[Reviewer Foley discusses a new examination of the "professional
managerial class." The books publisher calls this book "an
unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste
and consumption habits." ] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE PMC AND VIRTUE HOARDING  
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James Foley
February 2, 2021
Conter
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_ Reviewer Foley discusses a new examination of the "professional
managerial class." The book's publisher calls this book "an
unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste
and consumption habits." _

,

 

_Virtue Hoarders
The Case against the Professional Managerial Class_
Catherine Liu
University of Minnesota Press
ISBN 978-1-5179-1225-3

“I have long been of opinion that the Socialist movement…was to a
great extent hampered by the presence in its ranks of faddists and
cranks, who were in the movement, not for the cause of Socialism, but
because they thought they saw in it a means of ventilating their
theories on such questions as sex, religion, vaccination,
vegetarianism, etc”.

Those anxieties belong to Edinburgh’s own James Connolly and date to
the turn of the twentieth century, with socialist movements still in
their infancy. Three decades later, George Orwell was similarly
exasperated. The typical socialist, he found, was “a prim little man
with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with
vegetarian leanings…One sometimes gets the impression that the mere
words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with
magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer,
sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in
England…”

This testifies to a long history of fears that leftist movements will
be overrun by the hang-ups of middle-class eccentrics. Remembering
this can help contextualise our own doubts: despite all that pessimism
about quacks, faddists and cranks, subsequent years did witness mass,
proletarian socialist projects. Perhaps the same will apply in our
age. Yet times have changed since Connolly or Orwell, qualitatively
and decisively. Intellectuals of their day could still appeal to the
autonomous wisdom of self-organised artisans, working-class women,
soldiers, peasants and factory workers. Working-class associational
life has since reached a peak and collapsed, not just in party
organisation and trade unionism, but also in religion, sport and
culture. A working class (though changed) remains the social majority,
but a “void”, as Peter Mair said, separates it from political and
cultural representation.

Conversely, the traditional middle classes were transformed by the
expansion of universities and white-collar occupations. This also
reached a peak, somewhat later, when the over-production of cultural
elites collided with the post-2008 breakdown of the capitalist system.
Graduate wages fell to levels often indistinguishable from working
class occupations. But economic convergence was matched by cultural
and political divergence. While graduates entered the left and the
unions in droves, their hunger for distinction entered with them. For
this reason, universalist appeals to ‘the 99%’ fell flat:
today’s leftism presents itself as an immense accumulation of
subcultures, all seeking moral differentiation from a fallen cultural
majority.

Here, I believe, lies the root controversy over the “professional
managerial class” (PMC). The term emerged in the 1970s during the
retreat of the first wave of New Left social movements. Barbara and
John Ehrenreich, who popularised the term, were not the first to
notice the accumulation of managerial and professional bureaucracies
that were both causes and consequences of university expansion.
Earlier notions of a “new class”, distinct from an earlier _petty
bourgeoisie_ or traditional professionals, can be traced to the
post-war theories of James Burnham, John Kenneth Galbraith and Milovan
Djilas.

The Ehrenreichs’ innovation lay in linking the rise of this class to
post-68 social movement leftism. Thus, from the start, it mixed
sociological description with political diagnosis. “The PMC’s
objective class interests,” they observed, “lie in the overthrow
of the capitalist class, but not in the triumph of the working class;
and their actual attitudes often mix hostility towards the capitalist
class with elitism towards the working class”. The PMC origins of
the New Left, the Ehrenreichs contended, “shaped its growth and
ideology”. That said, their assessment, as of the seventies, was
ambivalent rather than hostile: the PMC was by nature haughty towards
the working-class majority, but also structurally antagonistic to
capitalism. It was a potential ally, though not one to trust further
than you could throw.

