Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class

Forerunners: Ideas First

by Catherine Liu

Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Sociology, Philosophy, Theory, Class, Society

90 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 26, 2021

About the author

Catherine Liu is the director of the University of California Irvine’s Humanities Center, a professor in Film and Media Studies, and the coeditor of The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century Down the Royal Road. She is the author of Oriental Girls Desire Romance (a novel), Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton, and American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 1 out of 5]

Calling Time on Tolerance

Catherine Liu wants to start a class war. “Class war over distribution of resources is the critical battle of our times,” she announces boldly from her position of tenured security in the University of California. Not a change in party politics or a push for voter registration. No, a real revolution. And she means what she says, including the rejection of the fundamental precept of liberal democracy, tolerance. Tolerance can no longer be tolerated: “Tolerance for them [traditional liberals] is the highest secular virtue—but tolerance has almost no political or economic meaning.”

It’s not entirely clear who would be on the opposing sides but in general it appears that the less well off are to be mobilised against the more well off. Her contribution to the war effort is to document the moral smugness of the current liberal ‘haves’ who have lost what she thinks is their historical role as advocates for the ‘have nots.’ More specifically, as a start she wants the supporters of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to bury the hatchet and get serious about taking power and returning America to its socialist destiny. Who nominated Liu to articulate the grievances of the deprived classes is not disclosed. Her presumption is,… well how can one express it, … elitist and condescending in exactly the same manner as those she accuses of false liberality.

This sort of Marxist revivalism is quaint, reminiscent of the hard-liners of the 20’s and 30’s, especially since it is addressed not to those who have been the losers in the racket of democratic capitalism over the last 50 years or so but to the winners, those

“Liberal members of the credentialed classes [who] love to use the word empower when they talk about ‘people,’ but the use of that verb objectifies the recipients of their help while implying that the people have no access to power without them.” Which of course they don’t.

In other words, she’s after the conversion of the gatekeepers to power - ”culture industry creatives, journalists, software engineers, scientists, professors, doctors, bankers, and lawyers, who play important managerial roles in large organizations” - to get on her bandwagon. Right, that’ll work. Just give ‘em a bit of some old fashioned woke rhetoric and they’re sure to sign up.

Presumably she also wants her colleagues in film and media studies (!) to get on board with the revolutionary programme. Indeed, perhaps they are the only ones who can understand its arcane rational and vocabulary:

“The poststructuralist cultural studies theorists despised the oppressive post–World War II liberal consensus as much as the most visionary of neoliberal economists like Alan Greenspan and his overlord, Ayn Rand… If you do not believe me, do a search for liberal consensus in digitized copies of cultural studies books of the 1990s and you will see it appears only to be dismissed with the patriarchy and heteronormativity and a vaguely Foucauldian idea of “domination.”

Forget translating this for the masses; your average corporate executive is likely to respond with a blank stare.

But, thankfully, Ms Liu is not unsympathetic to the challenges her programme will pose to many people. “To renounce one’s narcissistic fetishization of intelligence or refinement is not a simple act,” she says. In this she is absolutely correct as even Mao learned in his Cultural Revolution, which I’m sure Ms Liu looks upon nostalgically. Of course her own narcissistic fetishisation of revolutionary Marxism must be an exception to the rule. Her sagacity should not be questioned but tolerated.

Virtue Hoarders is a book published by a mainstream academic press. This is enlightening in a particular way. I now understand at least some of the vehement anti-intellectual stands taken by many Right wing politicians and pundits in the United States. If this tired Marxist rhetoric is typical of many academics, one has to fear for the mind of the country from the Left as well as from the Right.

[Athena · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh bOy . . .

In Virtue Hoarders, a polemic about the length of a longform journalistic article, Catherine Liu argues that elite professionals such as academics, creatives, journalists, and lawyers -- the professional managerial class or PMC -- drive a consumption-centered politics that masquerades as social justice but "loves to talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation." The PMC's moral capitalism masquerading as politics, Liu asserts, has "undermined our trust in public institutions, destroyed public health, diminished our childhoods, and litigated our pleasures."

I, like Catherine Liu, am of the professional managerial class. I was even a would-be academic in the same field as Liu, also at a University of California campus. I understand the contempt running through this polemic on a deep level; trust me. These are the reasons why I give enough credence to this book to review it.

Virtue Hoarders has a serious problem: Liu herself is so caught up in the academic PMC's tunnel vision that the book is completely disconnected from the poor and working-class people and movements that she purports to defend and speak for. Her critique, for starters, manages to position purportedly leftist PMC people as the left. This version of the left is weak, depoliticized, and needs to be transformed. Hard for anyone to disagree. But to hammer home that position, she adopts the PMC’s caricatures of concepts such as intersectionality in order to sneer at them without acknowledging how working-class Black women have had to struggle to keep the focus on the actual material politics of that concept. Non-Black people really need to stop finding proxies through which to trash Black feminism. This move makes no sense in the context of Liu's overall argument in particular, considering that Black feminism is the foundation for the most viable leftist politics of the last decade. Nonetheless, Liu tears down any politics in which class matters equally with race or any other so-called identity. The nuances of working-class people's movements that foreground the intersection of race, class, and gender by necessity -- the very movements that badly need class-privileged people to understand ideas like intersectionality and identity politics -- are invisible and irrelevant to Liu’s framework.

Most invisible of all is the work of people who have technically become part of the PMC but struggle with how to make it useful to the poor and working-class communities they come from. Why not highlight or at at least name-check the actual working-class organizing that comes out of UC campuses alone, by first-generation grad students striking for cost of living adjustments to their pay, by formerly incarcerated students continuing to build solidarity across prison walls, by undocumented students fighting for their families?

You could say Virtue Hoarders is a short polemic and these things are beside the point. But they are the point. Why would you go out of your way to center and engage the harmful ideas of the PMC instead of amplifying the visions of people who are excluded from it? The logic here is the same logic that led people to stage debates with Milo Yiannopoulos and that leads to the suggestion that white people invested in racial justice need to keep engaging white supremacists. Like people who take comfort in white supremacy, people who feel the PMC is where they belong are generally not going to be persuaded otherwise. Liu must realize this on some level, so who is this book really for? Is there any kind of power that Liu imagines could be dismantled through this line of critique? Spoiler alert: There isn't, because the point is for Liu to let her colleagues know they're wrong, not to persuade anyone who doesn't already more or less agree with her.

