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Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class Paperback – 6 April 2021
by Catherine Liu (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars (593)
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 Firstis 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.
Review
"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."--Current Affairs
"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
About the Author
Catherine Liu is professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine.
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Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial ClassProduct details
Publisher : University of Minnesota Press
Publication date : 6 April 2021
Language : English
Print length : 90 pages
ISBN-10 : 1517912253
ISBN-13 : 978-1517912253
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From Australia
Jacob Nottage
5.0 out of 5 stars Informative and funny.
Reviewed in Australia on 9 April 2021
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Great, short read.
Well structured and light enough to knock over in one or two sittings.
Highly recommend.
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Australian born German
2.0 out of 5 stars The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend
Reviewed in Australia on 5 May 2024
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I bought this book because it provides an insightful critique of the “polite” elite minion class. After all enemies are the best at spotting someone’s flaws.
I wasn’t disappointed in that respect but the author’s view are obviously distorted by her “progressive” Marxist viewpoints. Given that Marxists are responsible for over 150 million citizens murdered by their own government, in the 107 years since the Russian Revolution, on top of a similar amount of people killed as a consequence of spreading their “workers paradise”, I am obviously coming to different conclusions. Having said that I share her contempt for the soft-spoken psychopaths and mild-mannered mass-murderers she calls PMC. She obviously detests them for the wrongs reasons. She is just impatient.
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From other countries
Raymond Losier
5.0 out of 5 stars Someone sees the truth!
Reviewed in Canada on 31 March 2025
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i cannot say anything against the truth
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Lucas Cavalcanti Rodrigues
5.0 out of 5 stars Ressurgimento de conceito marxista do pós-guerra
Reviewed in Brazil on 16 August 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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Christine
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent dissection of the PMC. the good as well as the bad.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 April 2026
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It’s not often these days I read something as interesting as this from a socialist perspective-that is a proper socialist perspective not a self described one. It was bloody refreshing. Easy to read, enjoyable and funny in places, it was still challenging. The examination of To Kill A Mockingbird I found new (to me, having never looked at it from that POV before). If you are interested in current politics I would recommend reading this.
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Patrick Cotter
5.0 out of 5 stars Forget the New Left this is the True Left.
Reviewed in Ireland on 25 April 2026
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It takes a Marxist of colour such as Liu to cut though all the silage caking identity politics, painting it for what it is - a distraction from class war and economic privilege. She exposes all the self-delusions of the middle classes in their efforts to distance themselves from the culturally disenfranchised working poor; how the Professional Managerial Class are, in effect, functioning as useful idiots for Capitalism, while feeling virtuous about themselves.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book against the bougie worker-hating fake-left
Reviewed in France on 17 August 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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Rodrigo Barreda Maza
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
Reviewed in Germany on 11 May 2024
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Excellence
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Adam L
5.0 out of 5 stars great read def recommend
Reviewed in the United States on 18 March 2026
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great read def recommend
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Client Amazon
1.0 out of 5 stars Socialistic rambling
Reviewed in France on 30 December 2023
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Socialistic rambling. The points about the Professional Managerial Class are interesting, but criticizing the class because it's no longer socialist is ridiculous.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
Reviewed in the United States on 23 February 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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JP
5.0 out of 5 stars How the class struggle is being waged today.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 July 2025
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This is a thought provoking and persuasive analysis of how modern bosses anchor their untrammelled authority over workers - of all backgrounds - by mouthing empty platitudes about equality and diversity.
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Linda J. Page
5.0 out of 5 stars Opens my eyes
Reviewed in Canada on 21 December 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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Tom101
5.0 out of 5 stars Gegen den Wokismus
Reviewed in Germany on 15 July 2023
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Eine brilliant Streitschrift gegen die Wokness und für das Primat der Klassen rage.
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bruja
4.0 out of 5 stars Sounds true
Reviewed in the United States on 5 March 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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Pete D.