Post-68 radicalism ebbed away, leaving a cultural imprint on academic
faculty, who, in a ponytailed, blue-jeaned, turtle-necked spirit of
rebellion, passed hand-me-down ideas to their students. The resulting
mixture of cultural radicalism, political quiescence and economic
yuppiehood still dominates campuses today, and radiates out into
graduate professions like fashion, journalism and the arts. David
Graeber was an acute observer of this trend in academia:

On the one hand, campuses that in the 1960s had been the focus of
actual social movements, even revolutionary movements, were largely
depoliticized…On the other hand, much of the language and
sensibilities of such movements were maintained even as this period
saw the consolidation of the university as the place for the
reproduction of a class that in its upper echelons at least had become
no longer a mere auxiliary to power, but something at least very close
to a branch of the ruling class in its own right.

Thus, when leftist protest re-emerged from the nineties deep freeze,
it was increasingly inseparable from a great gloop of PMC mores. This
formed a natural upper limit to the left’s hegemonic ambitions.
Confronted with austerity, left populist parties initially tried to
recapture a majoritarian spirit – “we are the 99%!” – but
frequently found themselves prisoners of the predilections of their
core supporters, those subcultures of downwardly mobile graduates.

The great historical irony is that post-2008 left experiments, styling
themselves against the establishment, would eventually reinforce the
sociology of the Third Way. Perhaps the quintessential case, despite
its early promise, was Labour’s recent lurch to the left.
“Ideologically, Corbynism was a break from New Labour centrism,”
notes Chris Bickerton, “but sociologically, it was more Blairite
than Tony Blair.” Cynical though this assessment might sound, it is
reasonably founded in fact. Blair’s clique had emphasised the
“Southern question”, the need to break Labour from its “northern
heartlands” (as Peter Mandelson is said to have sneered, who else
would they vote for?) and speak to a younger, aspirational
middle-class who had embraced market globalisation. By the time the
Corbyn experiment had concluded – or, by the time the People’s
Vote had colonised Momentum – this base of broadly liberal voters
was effectively the party’s new heartland.

The result, not just in Britain, is a leftism where class dare not
speak its name. Stimulated by a postmodern curriculum, graduates
encourage – indeed, mandate – wrenching self-examination of
whiteness, heteronormativity and patriarchy. Privilege, as they call
it. But, on class, they have built paranoid, insulated walls against
critique. When the question is even asked, some retort (correctly)
that the “working class has changed”, implying (incorrectly) that
they are the vanguard of a new social majority that passes through top
tier universities. Others bristle at the tag PMC, the mere mention of
which invites charges of “class reductionism”, now regarded
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the greatest academic sin one can commit.

Within living memory, there were socialist cultures that defined
themselves as working class, sometimes at the cost of silliness. At
any activist get-together, there were Mockney accents, tracksuits and
flat caps aplenty. Perhaps it was necessary to break from this live
action role playing. But today, all of that has been replaced by an
excruciating silence, punctuated by occasional explosions like 2016,
which only reinforce a paranoid distrust of class analysis. Discussing
the left’s class profile has thus become the proverbial minefield.

In that sense, Catherine Liu deliberately treads on just about every
landmine. _Virtue Hoarders, _a book she styles as a “short
introduction to the false consciousness of a class”, charts the
decline of American intellectual life, the advance of PMC cultures,
and an attendant hostility towards the working-class majority – all
of it legitimised by radical rhetoric.

Back in America’s Progressive era, Liu observes, the PMC rose as the
enemies of robber barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie. They were the
muckrakers, the social workers, the reforming allies of trade unions
seeking to replace the rule of the corporations with the authority of
the planners. But since the seventies, they have become allies of
capitalist philanthropy – their highest aspiration being,
ironically, a Rockefeller or Carnegie endowment. They serve the
(post)-neoliberal epoch by providing its moral vocabulary, built on
the holy trinity of meritocracy, managed transgression and the
centring of excluded voices.