At the end of the day, Virtue Hoarders epitomizes why I tuned out of academic conversations unless they are widely taken up by people in grassroots leftist organizing. A second-generation class-privileged person such as Liu does not need to participate in academic conversations, or in PMC discourse at all. They do not HAVE to be a tenured professor at an elitist university, even one that is public. (As a UC PhD alum, I consider the UC a leech on the more equity-advancing, “lower-tier” California higher education systems, even though those also have their problems. If Liu taught at a community college or Cal State, I think she’d be much more likely to find the conversation she’s initiated here pointless.)

Liu’s ultimate argument is for her PMC peers to have a spine and fight for socialism. Yet Liu is so fixated on what she can’t stand about her peers that no working-class solidarity comes through at all. She makes the argument for it, but that argument comes up empty when what she actually accomplishes with Virtue Hoarders is a catalog of her own virtue hoarding. It’s just that in her case, the virtue she hoards is opposing the PMC. If you want to read this book, well, just read it. It’s not very long. But you could also not be a tenured professor, detach from PMC discourse, and steep yourself in the work and ideas of people who are building other worlds out of necessity and with much more nuance than “the left” to whom Liu gives undue importance.

[C. Varn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a strongly persuasive polemic that makes a cultural case against a class that it doesn't coherently define and also reads that class back in history and into thinkers who don't share the framework Liu has borrowed from the Ehrenreichs in the 1980s. The resurrection of Ehrenreich's PMC thesis gives a Marxist gloss to complaining about generic elites and Liu hardly invented it. More strongly linked to the so-called current "post-left" (a movement towards more socially conservative social democracy with strong populist flavor, which is probably the third movement to use the moniker), this critique became popular after the failure of Bernie Sanders in 2020. While it is a sound critique of a kind of moral kitsch that developed among academics between the 1960s and 1990s that has spread out into the larger culture, this moral kitsch is not limited to nor even solely emergent from the professionals and managers that get linked together here. Instead of admitting, as E. O. Wright did in his late work on a class that the importance of strata within the Marxist conception of class needed to be taken seriously, the existence of a vaguely defined educational "Professional Managerial" emerged. Unlike the managerial class of James Burnham or Peter Turchin's theory of elite (and elite overproduction), the "PMC" seems to be anyone who has the moral and ideological kitsch that emerged in left and liberal groups. The critique of that kitsch is fair enough, but do all managers or professionals share it? And what does it have to do with Marxism?

Effectively as described by Liu, the PMC are virtue hoarders, which is fair enough, but are they classified in the Marxist or even liberal sense? Neither a clear relation to commodity production on income predominates? Liu compares Nagle's "Kill All Normies" to the Sokal hoax, which as a person who works for the publisher that published Nagle and voted to publish it with criticism about its somewhat superficial engagement with the history of the more radical right, I find to be a hilariously bad analogy. Furthermore, the nationalist and nostalgic assumptions implicit in Nagle's work were to be made explicit later in her post-left turn. Now, Nagle didn't talk about the PMC but the ideological content of the left dominated by academia--academia which produced both Nagle and Liu themselves.

The interesting problem here is probably best dealt with by Mike McNair, one of Liu's more charitable critics, in his review of Liu in the Weekly Worker,

"The first is that what Liu offers as an implicit alternative to ‘PMC values’ is a politics of nostalgia - back to the social-democratic (or in US terms ‘new deal’) consensus of the 1950s-60s. The second is that the class explanation of what Liu characterises as “PMC values” is an overtheorisation of what is, in reality, current ideological fashion - which, though widespread among the intelligentsia (as all current ideological fashions tend to be), is also found among sections of the working class; and conversely can easily be displaced by a fashion for nationalist-traditionalism.
...
She tells us (p19) that the post-war “liberal consensus was based on state and corporate support for lifetime employment, labour power2 and strong social services and redistributive economic policies”. And at the end of the book: “While a mixed economy may be the short-term reality that we dare hope for, let’s strengthen the hand of the socialist aspects of that hybrid system” (p77).

Catherine Liu was born in 1964, and was an undergraduate student at Yale in 1981-85; which means that her personal experience of the “post-war liberal consensus” was that of a small child in its dying days - right at the end of the US civil rights movement and the high period of the anti-Vietnam war mobilisation. She could have researched the background to the ‘consensus’ and to the 1970s turn away from it, but has chosen instead to treat it as an image of the ‘possible’.

It is entirely reasonable from the standpoint of today’s world of endemic unemployment and precarity to have some degree of nostalgia for the years of the long post-war boom and ‘consensus’; just as it is now reasonable for people to have some degree of ‘Ostalgie’ in the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik - or nostalgia for the Brezhnev era in Russia after “shock therapy” wrecked the economy.

But it is essential to understand what the ‘libertarian left’ of the 1960s-70s - who came up with the ideas which have more recently been appropriated by ‘neoliberal intersectionalism’ - were fighting against. And this was not the managers, social workers and so on as an ally of the working class, but the managers, social workers and so on as the disciplinary authority standing immediately over the working class. "

In short, the PMC that Liu posits was not an extension of the prior PMC but a battle against it. The nostalgia there ignores that the workers' left was undermined by the very consensus for Liu seems to be nostalgic, something under which she did not live but she does want to defend. For people burnt by the culture war that many social democrats posit as a reason for the failure of Bernie Sanders against the neoliberal elite, this may seem convincing, but despite Liu's (and Nagle's) invocation of Christopher Lasch, Lasch had spent his first four books prior the oft-cited "Culture of Narcissism" exposing that this was not the case. The new left was not the cause of the failure of the populist and socialist left in America, but as Lasch clearly delineated in most of his career in the late 60s and early 70s, the result of it.

