Virtue Hoarders

The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class

Published May 28, 2021 by University Of Minnesota Press.

ISBN:
978-1-5179-1225-3
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OCLC Number:
1228637742

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2 stars (3 reviews)

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.

3 editions

Good points, but very tone deaf

2 stars

The book has good points. I specially enjoyed the chapter "The PMC Reads a Book". Throughout the book she explains how the PMC uses supposedly progressive agenda to conceal its real class-based politics. It's nothing new that, for instance, feminism, anti-racism, pro-LGBT causes aren't necessarily progressive and can be, and actually were in many situations, used to push for conservative, capitalist, anti-working class politics. I think of TERFs and Puar's homonationalism. There's nothing inherently liberating in these "causes", and we should pay attention to the way we take those discourses for granted - as we "progress" and people agree with these ideas more and more, it becomes easier to trick people while sounding rad. This is just marketing: now that we care about women's rights, or at least pretend to, we have to tone-adjust our language to get across our message, EVEN if this message is actually against women. Capitalist …