4.0 out of 5 stars If you want to understand why things are the way they are. Read this book.
Reviewed in Canada on 31 December 2023
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If you've ever looked at the way society operates and thought "this makes no sense" you're absolutely right! However there are reasons for that. This book reveals some of those reasons so you can understand the dynamics at play. If you are the sort of person who went to university for the sheer pursuit of knowledge this will be an easy read for you. If you are a more practical sort of person, this will be a challenging read.You may want to have a dictionary or thesaurus handy. I fall somewhere in the middle and am finding myself understanding all the words in some of the more difficult sentences but having to read them over a few times to get the ideas to register. I don't get the impression that it's written to dazzle you with the intelligence of the author, but rather a phenomenon that seems to happen in academic circles where high powered language is required to get the Inteligencia to take you seriously. You must just get used to expressing yourself this way after a while. However the ideas in this book so far are worth the effort.
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O.A.
5.0 out of 5 stars Wer sich besser fühlen möchte
Reviewed in Germany on 1 October 2022
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kann alles mögliche machen. PMC ist eben eine Story der hoch ausgebildeten Menschen, die sich nicht für ihre Klasse engagieren, sondern Kapitalisten. Hervorragendes Buch.
Must Read für alle PMC Leute (Also Ärzte, Ingenieure, Manager, usw.)
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Osas
5.0 out of 5 stars Very good read.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 December 2023
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Virtue hoarders (PMC liberals) have morphed into organisms that seek only to secure the interest of capitalists. By obfuscating and decentering economic inequality as a problem, they seek to alienate huge portions of the working class. In the absence of any real class analysis, their arguments focus solely on cultural studies, a field which in large remains subpar in its critique of real social-economic happenings.
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Frankk
1.0 out of 5 stars Zero value
Reviewed in Canada on 27 April 2025
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“Academia Class” rambling about Professional Manager Class. Snobs vs snobs - pseudo intellectual insider gossip. …a very desperate “paper” to maintain Liu’s academic standing. Waste of time, waste of money.
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Call to arms!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 December 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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Adios W
5.0 out of 5 stars excellent.
Reviewed in the United States on 12 July 2025
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Enlightening and an excellent read.
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MW Mills
5.0 out of 5 stars A Blistering Takedown of the Culture
Reviewed in the United States on 31 December 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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SarahL
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for disillusioned lefties
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 September 2021
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Liu puts a name and some faces to something that has probably been bothering you for ages- why are these supposedly “good” people so unrelentingly awful?
Though focused on the American milieu it is still an insightful look at why everything seems so stuck right now.
Far from despairing this is a trenchant diagnosis and a spritely call to arms.
It’s not you - it’s THEM - but there is a way out.
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C. Derick Varn
3.0 out of 5 stars The class which is not one
Reviewed in the United States on 17 April 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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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars concise critique of PMC
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 April 2023
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The book reminds me the French book “The education of ignorance” in its style of writing. Its a vigorous criticism of the role the Professional Managerial Class plays in maintenance of the status quo while at the same time “vaping” on meritocracy, virtue signalling, pseudo-heroism and other signifiers of self gratifying false- consciousness. Breaking the glass is only the start…
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Jake
5.0 out of 5 stars A short, concise but weighty critique
Reviewed in the United States on 8 August 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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Catford Massive
2.0 out of 5 stars A very strange and myopic book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 November 2024
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Weirdly focused on academia as if they represent the whole of the professional managerial class; entirely American in focus; has almost nothing to say about the professional managerial class as ‘professionals’ or anything to do with being ‘managerial’. More of a basic primer on modern day Marxist socialism with top line political history, and a screed against liberalism. All of which is fine as it goes but not really what it claims to be. Stick to the Ehrenreich books, which tell you much more about this class of people.