This is not to say that the moral kitsch that Liu describes and academic self-righteousness around it does not exist and is not self-undermining, but the PMC is not a class in the Marxist sense. Even in the circuit of production, it does not have one singular role. This becomes apparent in Liu's understanding of education, equating the neo-liberalization of education with charter schools as a workers' battle as if teachers are part of the working class, but under Ehrenreich's definition of the PMC and in the curriculum choices (such as Liu's rather odd focus on Harper Lee as somehow endemic of this problem).

As I have hinted before, the PMC concept itself is not particularly coherent. But its current use is particularly pernicious, whatever Liu's politics or intentions. For all its implied critique of the moral kitsch and student-focus of the new left, it actually accepts a new left problematic. Again, quoting from Mike McNair, "The paradox is that ‘PMC theory’ remains within the framework of the most disabling aspect of the ‘new left’, and in particular the Maoists: that is, the tendency to reduce all political differences to class conflicts." But I would go beyond McNair, who chastises Liu's use of Lasch because of the use of Lasch in the culture war by people who McNair hints he knows are misreading him, because the other issue is that class analysis here owes more to people like David Brooks, James Burnham, Peter Turchin, and Michael Lind--the latter two I even respect even though I fundamentally disagree with their rejection of Marx--but have essentially non-Marxist or anti-Marxist views of class. In short, selling conflating anti-socialist views of class with socialist ones while not addressing that the PMC is not what killed the industrial working class as a movement: declining profitability during the end of Keynesianism did.  Furthermore, for people complaining of privilege, the argument for the PMC often just amounts to an argument from privilege itself: educational privilege and the helicopter parenting of children. In an area of increased centralization of wealth in the hands of a few and of declining profits in real commodities, this is predictable. To truly understand what is causing these problems, de-industrialization, the failure of Fordism, and the increasing importance of rentier economic models need to be understood far more than pretending a cultural battle that DOES even extend into urban vs rural working class is due to the emergence of a nebulous new class or that the nostalgia for the post-war consensus serve as an answer to neoliberalism.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quick, harshly written polemic that I appreciate & spiritually align with. It excoriates my class, the PMC, or lumpen PMC in my case, for the PMC's odd mix of radical pluralism, transgressive fetishes, & harsh puritanism. This contradictory stew helps uphold an anti-working class cultural hegemony & inhibits PMC collaboration w/ the working class on any meaningful socialist politics.

*Virtue Hoarders* has some flaws of underdevelopment typical of pamphlets, & the stances the pamphlet wants to take on educational, parental, & sexual questions are sometimes opaque, although its PMC critiques are always crystal clear. It occasionally goes down unfruitful avenues, for its critique of deconstruction & championing of enlightenment are shallow, & I don't think we should keep talking the Sokal hoax 25 yrs later. Railing against *To Kill a Mockingbird* is probably not useful but is very welcome, still.

A final thing I appreciated in this short work is its strong gathering of working-class aligned &/or feminist sociology (whether academic or polemical): Barbara & John Ehrenreich, Amber Frost, Christopher Lasch, Angela Nagle, Megan Erickson Kilpatrick, Jefferson Cowie, Jennifer Silva, Diane Ravitch, & Laura Kipnis.

[Sveta · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you:

think your job exists so that you can achieve all your dreams while expressing your authentic self — instead of to make profits for capitalism;

trust that the free yoga classes and mindfulness training are on offer in your office just to make you more happy — instead of to make you more productive and "retain" you and thus increase profits for capitalism;

believe that economic inequality exists because people don't take "personal responsibility" for their lives — instead of being the logical outcome of a neoliberal policy that shrugs at stagnant wages in the face of rising healthcare and education costs because it's committed exclusively to profits for capitalism;

assume that all or most social ills can be traced to identity — instead of the economic inequality (see above) that's embedded in a system that's engineered to do just one thing: increase profits for capitalism

hope that liberals and technocrats are motivated by the needs of the working class — instead of a dedication to make profits for capitalism

you won't like this book.

Catherine Liu is angry, and she doesn't bother to conceal it. This is a call for a revolution, and it's not likely to convince those who aren't already converted. I think it's brilliant, but I agree with everything she says. For a more careful, academic take, see anything by Jason Hickel.

[Justin Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

Liu is realistic: she is a second-generation member of the PMC, and she doesn't like her class. She thinks most people would be better off if we focused more on economic matters and less on, well, anything else. She thinks that, of the problems that can be solved, almost all of them can only be solved under socialism. I more or less agree with those things.

The average PMC, Liu writes:

* 'do not accept debate as a meaningful form of the advancement of knowledge. For them, every conflict is moral, not intellectual or political' (32)

* 'want to humiliate their adversaries by attributing to them a desperate lack of intelligence, empathy, and virtue' (56)

* ignore history, and particularly materialist history, preferring tales of moral derring-do by heroes like Atticus Finch

At least two of these seem spot on.

The book comprises an introduction, and chapters on 'transgressiveness,' child-rearing, reading, and sex.

Now, as I noted above, Liu admits to being a member of the PMC. If Liu wasn't so contemptuous of her own education in self-reflexive close reading (i.e., she has a Yale lit PhD), I might have thought she was slyly explaining the nature of her own book in her description of PMCs. Because this book does very little to *historicize* the PMC, although it does *narrate* the last seventy years or so of American history. In other words, the history here does not *explain* why the PMCs act as they/we do; instead, it is a narrative of *what they/we have done*. There is no hint that PMCs might be responding to historical circumstances, events, or issues; there is just brute action. And that is exactly how a PMC would tell the story, as well.

This narration allows Liu to present herself/her team (socialists) as the truly virtuous, intelligent, empathetic, and moral character in the drama of current affairs. If the book historicized (that is, explained) the PMCs, it would reduce their agency, and thus reduce their immorality. If their immorality was reduced, the morality of their opposite number (the socialists) would also be less assured. But that is not the point of this book, which is supposed to make a good case for engaging in socialist politics, rather than empty moral grand-standing.

