k)s,
alongside the rising college wage premium. It was the Great Recession
and its turbulent aftermath that brought everything crashing down,
setting up Scheiber’s narrative.

While Scheiber’s story takes place over the last few years, he
acknowledges that its immediate precursors go back to the aftermath of
the financial crisis. Occupy Wall Street, the Sanders campaigns, the
first Trump administration, and Black Lives Matter were all symptoms
of the deterioration of neoliberalism’s promises and social
compromises, and also occasions to name that deterioration, to
identify its consequences, and to propose alternatives. Even before
2020, Scheiber observes, DSA had undergone dramatic growth, and the
generational opinion shift toward socialism and the labor movement was
underway. Still, it was the compounding effects of the second Sanders
campaign, the George Floyd uprising, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the
defeat of Trump in the annus mirabilis of 2020 that escalated a
long-term trend into something more pointed.

Of the narratives in _Mutiny_, it is the campaign of Starbucks Workers
United (SBWU) that shines most brightly. The prior decade, after all,
had seen a kind of organizing campaign among fast food workers,
bankrolled by the Service Employees International Union, also the
parent organization of SBWU today. While it stoked some public opinion
heat behind a wave of successful minimum wage campaigns, and
contributed vaguely to the rising pro-worker sentiment of the 2010s,
Fight for $15’s goal of unionizing fast-food workers went nowhere in
terms of actually building shop-level organization. Workers at
Starbucks, on the other hand, achieved a genuine breakthrough, first
winning an election in Buffalo, New York, then hundreds more across
the country. Here, Scheiber draws close to the very bottom layer of
the PMC, where it ceases recognizably to be middle-class at all.

Some of the workers he profiles have resumes that shine with
achievement of a recognizably professional sort: Teddy Hoffman, a
Chicago Starbucks worker whom Scheiber follows throughout _Mutiny_,
attended the elite Grinnell College and won a prestigious Watson
Fellowship to spend a year after college traveling the world studying
how theater programs include people with disabilities. When an acting
career in Chicago didn’t work out, he landed at Starbucks. Many
workers at the coffee chain have some college education under their
belt, even a degree like Teddy. Many others are studying concurrently
with their jobs. They heard an invitation from their society to get
educated and climb into interesting, rewarding work. Perhaps they took
on debt in the process. What marks them as members of the PMC is more
a cultural residue than a live material fact.

Starbucks in particular attracted a progressive young workforce with
its vaguely cosmopolitan, even pseudo-intellectual branding. In some
parts of America, a Starbucks might be the only public space where a
legibly queer or trans person would be able to get employment. More to
the point, it offered benefits: education benefits, gender medicine
benefits. A corporate holdover of the vision of progressive
neoliberalism of the 1990s, the decade of the company’s nationwide
expansion, Starbucks’s implicit ideology made little sense in the
discontented and disillusioned 2020s. This was also true for Apple and
Amazon (and even academia—which fizzed in the 1990s and early 2000s
with growth and playfulness before entering its steep and bitter
decline after 2008). As Scheiber recounts, by 2020 many of these firms
were years into a regression to the mean of corporate America. At
Apple, for instance, the transition from the reign of Steve Jobs to
the era of Tim Cook brought about a shift in the function of the
company’s stores: Jobs had envisioned them as jewel cases for
Apple’s perfect products, while for Cook their purpose was to move
inventory.

Disillusionment is at the center of the workers’ movement in
Scheiber’s narrative. A perennial refrain of the Starbucks
campaign—neither wholly true nor altogether bad-faith—has been
that workers flocked to the company for its image and want to help it
live up to it. Of a group of union activists at Apple, Scheiber notes,
they “had all nursed a crush on the company before their eventual
disillusionment.” Chris Smalls, the crucial figure in the early and
partial breakthrough of the Amazon Labor Union, similarly turned
toward the movement after his ambitions to rise into management were
frustrated.

The same rule writ large across society elucidates the structural
dynamic: a debt-fueled expansion of higher education, driven by
pursuit of the college wage premium, refluxed into outrage when that
premium stagnated and the proportion of graduates working in jobs that
didn’t require their skills began to rise. Now former Watson Fellows
and Harvard graduate students were fighting over break time,
understaffing, and part-time schedules. Pile on the threat of AI,
especially to the creative and intellectual professions, and the
kindling for an uprising was there.

The social movements of the previous decade were ready to strike the
spark. For instance, Teddy Hoffman was friends with Joe Engleman, a
graduate student at the University of Illinois-Chicago, whose union
had fought an offensive strike in 2019 and gained significant ground.
The two texted during the early days of the pandemic, and Joe made
clear to Teddy the difference between his union job and Teddy’s. By
the time that workers at some Buffalo Starbucks stores filed for
National Labor Relations Board elections (led by Jaz Brisack, a Rhodes
Scholar turned salt—an undercover operative for the labor movement),
Teddy had already been talking about unionization for a year.
“Really anytime he had a frustrating day, Teddy would quip . . .
that he was going to organize the store,” Scheiber writes. “‘I
was coming home feeling this impotent rage,’ he said. ‘I was
sharing with friends this pipe dream of organizing, almost as a
therapeutic pipe dream.’”

