The Counterfeit

Credential is capital.

This is the move the American left cannot make and the American right cannot stop making. Once it is made, the political landscape rearranges. Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani exit the working-class coalition they claim to lead and rejoin the class they actually belong to. Their politics becomes legible. Liu’s polemic becomes intelligible. The convergence essay I wrote was wrong, and wrong in a specific way that protects exactly the figures it should have indicted.

The thesis

In an economy where the means of production have been replaced by the means of credentialing, the dominant form of capital is no longer industrial. It is positional. The university admission, the professional license, the editorial board seat, the foundation officership, the nonprofit directorship, the academic appointment, the policy fellowship — these are not jobs. They are stakes in a system of social reproduction that gates access to income, status, marriage markets, and political voice. To possess credential is to possess capital. To control credential is to control the gate. The class that controls the gate is a capitalist class.

This is not metaphor. The credentialed stratum reproduces itself through marriage, through inheritance of the cognitive and dispositional traits that produce credential, through the geographic concentration of high-credential institutions, and through the political capture of the apparatus that issues credential. It accumulates. It compounds. It transmits to children. It defends its prerogatives through state action, just as the industrial bourgeoisie did, but the prerogatives now defended are licensure, accreditation, peer review, and the administrative gate. The PMC is not a class of managers serving capital. It is a class whose form of capital is credential, and whose political project is the protection and expansion of credential’s authority over economic and social life.

This is what Liu names. Her polemic is not against billionaires. It is against the PMC. She is the most consistent left voice on this point, and she pays for it by being shouted down within her own coalition.

The figures

Mamdani is the son of a Columbia University professor and an Oscar-nominated filmmaker. Bronx Science. Bowdoin. He is, in the most literal sense, an heir of credential. His coalition — DSA — is the most credential-heavy political organization in American life, with a membership composed disproportionately of graduate students, nonprofit workers, adjunct professors, and credentialed urban professionals. The “working class” he invokes does not staff his transition team, fund his campaigns, write his policy papers, or attend his rallies in proportional numbers. His coalition is the PMC. His rhetoric is class. His structure is credential.

Ocasio-Cortez is the cleaner case. Boston University. Brown University internships. Educational Justice Coalition. She is a credentialed political professional who briefly worked as a bartender, and the bartender period has been load-bearing for her entire political identity. Her actual class location, before and after Congress, is PMC. Her staff is PMC. Her donor base is PMC. Her political vehicle is the Justice Democrats, a PMC organization. Her program has drifted, over six years in office, away from the direct-provision politics of the early Sanders era and toward the symbolic-recognition politics that Liu specifically indicts. Climate justice. Reproductive justice. Trans rights. Each of these is a real issue. None of them is a class issue, and the systematic substitution of these issues for class issues is the PMC’s signature political move.

Sanders is the hardest case and the most important one, because his program is the most direct-provision-coded of the three. Medicare for All. Free public college. The $15 minimum wage. These are New Deal policies, structurally similar to Social Security in form: pay the benefit, eliminate the intermediary. If any major American politician has held the line against the symbolic substitution Liu describes, it is Sanders.

But the program is not the politics, and the politics is the politics of the coalition. Sanders’ coalition is the PMC. His organizational infrastructure — Our Revolution, the Sanders Institute, the network of consultants and operatives that runs his operation — is PMC. The activists who knock his doors are PMC. The journalists who frame him sympathetically are PMC. The young volunteers who built his two presidential campaigns came overwhelmingly from elite universities. His one durable institutional achievement, the Squad, is a PMC vehicle. The class he claims to represent does not turn out for him in the numbers his rhetoric implies. The Black working class did not vote for him. The Hispanic working class did not vote for him in the proportions a class-first politics would require. The white working class, after voting for him in 2016 against Clinton, drifted to Trump in 2020 and stayed there.

This is the deepest version of Liu’s indictment. Even when the program is right, the coalition that delivers it is wrong, and the wrong coalition delivers a wrong politics in the long run. Sanders has spent forty years trying to build a working-class movement, and the movement he has actually built is a PMC movement that uses working-class rhetoric. The failure is not personal. It is structural. There is no available institutional vehicle for working-class politics in contemporary America that does not run through PMC infrastructure, and running politics through PMC infrastructure produces PMC politics regardless of the candidate’s intentions.