I regret, the book does not make its case. It does not explain the PMCs historically or even conceptually. As another reviewer notes, PMC is here often just a synonym for liberal; it is also often a synonym for identity political academics (who really are irritating), or postmodernists (who surely only still exist in Liu's own field, so she probably has to deal with them more than I do), or artists in general, or people who worry about their children. Without a proper historical and conceptual account of a thing, it is very hard to make a good case against that thing.

So, if this is all high-literary self-referentiality, I give it five stars, because that is freaking hilarious. If it is unconsciously self-referential, and Liu is cool with that, I give it four stars. But since it seems to have been written in quite a hurry, and stitches together a bunch of things that are fine on their own but meaningless here (Liu does a nice job reading 'Mockingbird'), I give it one, plus one for being on the right side of history.

[Christopher · Rating 1 out of 5]

Really a tired screed. Everything is PMC. PMC is synonymous with being liberal. Half the things she describes is just being a damn liberal. The two concepts are not collapsible. And, for some reason, she is waging some incomprehensible polemic against the labor historian Gabriel Winant claiming he is just a deluded liberal writing an apologia for the PMC. Having read the article to which she refers I have literally no clue where this is coming from.

On the other hand, do read the folks she's referencing. Nagle and Ehrenreich are great. And, honestly even Winant's worst article is better than this. There is no analysis here, just polemic in which the stridency if her rhetoric is the whole point (which she all but states). Want a look at what the mode of enjoyment the PMC demonstrates when they engage in sex or read something? Want an analysis of how they conceive of pleasure (if at all)? That sound interesting? It's not here. Instead one book, To Kill A Mockingbird, lies at the root of PMC delusion. What was the point of bringing in the part of the New Criticism? It's a valid point but at what point did it get tied into the argument? I kept reading this like a thesis advisor. Winant in his piece goes to a lot of trouble to historicize the concept and bring clarity to understanding the formation and change of the class itself. I thought we were at least going to get a rival conception or something. At least it's short.

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hard book. A powerful book. A confronting book. This is not a 'pleasant' reading experience. And that is the point.

This book explores the Professional Managerial Class. This is the apologist group for capitalism. Most importantly, Liu investigates how the PMC have become 'virtue hoarders.'

These virtue hoarders are now conducting a class war - not against the capitalists - but the working classes. The culture war has now replaced the economic war. This is based on the confusion of popular culture and populism.

This group, composed of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production, "talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation.” Tolerance is as good as it gets for this group. They 'manage' social change.

Most importantly, this group are "making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits." In our universities - which are filled with the PMC - this invention of cultural hierarchies, valuing one mode of consumption over another, provides the space for populism, rather than popular culture, to flourish.

This is a tough book, and a welcome one. It is tough - and it needs to be. Excellent analysis and argument.

[David Selsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is fantastic--incisive, clearly-written, timely. It’s also incredibly depressing because of its accuracy. The power of this book is it clearly, succinctly, and powerfully lays bare a key component of the composition of class forces in America as they are currently constituted: the professional-managerial class--its composition, its characteristics, and its function in capital reproduction.

The Bernie campaigns for president in ‘16 and ‘20 were eye-opening experiences for many. For others, they were a case study of what they already knew; they were a repetition of what they experienced in the past: and that is if you scratch a liberal, if you scratch a Democrat, what you find underneath is usually a good capitalist meritocrat. Yes, meritocrats want a kinder, gentler world. Yes, they ache and hurt for the suffering masses here and abroad and wish all people had access to good healthcare, a decent education, and other social goods, but they have no idea, or don’t care to know, or know but don’t care to do anything about, the balance of class forces in the United States. They don’t understand or do understand but don’t want to do anything about the way power is wielded in this country.

Why? Why? Why? Why didn’t all the the kind, recycling, food co-op, Prius driving, NPR-listening liberals of America line up in droves behind the candidate with not only the most progressive platform since FDR but also the track record in city, state, and national politics to show he was committed to it and not a Johnny-come-lately? Putting aside morons who didn’t like the aesthetics of a loud, Jewish grandpa lecturing them, let’s look at the more substantive, and the more instructive critique of Bernie, which was the notion liberals had that they could substitute a woman (Warren), a millennial gay man (Buttegeig), or a woman of color (Harris) for Bernie and essentially get a politician who had the same political commitments. This belief indicated political ignorance. Or willful denial. For some, the fact that Bernie’s political commitments were substantively different than the other Democratic candidates finally became clear (too late). Or the ignorance remained. Or the denial remained. Or they ended up voting their class interests (PMC). More charitably, many who don’t follow politics closely or don’t think about the nature of political battles and policy making too closely, might not have realized there was a difference between Bernie and Warren or Bernie and the other candidates; or again, they realized it too late.

The class Liu directs her ire at by-and-large did know the stakes and clearly came down on the side of Warren or Mayor Pete or someone else. They came down on the side of those candidates as opposed to Bernie because their class position brought them to that point (or they had the aesthetic concerns about loud grandpas). I don’t want to relitigate the primary, but suffice to say, it was enlightening that the candidate who clearly staked out the farthest left position was not fully embraced by those who tell you all the time they believe in people getting nice things. The Left is not all the same! In fact, those liberal, those moderates, are not the Left. They are not socialists. Those on the left side of the political spectrum aren’t all the same and don’t all have the same political commitments. Liu’s book is clarifying about this fissure among those on the left. If one wanted to point to one word that captures the nature of the fissure that separates those who ultimately ended up voting for Biden in November, the word is meritocracy.

Socialists--and it’s interesting to note this is why socialists if they don’t make common cause with elements of Right populism at least don’t run from it in horror--do not fetishize elite educational institutions and don't fetishize ambition and accumulation above all else. Socialists are committed to the notion every human being should have good housing, good healthcare, good education, and lots of free time to do whatever he or she wants. One doesn’t have to be smart, or clever, of ambitious, or hard-working, or morally sound, or have the right beliefs, to have nice things in life. Being lazy, not particularly smart or ingenious aren’t characteristics that are targets of derision for socialists. Liberals--mainstream Democrats--believe one should have to work hard to get those things. They do believe in people getting good things. But they also believe you should go to college and work hard, read good books, eat well, improve yourself, try hard, and follow your dreams. They also make fun of half of the country for being idiots, rubes, morons, cretins, basically a basket of deplorables. Liberals are always the smartest people in the room in their telling, and they are alternatively tolerating and despising the great unwashed, gun-toting masses. Equality of opportunity is sacrosanct to liberals; the structural features that create abominable outcomes of inequality are much closer to socialists’ hearts.