The organic and materially grounded origins of this wave of organizing
should, at this point, be beyond dispute. They are not a fad, a mere
viral trend, or a status game. But this does not resolve the question
of their significance and consequence. Beneath the sneering, this is
the more substantive issue raised in the venom directed at DSA: this
might be a layer of society with real grievances, but are those
grievances the same as, or even compatible with, those of the wider
working class? This distinction may be eroding as the ranks of
college-educated workers grow, and as borderline, credentialed
occupations such as nursing and teaching take on greater importance.
But even if the boundary cannot be drawn precisely over the
sociological reality, it’s reasonable to believe that some
difference remains.

Here the question becomes more difficult. If the United States had a
functional labor relations system, the problem would be less acute.
But workers at Starbucks and Amazon who won their union elections in
2021 and 2022 still do not have contracts and, as Scheiber documents,
those companies have engaged in extensive anti-union activity that
violates labor law in spirit and sometimes in actuality. At Apple,
workers at only one store, in Towson, Maryland, fought all the way
through to a union contract—a story Scheiber narrates in full. Apple
has since closed the store. Hollywood, with its incumbent unions, and
the academic sector, which is subject to numerous other pressures from
below, represent more of a success story. Not coincidentally, workers
across lines of skill, race, and other such criteria have had much
more luck forming coalitions in those industries, where alliances of
blue-collar and professional workers have become routine, if not
altogether uncomplicated. Indeed, as scandalized right-wing observers
have become fond of pointing out, one-quarter of the membership of the
United Auto Workers (UAW) are now academics, and this growing element
of the union played a crucial role in capturing leadership from the
complacent and corrupt Administration Caucus in 2023.

Wherever real or even perceived differences are operative, however,
political fissures may open when circumstances become difficult. They
are there, largely implicitly, in the UAW, which has tried to thread
the needle by maintaining progressive positions on immigration and
foreign policy and endorsing left-wing candidates, while hedging on
the other side with its support for tariffs. In the long term, if the
union can capitalize on left-wing activist energy to create a more
favorable political environment and win better contracts, it will
bring the traditional membership along with it. They in turn can wield
their economic leverage over the actual profits of actual capitalists,
which graduate students cannot do. It’s difficult to see what a
better approach might be. An unhappier version of the problem is found
in the experience of the Amazon Labor Union. After its initial
strategy ran aground on the company’s intransigence, the union
devolved into bitter internal power struggles. “As the rift widened,
Smalls’s inner circle framed it as a conflict between
college-educated white people, led by Spence, and working-class Black
people,” Scheiber writes. “Never mind that some of the dissidents
were themselves Black or Latino, and that some of the white dissidents
were working-class.”

The danger runs in both directions, too, although not in quite the
same way. Where working-class organizations and communities may be on
guard about middle-class takeovers, professional-class progressives
are sometimes prone to projections about the working class. One need
only think of what we now know about how political operatives Morris
Katz and Dan Moraff talked about Graham Platner: “looks like he’s
a union working-class guy.” With the benefit of hindsight, it’s
easy to see here how old anxieties took hold of these operatives of
the party of dentists and drove it into a fantasy—but one that
corresponded to a real political demand, and a real political opening.

The question of whether or not these groups—auto workers and grad
students, screenwriters and teamsters—belong together is not one
that has a self-evident or objective answer. It is an eminently
political question. Every class formation has contradictory edge
cases, and the way it handles these forms part of its character,
rhetoric, ideology, and identity. Certainly, classes cannot be made
from just anything: there must be some material substrate that is
shared or at least comparable. But no two workers, much less groups of
workers, are identical. Rather, all workers must decide to affiliate
with each other, see themselves in each other, and become something
together. That is true at every scale, from two workmates to whole
sectors of the economy. Classes are made politically. Indeed, the
political work of deciding what to bring to the fore, of how to make
experiences commensurable, is what organizing is. The necessity of the
activity itself reveals the lack of the guarantee. When someone says
that grad students have hijacked the UAW, or that gentrifiers are
taking over the Democratic Party, they are not making a descriptive
observation, but a normative one. Let them make their case.

It’s easy to blow hot air about who doesn’t belong with whom. But
it’s not a serious idea if it has no stakes: it’s the reaction of
a child who thinks peas and ketchup shouldn’t touch on the plate. If
the center and the right think the working class and professionals
don’t belong together, they should make an offer to one group or the
other about a better affiliation. Their failure to do so in any
serious way is the condition for today’s growing socialist
coalition. What _Mutiny_ shows is how this alternative proposition
has, over a decade and more, been painstakingly turned into something
concrete. It has limits and contradictions of its own. But it is on
the table now, people can see it, and some of them like it. If the
incumbent political order is anything other than historically
exhausted, it will have to produce an answer that is more than a
temper tantrum.

 

Gabriel Winant teaches history at the University of Chicago.

* Working Class
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* professional managerial class
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* unions
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* class struggle
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