Virtue Hoarders
* Book: Catherine Liu. Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. University of Minnesota Press,
URL = https://www.upress.umn.edu/press/press-clips/washington-examiner-the-dictatorship-of-virtue
Description
Washington Examiner:
"Catherine Liu’s polemical new book, Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, 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. As Liu states in the first sentence of the book: “For as long as most of us can remember, the professional-managerial class has been fighting a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but against the working classes.” Whereas Winant claimed that the declining economic prospects of the highly educated have created the conditions for solidarity with the toiling masses, Liu views this as a mirage. Although the professional-managerial class has been losing ground to the 1% in financial terms, it has also been hoarding another commodity, virtue, and using it to wage all-out war against its social inferiors."
(https://www.upress.umn.edu/press/press-clips/washington-examiner-the-dictatorship-of-virtue)
Review
Taylor Hines:
"Catherine Liu’s recent book Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class aims to stop such thinking in its tracks. Liu critiques Winant by name, prefacing her book by stating that “My brief introduction to the PMC is polemical: for a recent ‘objective’ account of the term, one need look no further than Gabriel Winant’s ‘Professional Managerial Chasm.” (4) “Unlike Winant’s article,” Liu continues, “the work represented here is not a neutral piece of professional scholarship, refining terms and their definitions, insisting on nuance, and then finger-wagging at those on the Left who are allegedly uncivil, who cannot hold polite discussions, and who hurl epithets at their enemies like missiles. Winant believes in liberal virtue; I do not” (5).
Organized as a collection of short stand-alone essays, Virtue Hoarders analyzes PMC character with a series of case studies. In “The PMC Has Children,” she unpacks the anxiety surrounding child-rearing among affluent professionals, who desperately prepare their children to take and hold their place in the white-collar world, hyperconscious that they are facing an ever-narrowing window of opportunity. For the PMC, children are reservoirs for professional anxiety: “PMC mothers have to do prenatal yoga while setting up intrauterine Mozart streams on pregnant bellies. Preparing for a child is just the beginning of a tortuous and expensive preoccupation for today’s elites” (35).
In “The PMC Reads a Book,” a review of To Kill a Mockingbird sure to delight any critic of pedantic SAT questions, Liu observes that “Despite its veneer of detached sophistication, the PMC embraces melodrama and sentimentality when dealing with inequality, imagining powerless people as innocent victims who it alone is uniquely able to ‘help.’” In short, she concludes, “The PMC desperately wants to be a gender-neutral Atticus Finch” (74).
Liu continues her critique of the PMC’s purported intellectual superiority in her chapter “The PMC Has Sex,” wherein she draws a near-linear path from hole-in-the-sheet puritanism to contemporary consent culture, observing how the PMC’s self-proclaimed “sexual revolution” was “a revolution that made orgasm and pleasure objects of PMC moral and pedagogical refinement” (61). “To be part of this revolution, you had to accept that the private experiences and lives of elite PMC people were the most important sites of meaningful political and cultural activity” (61). For the PMC, Liu argues, good sex is not centered around pleasure but neo-puritan ideals of intellectual purity and virtuous individualism: “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. Good sex became suffused with the logic of information and communication they upon which ideals of consent are built” (61-62).
Liu’s portrait of the PMC is uncompromising: sanctimonious and puritan, the PMC of Liu’s book imagine themselves saviors of the world, delight in melodramatic scandals, and assiduously poison themselves with raw water and organic carrots they have fertilized by composting their own fiber-enriched feces. Whether it is “returning to the ‘land’ under the aegis of new communalism to keto diets, only drinking sewage-laden raw water, and intermittent fasting,” she writes, even “their self-indulgence is always a kind of sanctimonious austerity” (55). Forget whether the PMC has anything concrete to contribute to political struggle; who the hell would want these people on their side?
In her conclusion, Liu writes, “I hope that this short introduction to the false consciousness of a class that still wants to believe itself a heroic and virtuous political actor will strengthen the reader’s resolve to reject PMC politics while building on this critique of its reactionary class politics” (75). While no doubt successful in this task, Virtue Hoarders brings its critique to bear by conflating the PMC as a class with a particular consumer ethos. Although thoroughly enjoyable, what tends to get lost in such a critique is the primary structural question: why does the PMC tend to collaborate with the bosses—or, at least, against workers?
Because the targets of Virtue Hoarders are reducible to a collage of personal affects, it can be unclear at times who the real target of its critique is. Overanxious parents? Those responsible for perpetuating parental anxiety? The sanctimonious parents who lord their hyper-refined child-rearing practices over those less assiduous than they are (even if all of these groups, along with their purported victims, are ultimately the same people)? Beyond the question of the intended object of critique, one wonders whether it is necessary to consider prenatal yoga mats or G-spot stimulation toys when analyzing PMC politics. Ridicule has its strategic function, but ruthlessly picking apart the idiocy of PMC consumer culture does not necessarily make strategic political thinking any clearer.
Don’t get me wrong: I despise PMC culture, and particularly its influence on the Left, as much as Liu. And polemic can be fun, cathartic, and necessary. But polemic also needs to hit its target. We need the blows to land, and for the PMC to stay on the mat. The characters we meet in Virtue Hoarders include cynical financial analysts, co-op tending Swarthmore College professors, and woke campus activists. Winant’s PMC, on the other hand, includes nurses and teachers—skilled professionals who might sometimes bask in their own “virtue” but whom the Left should be hesitant to dismiss. Winant and sympathizers can easily point to the 2018 teachers’ strikes and say, “This is who we’re talking about. Who are you talking about?”
Discussion
Lizzie Warren:
"The upper echelons of the PMC inhabit a conflictual class position, which scrambles their thinking. Stocks, tantalizing promotional possibilities, and bonuses and benefits galore—who can blame them for believing their bosses are the good guys? The PMC resists a basic understanding of class conflict in favor of cohering as a social group around cultural and moral issues for simple material reasons.
Upper-PMC workers also need to believe in the “goodness” of their companies and the people who run them to do their jobs successfully. And the bosses are increasingly keen to confirm this belief, ever more interested in projecting to the public they’re on the right side of history. They care about Black Lives, feminism, democracy, mental health, and so on. Where marketing before surreptitiously sold sex appeal, today it peddles moral appeal, and a certain stratum of workers has been primed to accept the marketing as true.
The PMC understands that the world is in dire straits, and that they must commit wholeheartedly to doing something about it. Manic defenses rush in: grand activity triumphantly banishes doubt. An inflated sense of one’s own power masks the overwhelm of external reality. The goal is to stay busy all of the time—and not just busy in the traditional sense of productivity, but busy being a particular kind of human being. The economy of subjectification demands a continual, largely unconscious curation of a self that is engaged, committed, socially aware, and virtuous—precisely not the kind of person who would kill themselves for a job they hate at a company that is morally bankrupt. Nor the kind of person who would accept an easy, pointless job in exchange for a lot of money. Personal accommodation to corrupt social structures to make ends meet threatens their identity. “It’s just a job” no longer flies as an excuse.
The ethos of Silicon Valley encourages this form of omnipotent denial. Winners abound, and they are clear evidence that you can indeed have it all: the money, the status, and the virtue."