The vanguard class of capital reproduction in the neoliberal era is the professional-managerial class. Understanding what the professional-managerial class is is important for anyone trying to understand who is holding power in American politics, who is dictating political and cultural discourse, and what role that class (PMC) plays in maintaining the status quo and stymieing redistributive governmental policies. Liu’s aim is true, and she exposes the PMC for the role they play in capital reproduction and for stymieing robust redistributive policies (exhibit A--the elite liberal media/political class’s [across all its platforms and in all its institutional roles] derision towards and attempts to undermine both of Sanders’s campaigns). Personally, I haven’t shed any tears over this. This was realpolitik. That was power. That was the PMC, the NGO-industrial complex, and the elite liberal media flexing to make sure their bread stayed buttered. You can’t cry over this stuff. But Liu and many other authors (Adolph Reed Jr., Walter Benn Michaels, Cedric Johnson, Chris Hedges, even Thomas Frank) do well in demystifying the class forces and clarifying the stakes.

What’s so depressing is that no matter how accurate Liu’s aim is, no matter how spicy some of her takedowns are of the PMC liberals, the aftertaste of the book is that of having consumed the largest, greatest Twitter thread in history: cloistered, intelligible mainly to the initiated, and likely to change virtually nothing. Which isn’t the same as saying it’s not a thoroughly satisfying read or that reading it isn’t time well-spent. But rather, no matter how many socialists edify their minds and spirits to the nature of the stakes and achieve clarity about who and who is not a class enemy, reading, clarifying and becoming edified aren’t counterweights to capital and the reproduction of elite consent. The almost complete ideological capture of the elite media, academia, finance, trade, and government by the neoliberal, meritocratic, militaristic, growth ethos (late stage Capitalism) means that the only thing that will slow down this leviathan is a power equal to or greater to the force it (capital) deploys.

Let me pause to say that I’m a member of the PMC (teacher), Liu is part of the PMC (academic), and almost everyone who reads and enjoys this book, that is to say socialists, is part of the PMC. They are college educated, well-read, interested in and knowledgeable about politics, history, and social science. 98 percent of my friends are good liberals. It’s nothing personal. It’s beyond the scope of this review to explore how political commitments reveal themselves in the everyday actions of our lives. Maybe the political commitments of a socialist and a liberal don’t look that different coming to fruition in everyday actions. I suspect they do in all sorts of small but important ways, but I’ll leave that alone for now.

I’ve almost completely ignored the issues encapsulated in the title of the book--“Virtue Hoarders.” Like most books I read, I forgot the specifics of this book quickly after I closed the cover for the last time. What happens when I read is the philosophy and political project of a book (or books) accretes to my thinking as the months and years pass. Earlier in this essay I mentioned some of the authors I’ve been reading in depth the last couple years. The philosophies put forth in their work, and the ideas and project put forth in Liu's book, meld together, blend and mix with my own philosophical, psychological, and political ideas and inclinations and come out in how I conduct myself. One doesn’t need to learn something new in every book or expect every book or every few books to alter the way one experiences the world. The written word can be edifying, deepening and solidifying one’s way of understanding the world and one’s place in it. That’s what this book did for me. Sitting here thinking about the book, I feel as though I agreed with almost every sentence in it.

The virtue hoarding the title refers to is the virtue PMC liberals feel they have as possessors of the answers to everything and the fact the rightness of their beliefs is unassailable. These beliefs mainly concern cultural issues around gender, sexual orientation, abortion, education, worthy intelletual pursuits, art/media, guns, race, and policing. What’s invariably missing from the PMC’s focuses of consternation and intervention are the structural elements of American political economy. However, the pro-capitalist mask usually doesn’t come all the way off. Elizabeth Warren’s (PMC candidate par excellence) “capitalist to my bones” comment was one of the few complete mask-off moments in recent discourse, and that is why it’s cited so often by those on the Left antagonistic to the PMC project. Most Democrats/liberal/PMC just want a kinder, gentler capitalism. And that’s fine. Sometimes I wish those nominally “on the left” would be more honest about their commitment to capitalism. It’s not wrong, per se. It’s their political commitment. What we have, however, is a lot of mealy-mouthed obfuscation and mystifying of who stands where (politicians, writers, podcasters and other manipulators of symbols [in the broadest sense]). It creates a lot of confusion about alliances, political commitments, and constituencies. Liu pierces the bullshit and states who stands where and why.

I think this obeisance to capital most Democrats have essentially has to do with an individualistic orientation towards the world: personal responsibility, personal accountability, personal growth, personal ambition--in the final analysis a focus on the self and an analysis of other selves. Socialists (and those who take on a lot of Marxian precepts) privilege a structural analysis of the world around them. This is a key way to differentiate between these two political orientations--a kinder, gentler capitalism and socialism. The PMC liberal is, on the whole, a very ambitious person. He or she also gets the knives out for the detritus of the country not living the right way (think flyover states occupants, white men (usually), the un- or undereducated, the religious, and the GOP--almost all members without exception). Liu’s book is so helpful here (as is the work of Adolph Reed, Cedric Johnson and a lot of Thomas Frank) because it clarifies that the PMC liberal is committed to a certain type of class politics--it’s a petty bourgeois and bourgeois politics. It’s not a working-class politics. As Adolph Reed has said many times, identity politics is a class politics; it’s a bourgeois class politics. I don’t feel like talking about racialized politics. The whole class essentialism versus race essentialism issue, especially vis-a-vis the Bernie campaign, was the topic that launched a thousand hot takes and essays. Enough of that.

