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Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class (Forerunners: Ideas First) Paperback – December 20, 2020

by Catherine Liu (Author)

4.4 459 ratings

Part of: Forerunners: Ideas First (70 books)

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A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism

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.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

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Part of series

Forerunners: Ideas First
Print length

90 pages
Language

English
Publisher

University of Minnesota Press
Publication date

December 20, 2020
Dimensions

5 x 0.4 x 7 inches
ISBN-10

1517912253
ISBN-13

978-1517912253
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Customers find the book insightful and persuasive. They describe it as a well-researched, concise, and easy read. The author's writing style is described as clear and straightforward.

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10 customers mention "Thought provoking"10 positive0 negative

Customers find the book insightful and persuasive. They say it's a well-researched, concise, and accurate account of the current moment. The book provides a useful critique of the contemporary left and is an important work in hypocritical times.

"Short but well-researched and straight to the point...." Read more

"This was an enjoyable read. A well laid out argument that allows any reader to strip back a few layers of our daily social experience, allowing us..." Read more

"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..." Read more

"...An important piece of work in hypocritical times." Read more

9 customers mention "Pacing"9 positive0 negative

Customers find the book concise and easy to read. They appreciate the author's writing style and say it's straightforward and accurate, not overly academic or decorative. The book provides a brief introduction to how the top 30% have evolved over time and an accurate description of the current moment.

"Short but well-researched and straight to the point...." Read more

"...The text is short, but powerful. Liu's writing style pulls no punches while maintaining a clinical remove...." Read more

"...get obliterated or overly dumbed down, but the text is very accessible to any untrained reader..." Read more

"...It's short and blunt and spot on." Read more

7 customers mention "Readability"7 positive0 negative

Customers find the book easy to read and engaging. They say it's a concise but thorough critique of the topic.

"Short but well-researched and straight to the point...." Read more

"This was an enjoyable read...." Read more

"...Liu puts into words what I've suspected for years. It's short and blunt and spot on." Read more

"What a great book on a great topic. Kept hearing about it everywhere I went online, glad I finally got to read it...." Read more

3 customers mention "Humor"3 positive0 negative

Customers like the humor. They mention it's provocative and searing, and they find it fun propaganda.

"Funny and largely correct. I usually poke fun at these people and maybe pity them (some virtue hoarding myself?)..." Read more

"...Liu's book is mordant and provocative, humorous and searing, and is easily digestible for all...." Read more

"Fun Propaganda For You..." Read more

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Excellent
Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2023
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Short but well-researched and straight to the point. The only point I have a real contention with is the assertion that the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) has decreed that sadism is not acceptable in any context. If that were true, economic wage slavery and the sadism of environmental and climate destruction would be unacceptable: they are, instead, the order of daily business. Every time you hear excuses for how some elite gets away with what the common rube would face prison for - that's the PMC, most especially in its tech-bro incarnation.

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MW Mills
A Blistering Takedown of the Culture
Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2024
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I came from a solidly blue, working-class background. I was the first in my family to make the migration from a locally-oriented culture that valued skilled labor and the business of "making things" to a globally-oriented culture that pitied tradespeople and created careers out of data manipulation. I strongly identify with Liu when she writes that, as she too made this migration and nestled into the comforts of lanyard living, she looked around and became troubled by a lot that she saw.

The text is short, but powerful. Liu's writing style pulls no punches while maintaining a clinical remove. The matter-of-fact tone carries you through paragraphs that can be dense at times. But no passage or word feels decorative or needlessly academic.

Some familiarity with the Ehrenreich essay on the PMC will help the reader, but it is not necessary.

If you feel—as I have felt for a while—that culture is flattening, that even smalltalk between strangers can involve an odd instances of materialist one-upsmanship, and that there's barely a moment in your life or the lives of your children that isn't spent in service to someone else's wealth, this book is for you.