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Devan A Church
5.0 out of 5 stars Catherine Liu's scathing and often troubling indictment of the state of the American left
Reviewed in the United States on 27 February 2021
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First - I would strongly recommend this book to anyone currently engaged in discussions about equity and diversity. Primarily because Liu is saying something that almost always goes unsaid in these discussions - not only does class status matter, but in a capitalist system, it matters (perhaps) most.
Even though Liu is directly taking on the Professional Managerial Class (of which she admits she is a part) - in many ways this is a text to challenge those who are deeply entrenched in that system.
Her strongest sections deal with the ways PMC elites have prioritized performative virtue (that bolsters their class position) over coalition building, as well as how they have fetishized transgression. Further, she clearly details how these tendencies have often backfired and led to similar strategies being co-opted by fascist groups/pundits.
This text is brief, and while sometimes dense, can certainly be consumed in an afternoon or a day. Liu's perspective as a critical theorist and socialist (class struggle over culture struggle) is important - and it is absolutely absurd, as the other review here suggests, that she is somehow entrenched in right-wing thought.
However, this is where I would like to hear more from Liu - her dismissal of identity/intersectionality in favor of a more reductionist view of human rights is concerning, particularly when considering Transgender rights. But again, if one is to consider this text as a polemic to create questions about the effectiveness of elitist PMC strategies that are meant to broaden human rights in a capitalist system - Liu is tremendously successful, and a IMO this is a must-read.
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MR Balch
5.0 out of 5 stars Scathing and timely
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 May 2021
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This is such a passionately written and persuasive book that has gotten me to think differently for the first time in a long time.
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William H. Payne
3.0 out of 5 stars Fun Propaganda For You
Reviewed in the United States on 30 January 2022
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Ever since there was a Frankfurt School, this back and forth has persisted: Should progressives focus purely on class struggle per the tenets of crude Marxism or fan out into high theoretical critique promulgated by the upper middle classes elite? Lukacs or Adorno? Catherine Liu seems to take the side of the former (heroically, in her mind) but she does so without unpacking the Frankfurt School or very much theory at all. Instead, she focuses on recent examples of upper middle class folly and excess with deliberate bluntness. She wants typical members of the upper middle class, or what she calls the PMC, to read her book, and she knows only a fraction of that crew are actually familiar with the history of Marxist theory (though she does take a crack at Deleuze and Foucault). Even if a little insulting - I’m sure Liu can riff on the history of Marxism - her strategy is fair enough. History continues to happen, and today’s bourgeois elites are more bloated with surplus wealth than any predecessors (though it is now nothing in comparison with the class of real stakeholders). No wonder their narcissistic cultural production is more appalling than ever, and no wonder they feel tortured by their schizoid allegiance to moral behavior and wealth accumulation/status. The fact that this critique seemed like a “right-wing” perspective to some reviewers is revealing. The petite bourgeois have purchased the bullseye and everything outside it is neither right nor left - it’s just unacceptably tacky and lower class.
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Mary Lockhart
2.0 out of 5 stars Whiny.
Reviewed in the United States on 6 December 2025
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Very small book— good thing—any longer it would have been intolerable. Academic whining about her own class. Central thesis not original. Don’t disagree with much, just really didn’t add anything. Doesn’t discuss ways in which managerial class might be a useful social function or how to operate sans management. The title is over reaching and grating. Did not donate.
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Romi Mahajan
5.0 out of 5 stars The Perfect Broadside
Reviewed in the United States on 31 May 2021
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Dr. Catherine Liu's "Virtue Hoarders" is an important addition to the increasing corpus of work on the Professional/Managerial/Bureaucratic/Buffer Class that maintains itself as the perfect foil for revolution or revolutionary thought and that through both mental and work-related constructs supports the dominant class of Capitalists; the PMC- as Liu refers to it- is the set of foot soldiers for power and in order to maintain this self-serving buffering role, finds new ways to signal virtue while ironically looking down on and suppressing the very people they claim to "be working hard" for.
Liu's book is mordant and provocative, humorous and searing, and is easily digestible for all.