Ultimately, however, what choice do we really have in the political commitments we hold? What free-will, what agency is actually at work in the existential, psychological, and political orientation we settle upon in adulthood? Do we “want” to be the way we are? Do we choose who we think are the righteous and who we think are the sordid? I don’t know. We probably consciously choose these orientations, these commitments, a lot less than we tell ourselves we do. I think bedrock psychological and foundational aspects of one’s personality inform the reasonings and the imperatives of one’s political outlook qua politics more than we acknowledge and more than there is any way to quantify. One’s political posture is ultimately irreducible and inscrutable. That’s not very Marxist of me to say. But I should be honest about that (the preceding thoughts in this paragraph) because if any of my Democrat friends read this they’ll think, and not inaccurately, that some of what I’ve written in unfair, haughty, and churlish.

As I said, I’m PMC, all my friends are PMC, and just about all my friends are liberals. It’s nothing personal. I’m not at the barricade on behalf of the working-classes. I’m a community college English teacher. Nothing is changing. Amazon crushed the workers in Bessemer. Biden’s term will morph into Obama’s third term. Whatever. “Virtue Hoarders” is edifying. The PMC, the bourgeoisie, the elite--they’re ambitious and they are ruthless. I thought about Lenin while I was writing this review. Perhaps that’s the kind of iron will it takes to subdue the ruling elite-- people like him doing things like he did. Is it worth it? I don’t know. The ruling elite in America is ruthless; it always has been. They are cocksure and convinced of their righteousness. They will do what they have to do to maintain power and accumulate capital. They always have and they always will. Ecological catastrophe might be the only laugh anyone (or thing) ever has on the capitalist rulers of the world. No humans, no constituency, no movement of solidarity, domestically or internationally, has even been strong enough to slow down the leviathan. Perhaps the Earth ripped and torn, battered and beaten, will have the first and final victory over capital.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short and affordable overview of the "PMC" or "e-mail caste" and its discontents by lifelong leftist Catherine Liu. Liu has studied the major events of the PMC-led culture wars - the Nagle cancellation, Kipnis on Title IX, Michael Lind talking down the PMC from the right, etc.

While I'm not sure if "PMC" is the apposite term or proper point of emphasis, this is the right book for sharing with skeptical friends and relatives best classified as "classical liberals," "radlibs," "Mitt Romney RINOs," and "disaffected leftists" - folks who might need some sort of pathway into a world beyond all of that stuff. Liu speaks to them where they are, in the way a total outsider like me - forever politically homeless and lost in both the rural part of the Rust Belt as well as books that are out of date and out of "cite" - could not.

My podcast co-host interviewed Liu this week. You can listen here:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/49752979

[Machiko · Rating 3 out of 5]

First purchase of 2021. Can't stop thinking about it. Read this alongside the new Obama memoir for a more profound side effect. Now you can judge me by my performative act of talking about reading this book and making a "virtue out of taste and consumption habits." 🤭🤣

[Hayo · Rating 3 out of 5]

mostly right on, ultimately nothing to disagree with in her conclusions. didn't entirely blend with how she got there. i understand the digs at poststructuralist excess, but i don't agree that they are either emblematic or counterproductive to revolutionary projects. there was also a strange snark at pronouns right at the end that didn't land well to me. another example where her targets are broadly correct, but her aim is off. i dunno, maybe it was really two stars.

[Vicky]

Reading this after stalking some profiles on LinkedIn and looking for—some thoughts—to clarify—some feelings—

"The rewards for following ruling-class directives are just too great, but the intellectual and psychic price that has to be paid for compliance should be too high for any member of society."

"Ordinary people were trapped in stultifying stable jobs, deferred gratification, and social conformity." + "Yuppies [were] boring, anxious, and conformist."

"Members of the PMC soften the sharpness of their guilt about collective suffering by stroking their credentials and telling themselves that they are better and more qualified to lead and guide than other people."

"The PMC was having difficulty reproducing itself [after 2008] because it had undermined working conditions for all Americans while raising too high the barrier of entry into the credentialed classes. PMC families and their children were reeling from the punishing cost of higher education as well as the narrowing gates of a corrupt meritocracy."

"In the early 1970s, just as the policies of deindustrialization and austerity were being perfected as instruments of class warfare in the United States, Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett interviewed the janitor “Ricca Kartides” (a pseudonym) for The Hidden Injuries of Class. The young sociologists discovered that Kartides, who worked as a janitor, felt humiliated every day by his job and its low social status. He was, however, on his salary alone, able to buy his own home so that his children wouldn’t have to live in the building he cleaned. Kartides’s ability to buy a house and support a family on his wages is unimaginable today.17 Today, the average janitor, who makes $24,000 a year"

"Today’s capitalists and PMC elites are also into self-cultivation, but their anxiety about their “privilege” makes them work very hard to humiliate others and project themselves tirelessly as a cultural and political vanguard, doing things to themselves of which ordinary people are incapable. PMC elites are always experimenting with themselves: from returning to the “land” under the aegis of new communalism to keto diets, only drinking sewage-laden raw water, and intermittent fasting, their self-indulgence is always a kind of sanctimonious austerity."

"When Kakutani interviewed Obama and he paraphrased Atticus Finch on how not to be a racist, the PMC elite was deifying a mode of reading that was meant to build a set of weak but socially legible links between people in closed-off, insular worlds of sensibilities and sensitivities." + "Other people, other experiences, only exist to the extent that they can expand our capacity for empathy and feeling."

"The majority of college-educated Americans abandoned promiscuity and nontraditional romantic arrangements as they became more successful in their professions. They were incentivized to settle down and stop cycling through partners as their incomes and assets increased. The protection of PMC socioeconomic status created opportunities for sacrifice and compromise that precarious working-class people abjured."

"In sex-positive PMC feminism, the best sex could be had in a social vacuum: it would take place in a comfortable bed with clean sheets, between consenting partners free of economic or social anxiety. In such an optimal situation, a woman could finger her clitoris, labia, or perineum in a leisurely manner, all the while communicating her needs and desires to a sensitive and receptive partner. [I copied/pasted this part only because I laughed out loud] Good sex became suffused with the logic of information and communication theory upon which ideals of consent are built."

"Even though they understand the futility of their own work, they do not believe in the systemic changes necessary to remake economic systems that would allow the many to find rewarding work and lead meaningful lives of dignity and economic security."