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bruja
Sounds true
Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2021
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Funny and largely correct. I usually poke fun at these people and maybe pity them (some virtue hoarding myself?) but this book made me question whether that was the appropriate response or whether I was therefore even more complicit in furthering the country’s inequities.

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14 people found this helpful

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Jake
A short, concise but weighty critique
Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2021
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This was an enjoyable read. A well laid out argument that allows any reader to strip back a few layers of our daily social experience, allowing us to consider a structural and class based impediment to progress. I'm coming to this being already on board with this critique but was looking for a deeper (but short) dive into the premise itself. I'm writing this review weeks after reading, so I can't get too granular but it's stuck with me. The Author is clearly a trained academic and that vibe doesn't get obliterated or overly dumbed down, but the text is very accessible to any untrained reader (which should be the goal of any social analysis attempting to find a wider audience). I believe I learned about the Author via a video podcast interview.

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5 people found this helpful

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BFRICE
A Brutal Must-Read
Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2024
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I have always been a center left liberal. Liu puts into words what I've suspected for years. It's short and blunt and spot on.

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C. Derick Varn
The class which is not one
Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2021
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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.

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David Cook
The classism and suppression tactics of Human Resources departments
Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2024
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Informative of the history of the professional managerial class and it's turning against the working class.

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Lucas Cavalcanti Rodrigues
Ressurgimento de conceito marxista do pós-guerra
Reviewed in Brazil on August 16, 2024
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Eu realmente gostei desse livro. Em geral, o conceito de PMC vem da insatisfação de alguns marxistas do pós-guerra com insuficiência do modelo marxista de duas classes (capitalistas vs proletariado) para explicar sociedades modernas no século XX. Cada vez mais era claro a existência de um estrato intermediário. Para marxistas mais ortodoxos o tal estrato intermediário não era qualitativamente diferente da working class já que também era composto por pessoas que não possuíam capital e também dependem da venda da sua força de trabalho para viver. Quando muito esse estrato intermediário se distinguia pelo consumo apenas.

Outros marxistas, porém, decidiram romper com a ortodoxia e argumentaram que classe não se limita à posse de capital, mas também por cultura, redes de socialização e inserção produtiva. Dessa forma, os não-capitalistas em sociedades modernas se dividiriam em working class (dedicados à produção de mercadorias) e PMC (dedicados à replicação da ideologia que legitima o sistema). O papel dos PMCs, então, é eminentemente ligado à propaganda ideológica e, portanto, ao aparato intelectual e cultural da sociedade.

Neste ensaio, a autora retoma o conceito (originalmente pensado em 1977) e procura mostrar como lideranças e instituições aparentemente progressistas tendem a agir contra a classe trabalhadora ao promover visões de mundo e debates que passam ao largo de preocupações materiais ou de conflitos entre capital e trabalho. Dessa forma, os PMCs garantem sua sobrevivência econômica ao contribuir para repressão da classe trabalhadora (classe que, na visão da autora, os PMCs abominam e, em geral, não convivem socialmente).

O modelo básico é simples, mas gera alguns resultados interessantes. A escrita da autora é muito boa, então a leitura é bem agradável.

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Linda J. Page
Opens my eyes
Reviewed in Canada on December 21, 2021
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As a member of the PMC, I have long wondered about the reluctance of my colleagues to recognize this irony: talking about relieving suffering but ignoring or squelching attempts by our working class brothers and sisters to organize to do it. I don't see any other force that can do it.

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Kindle Customer
Call to arms!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 5, 2024
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Really good no nonsense critique of the 'buffer' class - those useful idiots who serve Capital without knowing it.
Read it, smile...then act.

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Rodrigo Barreda Maza
Excellent
Reviewed in Germany on May 11, 2024
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Excellence

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Amazon Customer
Great book against the bougie worker-hating fake-left
Reviewed in France on August 17, 2021
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Catherine courageously demystifies and attacks the culture of self-aggrandizing, self-mediatizing strivers and pleads for a return to class politics.

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