An important piece of work in hypocritical times.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Quick read, life-changing & thought provoking
Reviewed in the United States on 21 August 2022
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This book put words to my feeling, as an IC in the PMC that “something is off.” Outside of a guilt-provoking validation of me, yet again, supporting institutions that I despise in the name of comfort, this is an essay on the left’s collective shadow. To someone who’s childhood was dominated by right-wing, religious-fundamentalist domination tactics, my adult pendulum swing to the other side bears strong echoes of the same “othering” with a secular flair. Unfortunately, the path forward isn’t clear. Yet, as in any shadow-work, awareness is the first step toward mature action. Work certainly won’t be the same on Monday.
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Obed S. Sands
5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding. Leaned a lot... And not all of what I learned was ''second semester' word definitions
Reviewed in the United States on 24 March 2025
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Outstanding. WARNING: THIS BOOK CAN CAUSE SEVERE COGNITIVE DISSONANCE IN INDIVIDUALS WITH CLOSED MINDS.
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Amazon Customer
2.0 out of 5 stars Rambling and Incoherent
Reviewed in the United States on 13 December 2022
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Reading this (treatise?) is an exercise in frustration. From what I could gather, the author is a graduate of Yale, so that is further evidence of the decline of the Ivies. Seriously, her solution to the problems of postmodern economics is ..... (drumroll).....Socialism! (sigh)
If you want background on the rise of the PMC, you are better off reading James Burnham and if you want to know what their future is, you should read Peter Zeihan.
The PMC is a creation of new technologies (never mentioned), demographics (never mentioned) and the switch in the 1970s to fiat currency and the shift to globalization. All of these conditions are rapidly unwinding, as we can see in the current flushing out of employees in the tech industry and the rapid re-industrialization of U.S. The era of financialization, globalization and rising populations is rapidly coming to an end. We are entering a whole new era where capital is going to be hard to come by and populations are too small to consume much. The future is going to be local and the PMC probably realize things are going to be very different.
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BFRICE
5.0 out of 5 stars A Brutal Must-Read
Reviewed in the United States on 23 September 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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David Cook
5.0 out of 5 stars The classism and suppression tactics of Human Resources departments
Reviewed in the United States on 8 September 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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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars A call to action
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 June 2021
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
This quick read deserves to play an important role in the political turn we are taking in the West, away from managerialism and towards a new solidarity. Liu articulates simply and clearly how the emancipatory promise of the professional managerial class identified in the late 60s was squandered on symbolic distractions from the hard work of achieving a materially more egalitarian society. It expresses a perspective that is at once familiar and refreshing, accessible but with deep roots.
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Undec
5.0 out of 5 stars Great short book
Reviewed in the United States on 3 October 2021
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
I had listened to a podcast where Catherine was featured, so I was quite familiar with the content of her book. Yet, it was interesting to hear her argument again. She's an academic, but the book wasn't dry, quite an easy read actually. A very much needed critique to (what I believe is) the contemporary left. I bought Virtue Hoarders together with Vivek Ramaswamy's Woke, Inc. - and the two pair quite well!
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Adam P Prince
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting by not fulfilling
Reviewed in the United States on 23 April 2023
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
The detailed criticism of professional managerial class was insightful and useful for self-reflection. It certainly had plenty of content on that front. However the book as a whole seem to be missing substance in the area of solutions, with only very limited attention there. I felt as though the book was missing a couple of chapters on solutions and example relief for the stated problem.
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세진님, 요청하신 캐서린 류(Catherine Liu)의 저서 <미덕 사재기꾼들: 전문직 경영자 계급을 향한 고발>(Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class)에 대한 요약과 평론입니다. 요청하신 대로 <해라> 체를 사용하여 작성했습니다.
1. 요약: <미덕 사재기꾼들>이 폭로하는 엘리트의 민낯
전문직 경영자 계급(PMC)의 정의와 변질
캐서린 류는 이 책에서 현대 자본주의 사회의 새로운 지배층으로 부상한 <전문직 경영자 계급>(Professional Managerial Class, 이하 PMC)을 정조준한다.