[Joan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Catherine Liu repudiates the stereotype of a Marxist cultural critic. She is both an excellent writer and very funny.

[Lily Manning · Rating 4 out of 5]

Veryyyy interesting exposé on the internal contradictions within the mainstream left. Quite specific to America tho. Certain things uncomfortable to read especially around sexual violence / identity politics.

This is definitely a core text in a convo that is gaining heaps of traction online : one that is anti-liberal elites (they haaaate Obama) and wants to return to economic reorganization as the central political goal

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is it a polemic and not a fully detailed analysis? Yes. But much like the war time writings of Thomas Paine, it is what we need in this moment of Valley Forge winter for the few remaining sane people on what passes for the political left in the Anglosphere.

'Members of the PMC believe themselves to be virtuous vanguardists, floating above historical forms and conditions, transgressing boundaries and inventing new ways of being and seeing. It is hard to argue with them, because they do not accept debate as a meaningful form of the advancement of knowledge. For them, every conflict is moral, not intellectual or political. Sokal failed to stop the proliferation of Americanized ahistorical poststructuralist lines of research into the humanities. Nagel reframed the notion of transgression, but found herself banished from academia. I have no illusions about the power of my critique against the dominant tendencies in academia today, but I will not stop criticizing opportunistic forms of antihistorical, antimaterialist, and antiprofessional work in my profession.'

[Oisín · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this so badly, it's a good topic that is only coming into mainstream discussion in the last few years. Unfortunately, Liu is prone to a kind of moralising that is quite unconvincing, and detracts from the material criticism of the PMC that is so readily available. The criticism of Laura Kipnis is, for the most part, quite pedantic and shows her rejecting a natural ally on the basis of imagined theoretical difference. The commentary on contemporary "endurance-based" performance art is bumbling and kind of insane.

[Eren Buğlalılar · Rating 4 out of 5]

An energetic and sarcastic polemic against what Liu calls the "Professional Managerial Class" (PMC).

Her main argument is that the PMC, the intermediate layer of white collar workers, hijacked the debate about the inequalities of capitalism. They "talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather exploitation". The PMC looks down on the working class and its values, and claims a monopoly on the most progressive, virtuous worldview possible -hence the "virtue hoarders".

Liu claims that the roots of the PMC ideology go back to the 1968 hippies but as these hippies "served new masters and enjoyed the rewards of that service", they slowly created their own liberal, capitalism-friendly psuedo-progressive ideology. She then goes on to critically explore the elements of this ideology, including of the bourgeois academy: "Academic research... is being subtly shaped by the agendas of the ruling class."

Interestingly, a similar intellectual atmosphere came to dominate Turkey starting from 2013. The ruling party intensified its campaign of oppression against the progressives and propped it up with reactionary propaganda designed to contain the impoverished sections of the society with religious nationalism. The liberal, secular progressive circles, instead of directing their anger to the fascist government, played safe and chose the ordinary people as their scapegoat (working class supporters and voters of the ruling AKP began to be called as "Çomar/Stray dogs" -Turkish version of "redneck"). Just as the anti-Trump liberals in the US accused the working class for electing him, the Turkish PMC launched a "çomar-bashing" campaign. As if the entire election mechanism, since the end of the 19th century, hadn't been carefully designed and continuously adjusted to maintain the hegemony of the rich.

"PMC elites have pioneered a language of liberal tolerance that the working classes have not mastered. PMC elites, consciously or unconsciously, want to humiliate their adversaries by attributing to them a desperate lack of intelligence, empathy, and virtue."

Liu is a comrade.

[Ryan Jantz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good introduction into the background of neoliberal ideology, and a snapshot of where we are now. It’s a condemnation of the positioning of the elite liberal class as cultural and moral vanguards, who prioritize identity politics while ignoring intensifying economic stratification of the working class. Virtue Hoarders is especially prescient as it is framed by the pandemic.

“The fact that the Biden-Harris administration is opposed to national health care, or Medicare for All, is very revealing. Rather than promoting national health care, a phalanx of centrist experts will promote individual actions, such as mask wearing, as the new virtues. Yes, we should wear masks, but we should demand free COVID-19 testing and contact tracing, free vaccines along with the rebuilding of public health institutions to serve public health and not the profit motive. If times go back to normal, and your boss or health insurer tries to sell you on the commodification of your health as a “wellness” protocol, remember your health care is part of public infrastructure, not a commodity.”

[Andrew]

Finally getting around to this, even though I’m a fan, and hell I’m subscribed to her Substack (and if you are too, you should check out the Substack of one of her coolest followers, hint hint). Much like with another text from the same clique I read earlier this year, Amber A’Lee Frost’s Dirtbag, I agree with Liu about the vast majority of things. However, as with Dirtbag, Liu can’t help but rub it in your face a little about how right she is. Granted, this is a polemic, not an academic argument, so I’m expecting more cattiness than rigor (and how!). But there’s way too much space dedicated to the internecine feuds of the American Left, too much lambasting of some easy-to-ignore culture war dumbasses who are really quite easy to ignore if you’re less online, hell I just kinda felt at points like this is what Liu was muttering under her breath at every DEI seminar for faculty she was forced to sit through. Still entertaining as hell, but 80 pages was more than enough.

[Christopher Max · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like this book was written by the snake emoji's Bernie Bro's would post online whenever someone mentioned Elizabeth Warren.

Virtue Hoarders is longish form essay that mounts a critique of members of the "professional managerial class" (PMC) for not having a strong enough allegiance with the working class. Instead, Liu argues, that members of the PMC believe that they, and they alone, are the only folks capable of saving our democracy. Liu, with no irony, has written this book exclusively for the PMC (because who else would read it?) so that they may become a subset of their class and exclaim that they (and they alone) are the "good" members of the PMC who ARE aligned with working class values- those other PMC snobs are the bad guys. Enlightened members of the PMC can reference this book as a "signifier" of their class rejection.

