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<title>alexw.nyc -- virtue hoarders book review </title>
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<h1>Virtue Hoarders Book Review</h1>
<p>I came to this book relatively sympathetic to what I thought would be its
thesis, the idea that the Professional-Managerial Class, defined as white
collar, educated professional workers in fields such as media, technology,
academia, and so on, constitutes a defined class with its own often reactionary
values: values of temperance, a certain social conservatism, praise of
institutional thinking and meritocracy, ingrained through cultural institutions
that teach regimented, inflexible thinking, and a disdain for the values of the
working class.</p>
<p>While there is some element of that critique in her book, instead, I was
presented mostly with a set of unrelated culture war grievances. Liu
basically entirely adopts the right wing framing of "wokeness", connecting
completely unrelated and often contradictory movements under a singly banner. In a
Jordan Peterson-esque free association, Liu rails against 60s counterculture,
#MeToo, the Hillary Clinton campaign, Occupy Wall Street, French
poststructuralism, Dr. Spock's childrearing books, early 20th century
Progressivism, 1980s Yuppie consumerism, Free Love, To Kill a Mockingbird, and
so on, as, derisively, representing the values and interests of the "PMC", a
term coined by Barbara Ehrenreich but has become, in this framing, vague to the
point of incoherence. </p>
<p>In the most bizzare passage in the book, Liu argues that the Obama
administration's use of Title IX to crackdown on sexual assault on college
campuses was a "PMC obsession", and they should have instead cracked down on
the bankers who caused the 2008 financial crisis. In almost no one's mind
except Liu's are these positions mutually exclusive.</p>
<p>Furthermore, Liu's call to return for something like an orthodox, class-based
Marxist politics is at odds with her "PMC" framing. An orthodox Marxist
perspective would say, there is little class difference between an adjunct
professor, a barista, a journalist, a tech worker and an Amazon warehouse
worker nd so on: none of these people have control over the conditions of their
labor, they are all, basically, proletarians, and have a shared, not
differential class interest. The idea of the "PMC" is that this isn't the
case, that there are a set of privileged, highly educated workers who
constitute a distinct class and whose interests conflict with the working class
-- one may agree or disagree with this position, but it is decidedly
non-Marxist in its analysis.</p>
<p>The bizarre irony of Liu's critique is how strong this idea of class-based
politics is within the PMC is itself! She has almost nothing to say about the
two Bernie Sanders campaings, which Liu praises, and which both had the kind of
class-based politics that Liu supports, but whose most vociferous supporters
were alienated, downwardly-mobile members of the dreaded "PMC".</p>
<p>One could argue there were excesses and absurdities of certain identitarian
political movements in the 2010s, but my reading of the situation is that these
have basically come to pass, and the dominant view on the left (or even
liberal-left) is defined by a balanced synthesis of identitarian and class
politics. In many respects, Liu and her allies have won: you can find class
politics and socialism talked about openly in the pages of liberal publications
like the New York Times and New Yorker. This is a much more interesting and
nuanced phenomenon that Liu cannot see, instead insisting dogmatically on a strongly
"anti-woke, anti-PMC" perspective that, in many cases, finds more agreement on
the right than the left.</p>
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