미덕의 사재기와 도덕적 우월성
오늘날의 PMC는 경제적 불평등이나 구조적 모순을 해결하려 하지 않는다.
계급 정치의 소멸과 정체성 정치의 남용
PMC가 주도하는 담론에서 노동 계급의 경제적 생존 문제는 뒷전으로 밀려난다. 이들은 인종, 성별, 성적 지향 등 문화적·정체성 이슈를 과도하게 부각함으로써 실제적인 부의 재분배와 계급 투쟁을 은폐한다.
2. 평론: 날카로운 통찰과 지독한 이분법 사이
미덕의 무기화를 저격한 통렬한 팸플릿
이 책의 가장 큰 미덕은 진보를 자처하는 엘리트 집단의 위선을 가차 없이 폭로했다는 점에 있다. 현대 사회에서 고학력 전문직들이 행하는 '정치적 올바름'과 '미덕 표출(Virtue Signaling)'이 어떻게 실제 계급 격차를 가리는 연막으로 쓰이는지 매섭게 몰아붙인다.
경제적 분석의 부재와 도식적 이분법의 한계
그러나 선동성이 강한 만큼 이론적 깊이와 정교함에서는 뚜렷한 한계를 드러낸다. 저자는 PMC를 지나치게 문화적 소비 패턴과 태도의 문제로만 접근할 뿐, 이들이 신자유주의 경제 구조 체제 내에서 유입되고 작동하는 구체적인 유인 구조나 메커니즘을 엄밀하게 분석하지 않는다.
더욱이 PMC 대 노동 계급이라는 과도한 이분법적 구도에 갇혀, 현대 노동 시장의 복잡성을 간과한다. 오늘날 대학을 졸업하고 전문 자격증을 가졌음에도 불안정한 고용 환경에 시달리는 '프레카리아트(불안정 노동 계급)'나 하위 전문직들의 경제적 처지는 저자가 말하는 '미덕을 사재기하는 엘리트'와 거리가 멀다. 또한, 정체성 정치가 가진 긍정적 측면을 전면 부정하고 이를 오직 계급 배반의 도구로만 환환하는 태도는 지나치게 환원주의적이다.
결론
<미덕 사재기꾼들>은 대안의 구체성이나 학술적 엄밀함은 부족할지언정, 오늘날 진보 정치가 왜 대중과 유리되어 '그들만의 리그'로 전락했는지를 보여주는 강렬한 고발장이다. 스스로 진보적이라 믿는 엘리트들의 위선적 도덕주의를 깨부수고, 다시 경제적 불평등과 계급이라는 날것의 현실로 시선을 돌리게 만든다는 점에서 분명 읽어낼 가치가 있는 문제작이다.
이 책의 저자인 캐서린 류 교수가 직접 출연하여 전문직 경영자 계급(PMC)의 본질과 이들이 어떻게 노동 계급의 이익을 가로막는 장애물이 되었는지 설명하는
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책 자체의 핵심 논지를 중심으로 정리하되, 세진님이 자주 보시는 <계급·도덕·지식인 정치>의 틀에 맞춰 평론까지 붙이겠습니다.
<『버추 후더스: 전문관리계급에 대한 비판』 캐서린 류>
이 책은 2021년 미네소타대학출판부에서 나온 90쪽짜리 짧은 논쟁적 에세이다. 출판사는 이 책을 “자신의 진보적 영웅주의를 주장하면서 자본주의에 봉사하는 자격증 엘리트 계급에 대한 고발”로 소개한다.