Like many Bernie Sanders fanboys Liu pains herself to play the "Oppression Olympics" and demonstrate that class struggle is the only struggle worth caring about- those of us who care about racism, or sexual assaults on college campuses are wasting our time! Fortunately (or unfortunately) for the rest of us- there is no "Oppression Olympics" and oppression is not a zero sum game. Recognizing the brutal consequences of capitalism on the working class across the globe does not take away from the horrors of police brutality against unarmed black me in the name of white supremacy, or the real risk of sexual assault that women experience daily AND vice versa. In fact, whenever oppressed groups are pitted against each other the only real winners are the status quo- the capitalists, the white supremacists, the homophobes, the transphobes, etc. etc. etc.

Liu also, again with no sense of self-awareness or irony, critiques the academy (and the PMC who make up the academy) for their loosy goosy adherence to research methods while she herself has written a treatise on class (perhaps this work would be appropriate for the field of Sociology? I don't know for sure, I'm not a Sociologist). Liu is not a professor of economics, or sociology, but of film and media studies. "Sure those folks in the humanities and social sciences are clearly off their rocker for 'borrowing' from physics or linguistics, but I (and again, I alone) will dip into another field to show you all what the 'truth' really is." To be clear- I don't believe only scholars in a certain field can write about that field, but I do believe that you can't have it both ways.

Lastly- as is the problem with nearly all Marxist critiques and Bernie Sanders talking points- there is some truth to be had here but Liu is all too light about what we are supposed to do with any of this. Of course the widening of the gap between the rich and the poor causes tremendous horrors and is unsustainable. But what do we do? Like actually, do? Unfortunately, pointing fingers at whomever you think are the "real" bad guys is not social justice, it's not even activism. It is however very easy. It's also easy to come up with something that looks good on a bumper sticker like "Free College" or "Medicare for All". It is even easier to put that bumper sticker on your car. But that too is again not activism, and that again does not make change. Pointing a finger at a poisoned lake and saying that it is poisoned does not make you an environmentalist- tell me what you are doing (and I'd also be open to learn about what I can do) to clean that lake up.

Our country has a lot of poisoned lakes- class division, racial divides, and in some places like Flint the literal water continues to be poisoned. We don't need another book to tell us what the problems are (we know) and who's fault it is (we often know that too). We need actual solutions that start with what we can do as individuals and as a collective to make things better. If Liu has some actual recommendations and especially if she can can tell us what she is doing to support the working class I'd love to hear them.

[Camille · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked the PMC cultural critique, esp in regards to cultural consumption and political morals but disliked a lot of class reductionist takes (although she would criticize me for calling for intersectionality lmao)

[Arin Goswami · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible summary of class in the 21st century, especially in light of the COVID19 pandemic. Catherine Liu is a professor at UC Irvine and she breaks down how the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) is the 9% that are between the colloquial 1% of society (the elite / ruling class), and the rest of society.

She outlines how the PMC is responsible for virtue hoarding; especially with a view towards the Judeo-Christian values it originates in, the revisionist nature of its history, and the omission of objectivity in its thought. I genuinely recommend this book to anyone that is, or aspires to be, a member of the PMC. I definitely got a lot out of it.

[Ryan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Overly broad to the point of incomprehension. This paints 'the PMC' as whomever the writer wishes and manages to tar both art and academics as inherently elitist. Even as the author tells us she is, and presumes we are, part of the awful class, she chides the thoughtlessness of her peers.

Worse than useless, actively harmful.

[Pinhead Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5. Entertaining and timely rant. Liu argues that the liberal elite (the PMC), weaponize identity and signaling for whatever cause du jour to “hoard virtue” and assert cultural dominance over the working class. The PMC, backed by their distorted sense of moral superiority, use their social clout to undermine class struggle and pledge their fealty to our capitalist overlords.

[mads · Rating 5 out of 5]

had 5 pages left and libby returned it while i was reading but i'm counting this as finished idc. lots of interesting takes, made me look at the class i was brought up in in a new way. learned a lot of new words too😁

[Leah Yonemoto-Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

idk how to do stars ratings for this kind of book. 3.5? doesn’t rlly seem to fit w how im thinking about it.

critique of the pseudo-leftist values of the PMC and how the class serves capitalism while “insisting on its own progressive heroism.”

have wanted to sit down and read this for a long time. i see so much of my family, my education, my childhood in this, it’s jarring. it articulates a lot of the paradoxes and weird feelings one has as part of the PMC and being complicit in its proliferation. it also articulates so clearly how the PMC is a major part of driving this country towards fascism (“across the world, ordinary people without college degrees have rejected PMC technocracy in favor of populist authoritarianism bc they no longer believe in the dominant neoliberal narrative about austerity and competition. to the majority of non-college-educated people, the PMC increasingly appear as pedantic, hypocritical, and punishing: in authoritarian, science denying conservative leaders, they recognize their own rage.”)

i thought the first two chapters were stronger than the third. while i agree with her thesis of the third chapter, it felt a little more meandering than the very clear first two and conclusion. this is,,, a PMC book written for the PMC which sometimes i was like, is this whole thing just an example of everything she’s supposedly critiquing? sometimes it got a little too meta and disconnected from the working class she is supposedly championing. overall, some nuance could have been added.

i still think it should be required reading for children of academics and liberal arts graduates lol.

[Ellie]

I think it's going to be fairly obvious which books are assigned grad school reads

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strong - challenging - confronts the woke & liberal left in a way that is didactic, demanding and sometimes funny.

[Jint'ar Darvek · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I had to review this book in one word, it would be

Zing

The PMC are a big part of why (art) education has become prohibitively expensive.
I'll probably never get a BFA.
Suppose I'll have to educate myself.

My parent's fear that I might fail to perform academically and get into a good school were the cause of much teenage stress.
It makes sense now given the prevalence of the yuppie in public consciousness around the time my parents were the age I am now.

There's a nice crossover point between this book and Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford.
So many of us are "knowledge workers" now.
Work has become ungrounded from material objective measures.
When the quality of your labor is subject to interpretation, the most important activity becomes the management of relationships.
So we endlessly deliberate over whether the work is done right.
In so doing, we lose sight of whether we're doing the right work.