The book’s central concept, “virtue hoarding”, offers a useful
window into contemporary leftist dispositions. “The post-68 PMC
elite,” Liu observes, believes itself to comprise not just our
era’s best and brightest, but also “the most advanced people the
earth has ever seen”. Yet while their elitism may be pronounced, it
is also historically peculiar. Today’s leftists are not the first
to style themselves as a vanguard of virtue. Traditional Leninism, to
its critics, was guilty of adopting the lofty vantage point of the
“true” proletarian, in contrast to the masses deluded by false
consciousness. Much ink was spilled – often, ironically, by
postmodern academics – condemning this outlook’s pretentiousness.
Nonetheless, even at its worst, the Leninist stance implied a dynamic
relationship to the majority: the goal was to “win” or “guide”
the masses to the truth.

By contrast, today’s ideal-typical activists are radically
different. Our vanguardists of virtue have no time for proselytising
among workers – not even notionally. Instead, their goal is
distinction, culturally, against a fallen majority, what Hillary
Clinton called the “deplorables”. Virtue isn’t spread but
hoarded. This explains the curiosity that, even where this group’s
libertarian value system enjoys majority support, they continue
to _act_ as excluded moral minorities. Rather than stress common
ground, which, ironically, has grown abundantly over the neoliberal
epoch, they stress whatever makes them better than the masses.
Increasingly, this is framed through Star Wars, Harry Potter or
Tolkien tropes of plucky, geeky resistance movements, the teacher’s
pet who saves the day (again, note the difference with the
ideal-typical Trotskyist, who proclaims that the masses are on side
even when their parties command miniscule support).

Meanwhile, among peers, competitive virtue becomes a zero-sum game: I
can have it only insofar as you are denied it. And, at the risk of
reductionism, this directly mirrors the rationality of their class
position: graduates specialising in symbolic manipulation – the
hallmark of the PMC – compete for a shrinking number of jobs. Since
their contributions are not measured in abstract numerical units, such
as profit and loss for capitalists, or productivity for workers, their
employability is defined by intangible status competition. Virtue here
becomes a marketable commodity – and all the more when perceived as
scarce.

People trained in this regime of symbolic manipulation love to
weaponize outrage to fuel moral panics, but they are unable and
unwilling to face their identity as a class. In the liberal
professions, they police each other to enforce the sort of social and
intellectual conformity required by their class, one that is
fundamentally fragmented by competition and individualism. All
PMC-approved policies about inequality, racism, and bias circle back
to strengthening their sense of political agency and cultural and
moral superiority. In a viciously competitive market environment, they
have abandoned once cherished professional standards of research while
fetishizing transgression, or better yet, the performance of
transgression.

Liu’s book is best enjoyed as a class-based critique of American
left-liberal foibles. It offers a sterling critique of Occupy Wall
Street which, theoretically, should have been the point where the
downwardly mobile PMC joined hands with a multi-ethnic working class
to form the “99%”. That this happy marriage never happened is the
central disappointment of our era. The problem resided, at least
partly, in those dense cultural thickets of lower PMC, who, panicked
at their shrinking prospects, doubled down on their distinguishing
virtues, under what Liu calls “the legalistic and deadly
term _intersectional_”.

Equally, academia made activists poorly equipped for the realities of
political organisation. Liu thus shows how Occupy was doomed from
birth by another direct product of the PMC class position, namely a
fetish for (anarchist) procedures:

The highly educated members of Occupy fetishized the procedural
regulation and management of discussion to reach consensus about all
collective decisions. Daily meetings or General Assemblies were
managed according to a technique called the progressive stack. Its
fanatical commitment to proceduralism and administrative strategy
suppressed real discussion of priorities or politics and ended up
promoting only the integrity of the progressive stack itself.
Protecting the stack became more important than formulating political
demands that might have resonated with hundreds of millions of
Americans whose lives were being directly destroyed by finance
capital.