핵심 표적은 <PMC>, 즉 <Professional Managerial Class, 전문관리계급>이다. 의사, 교수, 변호사, 언론인, NGO 활동가, 문화산업 종사자, 테크·교육·행정 전문가 등 고학력 중산층이 여기에 속한다. 류의 주장은 단순하다. 이들은 스스로를 진보적이고 도덕적이며 계몽된 집단으로 여기지만, 실제로는 노동계급과 하층민을 내려다보고, 능력주의와 문화적 취향을 통해 자기 지위를 방어한다.
책 제목의 <Virtue Hoarders>는 “덕을 사재기하는 사람들”이라는 뜻이다. 여기서 덕은 실제 윤리라기보다 <도덕적 우월감>이다. PMC는 올바른 언어, 세련된 소비, 건강한 생활습관, 교육열, 다양성 감수성, 정치적 올바름을 통해 자신이 더 나은 인간이라고 과시한다. 그러나 류가 보기에 이것은 사회정의가 아니라 계급 구별짓기다.
류가 특히 비판하는 것은 <능력주의>다. PMC는 자신들의 성공을 노력과 실력의 결과로 설명한다. 좋은 학교, 좋은 직업, 좋은 취향, 좋은 정치의식은 모두 “내가 더 열심히 살았기 때문”이라는 서사로 정당화된다. 하지만 실제로는 부모의 계급, 교육 자본, 인맥, 문화 자본이 크게 작용한다. 그러면서 이들은 가난한 사람들을 무지하고, 건강하지 않고, 정치적으로 뒤떨어지고, 혐오에 쉽게 빠지는 사람들로 묘사한다.
이 책의 강점은 미국 자유주의 엘리트의 위선을 날카롭게 찌른다는 데 있다. 류는 트럼프 지지 노동자들을 단순히 “인종주의자”나 “무식한 대중”으로 매도하는 태도 자체가 PMC적 오만이라고 본다. 즉 미국 민주당식 진보는 노동계급의 물질적 삶보다, 언어·정체성·문화적 세련됨을 더 중시하게 되었다는 것이다. LA Review of Books도 이 책이 경제적 사고를 버린 포스트모던 지식인 문화를 비판한다고 평가했다.
평론적으로 보면, 이 책은 <좌파 내부 비판>이다. 우파가 “진보 엘리트는 위선적이다”라고 공격하는 것과 비슷해 보일 수 있지만, 류의 관점은 다르다. 그녀는 평등과 재분배를 버린 자유주의 엘리트가 좌파의 자리를 차지한 것을 비판한다. 그래서 이 책은 반진보 책이라기보다, <계급 없는 진보주의>에 대한 공격이다.
그러나 한계도 분명하다. 첫째, PMC를 너무 단일한 집단처럼 묶는다. 교수, 간호사, 사회복지사, 공무원, 테크 임원, 대형 NGO 간부를 모두 같은 계급 이해로 설명하기에는 차이가 크다. 둘째, 문화정치와 정체성정치 비판은 강하지만, 인종·성·젠더 문제가 실제 억압 구조와 연결되는 지점은 충분히 섬세하게 다루지 못한다. 셋째, 문체가 짧고 강한 만큼, 사회학적 실증 분석보다는 선언적 팸플릿에 가깝다.
그래도 이 책의 가치는 크다. 오늘날 많은 진보 담론은 “누가 더 올바른 말을 하는가”의 경쟁으로 변질되기 쉽다. 류는 여기에 대해 묻는다. <그 도덕성은 누구의 삶을 실제로 바꾸는가?> 만약 올바른 언어가 임금, 주거, 의료, 노동조건, 교육 불평등을 바꾸지 못한다면, 그것은 해방의 언어가 아니라 계급 장식품이 될 수 있다.
한 줄로 정리하면 이렇다.
<『Virtue Hoarders』는 진보적 고학력 엘리트가 도덕을 말하면서도 실제로는 능력주의와 문화 자본을 통해 자기 계급을 방어한다는 날카로운 좌파 내부 비판이다.>
참고로 현재 자동 로드된 Anthea Butler 관련 파일은 이 책과 별개라 본문 분석에는 사용하지 않았다.
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