Virtue Hoarders

The Case against the Professional Managerial Class

2021
Author:

Catherine Liu

MANIFOLD EDITION

PODCAST APPEARANCES:

CHAPO TRAP HOUSE

THE JACOBIN SHOW

DAVID PAKMAN SHOW

HIT FACTORY

BUNGACAST

IT'S NOT JUST IN YOUR HEAD

DARTS & LETTERS

CONTER CAST

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

Author Catherine Liu shows how Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers who labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling stand in the way of social justice and economic redistribution. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits.

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.

Catherine Liu is professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine.

If a meaningful intellectual current does emerge from the wreckage of contemporary capitalism, it may well begin from the demystification of PMC liberal mores.

Conter

Virtue Hoarders argues that the professional-managerial class-working class alliance was doomed from the start for the simple reason that the two classes’ interests are fundamentally opposed.

The Washington Examiner

Virtue Hoarders amplifies a discussion that still needs to be had.

Spiked

Lui’s argument is thorough, well researched, and saturated with supporting evidence.

Rhizomes

A quick, fun read, polemicising against views which are currently dominant in the US academic left and mainstream media, and characterising these views as expressing the interests of the ‘professional managerial class’ - or ‘PMC’ - as opposed to those of the working class.

Weekly Worker

Delicious.

Like all good polemics [Virtue Hoarders] is a romp: lively, fun to read.

Jeff Noonan

Thoroughly enjoyable.

Damage Magazine

Liu’s comments in Virtue Hoarders on politics seem spot-on.

The Independent Review

Liu, a professor at UC Irvine, draws from a well of experience, humor, and rage to show us how the PMC’s quest for class domination continues to unfold in our gilded age.

Los Angeles Review of Books

In this penetrating, provocative and often quite funny polemic, Catherine Lui, professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, meditates on the rise of a hypereducated, virtue-signalling middle class, which, she argues, focuses its morality on language, taste, consumption habits and performative politics- at the exclusion of material concerns and, ultimately, actual societal change. An anti-Twitter warrior essay to end all anti-Twitter warrior essays.

Globe and Mail