Rather often, measures formally aimed at inclusion or centring voices
eventually become ends in themselves. Evidence that they promote
elitism, the opposite of their formal aim, never leads to
self-reflection: as the joke used to say of Communism, the Theory is
sound! Again, it echoes the social foundations of contemporary
anarchism in the academy with its curriculum (explicit or implicit) in
human resource management. This explains the apparent irony, familiar
to anyone who has been an activist: the incessant bureaucratism of the
libertarian left.

_Virtue Hoarders_ excels as a series of short vignettes of cultural
critique. Liu is a film and literature scholar, with a training in old
fashioned critical theory. This may lead to a certain impressionism.
Considered as sociology, the book leaves unanswered questions. Critics
may, for instance, charge that it says too little about the
distinction between right-leaning and left-leaning PMC. Indeed,
sometimes Liu’s rhetoric gives the impression that all PMC have a
left-activist (but also neoliberal) outlook. Naturally, just because
most left activists are PMC does not mean that most PMC are activists
(though it may appear that way). There are obvious tensions between,
say, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Pelosi over climate,
immigration or prisons. The social base of Pelosi-ism may require
deeper examination.

But let’s also be clear: such niceties do often evaporate in
practice. Consider, in Britain, the convergence of whole sections of
the Labour left with the old Blairite leadership during the
“People’s Vote” campaign. Or layers of the Scottish independence
left-wing, which have fallen behind Nicola Sturgeon and her
corporate-neoliberal allies in Charlotte Street Partners, who
effectively write all key economic policy. Theatrical left-right spats
not only obscure common class interests, but actually help reproduce
the professional class in power. Nonetheless, while _Virtue
Hoarders_ benefits from a no bullshit account of leftism’s class
biases, some may prefer a more nuanced theorisation (although I take
Liu’s point that “nuanced” accounts often mean embracing the
worst of bad faith grifting, as with N+1’s apologia
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for Elizabeth Warren).

_Virtue Hoarders_ is equally ‘guilty’ of national biases: it
focused almost exclusively on American cultural habits. For me, this
did not lessen its impact, for two reasons: firstly, because culture
is central to class reproduction, and the PMC, more than any other
class, distinguishes itself by consumer preferences; secondly, because
the European PMC are infatuated with _American_ liberalism –
especially on all matters of taste. Thus, despite living in Glasgow,
nothing in these essays was alien to me. Class prejudices cut across
all national contexts, particularly in an age of social media. My
frustration, then, is that the European PMC remains a relatively
unexplored and interesting topic. Even the term “PMC” has only
recently entered our toolkit of political analysis, and it still lacks
the rhetorical sting that it possesses in American leftism.

Liu’s book has polemical aims. It wants to jolt the left into
recognition. And it wants to embrace the promise of the Sanders
campaign in 2016 – a revival of serious socialist class politics.
What was inspiring in that campaign, at its best, was precisely that
it was forced to distinguish a class-based message from the gloop of
PMC liberalism that spread from Clinton to Warren. Given that European
leftists failed comprehensively on this front, the themes should have
wide resonance.

And even readers outside of America will recognise the bravery in
_Virtue Hoarders_. It takes guts to address the peccadilloes of your
own kind. The PMC may specialise in self-examination and “call
outs”, but simply naming it as a class, with distinct interests,
alliances and agency, risks excommunication. And ethically it falls to
academics, arguably the guiltiest party, to endanger their standing in
a peer-reviewed field by speaking up.

Crucially, while defending the need for a distinct working-class
politics, _Virtue Hoarders_ is anything but anti-intellectual.
Indeed, perhaps the worst calumny is to believe that critics of
professional elites despise learning and cultural innovation. The
truth is quite the opposite. PMC domination dresses up conformity as a
war on cultural backwardness. It is defiantly middle brow (witness the
liberal obsession with “woke” superhero movies). And if a
meaningful intellectual current does emerge from the wreckage of
contemporary capitalism, it may well begin from the demystification of
PMC liberal mores.

James Foley is a research associate at Glasgow Caledonia University.
He is assistant editor of _Conter _and writer at Source News.

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