The expansion

The substantive program of the populist left, where it diverges from Sanders toward AOC and Mamdani, is the expansion of PMC employment under the cover of working-class advocacy.

Universal pre-K is a credentialing project. It places several hundred thousand new workers in a credentialed sector, regulated by credentialed administrators, accredited by credentialed bodies, with curricula written by credentialed experts. The children’s class outcomes are dubious; the labor-market outcomes for the credentialed stratum are direct.

Universal child care, similarly, places a new layer of credentialed labor between parents and children. The political appeal is to working-class parents who need affordable care. The structural effect is to absorb private familial labor into the credentialed economy, where it can be regulated, standardized, and supervised.

The Department of Community Safety in Mamdani’s program transfers responsibility for mental-health crises and community policing from line officers to credentialed social workers, mental-health professionals, and community engagement coordinators. The political appeal is to working-class neighborhoods harmed by aggressive policing. The structural effect is to expand the credentialed workforce into a domain previously held by a different, less credentialed labor force.

Social housing requires a new administrative apparatus. City-owned grocery stores require managers, procurement officers, equity consultants, and a compliance regime. Public option insurance requires a credentialed bureaucracy. Each program addresses a real working-class need. Each program addresses it by expanding the credentialed stratum’s employment base. The working class is the beneficiary of the program in the rhetoric, and the constituency for credentialed service provision in the structure.

This is the form Liu identifies. Provision flows from the credentialed administrator to the working-class recipient, with the administrator extracting status, employment, salary, and political loyalty in the process. The administrator is the citizen. The working-class recipient is the case. The relationship is not solidarity. It is supervision.

The donor class fight

The fight between the populist left and the corporate Democratic establishment is a fight inside the PMC for control of the redistributive apparatus. It is not a class fight. Both sides of it are credentialed. Both sides of it propose programs that flow through credentialed administration. Both sides of it draw their staff, their volunteers, their journalists, and their donor networks from the same credentialed stratum.

The donor class is not the PMC. The donor class is the rentier capital that funds the PMC’s symbolic and administrative work in exchange for the PMC’s electoral labor and ideological cover. Soros funds Open Society. Pritzker funds Democratic operations. Hoffman funds resistance infrastructure. The PMC delivers votes, policy, and legitimacy. The donor class delivers funding. The arrangement is symbiotic, not antagonistic.

When Mamdani attacks “the billionaire class,” he is attacking the donor wing of the arrangement while preserving the PMC wing — his own wing. The billionaire is the visible target. The credentialed administrator is the invisible beneficiary. Tax the billionaire and the revenue funds the administrator’s salary, the program the administrator runs, the building the administrator works in, the school the administrator’s children attend. The administrator does not lose in the populist-left victory. The administrator is the populist-left victory.

This is why the populist left can never deliver what Liu’s diagnosis requires. The diagnosis requires the dismantlement of the credentialed administrator’s authority over working-class life. The populist-left program expands the credentialed administrator’s authority while shifting its funding source from billionaires to taxes on billionaires. The supervisor remains. Only the supervisor’s payer changes.

The actual anti-PMC factions

Trump and Vought attack the PMC directly. Federal workforce cuts, agency dismantlement, executive defunding of credentialed institutions. The substantive intent is destruction. The PMC is the target.

Yarvin attacks the PMC most theoretically. His Cathedral concept is the cleanest articulation of credential-as-capital in contemporary thought, and his program — replacement of the entire credentialed administrative state with corporate-monarchical authority — is consistent with the diagnosis.

Friedman attacked the PMC through the negative income tax and the school voucher. His program eliminated the case worker by paying the citizen directly. The bipartisan PMC consensus has resisted his program for sixty years, because his program is the only redistributive structure that does not require credentialed administration to operate, and therefore does not generate PMC employment.

Karp attacks a slice of the PMC: the soft-power apparatus, the foundation officers, the credentialed pacifist class. He preserves the technical PMC, which is his class. The Palantir manifesto is a class war within the credentialed stratum, not against it.

Liu attacks the PMC most clearly from the left and pays for it by being unfunded, unorganized, and shouted down. Reed, Frank, Michaels, the Catalyst circle — all in her position. The class-first left has the diagnosis. It has no political vehicle. The vehicles available to it are PMC vehicles, which produce PMC politics, which the class-first analysis indicts.

Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani are not in the convergence. They are the thing the convergence is against. They are the most rhetorically sophisticated wing of the PMC, the wing that has learned to speak the language of class while protecting the structure of credential. The donor class is their visible enemy. The credentialed stratum is their actual base. The working class is their stage prop.

What the working class actually has

The working class, properly named — the people without college degrees, without credential, without positional capital, who work in the productive economy and are governed by the symbolic one — has no major political vehicle. Trump speaks to them and uses them. He does not give them institutional power. The Republican Party remains owned by donors whose interests are not theirs. The populist left speaks at them and provides for them through credentialed administration. Liu names their situation but cannot organize. The labor movement is a shell of what it was. The Catholic working-class infrastructure that once produced political voice has been dismantled. The Black working-class church remains but its political integration runs through PMC channels. The Hispanic working class is a battleground for the two parties’ marketing operations, not a political subject in its own right.

The working class is the demographic majority of the country and has no representation in the political contest currently underway. The fight is between two PMC factions and a donor class. The right’s PMC faction (technical, engineering, security) wants to mobilize the state for hard power. The left’s PMC faction (administrative, symbolic, therapeutic) wants to expand the state’s redistributive and regulatory apparatus. The donor class wants to be left alone or to capture state power for its own ends. None of these factions has a working-class program in any structural sense. All of them deploy working-class rhetoric.

This is the situation Liu’s polemic actually describes, and it is much darker than the convergence reading I gave first.

The formation point

The credentialed stratum’s deepest harm is not its inefficiency or its self-dealing or even its substitution of supervision for solidarity. It is the displacement of formation by credential. The institutions that used to form working-class people — parishes, unions, neighborhood schools, ethnic associations, fraternal orders, family economies — have been dismantled or absorbed by the credentialed apparatus. What used to be inheritance is now training. What used to be membership is now certification. What used to be authority is now license.

The populist-left program does not address this. Mamdani’s program assumes that the credentialed stratum can deliver to the working class what the working class lost when the formation institutions were destroyed. It cannot. The credentialed stratum is the agent of the destruction. Adding more of the credentialed stratum, paid better and aimed at working-class welfare, does not restore what was destroyed. It deepens the dependency.

The right’s anti-PMC factions are not solving this either. Yarvin’s program produces a feudal arrangement in which the working class trades supervision by credentialed administrators for supervision by corporate monarchs. Trump’s destruction produces a vacuum that the donor class fills with its own preferred form of administration. Karp’s republican mobilization restores hard-power capacity without addressing the formation void.

The honest position is that no faction in contemporary American politics has a program for restoring working-class formation, because the institutions through which working-class formation occurred were destroyed by processes that all current factions accept as given. The populist left expands the destroyer. The populist right destroys the destroyer without rebuilding what the destroyer destroyed. The donor class profits from the wreckage. Liu names the situation. Nobody is in a position to act on her naming.

Close

The convergence essay was wrong because it counted Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani as anti-PMC voices on the strength of their rhetoric. The corrected reading is that they are PMC voices using anti-billionaire rhetoric to expand PMC power.

Liu’s polemic indicts them. They invoke her diagnosis to attack their donor-class enemies and obscure the part of her diagnosis that names them. The class-first left has no political home. The working class has no political vehicle. The fight underway is between PMC factions and donor factions, all of them speaking a language they did not write, all of them using the working class as the stage prop on which their internal class war is performed.

This is what convergence actually looks like in late credential capitalism. Not five vocabularies attacking one target. Two PMC factions and a donor class fighting over the spoils of a working-class collapse none of them caused, all of them benefit from, and none of them will repair.

The corridor I named at the end of the convergence essay is narrower than I drew it. The bright case requires that the working class somehow generate, ex nihilo, a political vehicle that the existing institutional landscape provides no path to producing. The factions currently competing all gain from its continued absence. The diagnostic class names the absence and cannot fill it. The donor class funds the obscuration of the absence. The credentialed stratum on left and right performs the absence as politics.

This is more honest than the first version and considerably less hopeful. Most of human history has run on worse than this too. But the worse is what is actually here.