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pilesandpiles's review
2.0
Oh bOy . . .
In Virtue Hoarders, a polemic about the length of a longform journalistic article, Catherine Liu argues that elite professionals such as academics, creatives, journalists, and lawyers -- the professional managerial class or PMC -- drive a consumption-centered politics that masquerades as social justice but "loves to talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation." The PMC's moral capitalism masquerading as politics, Liu asserts, has "undermined our trust in public institutions, destroyed public health, diminished our childhoods, and litigated our pleasures."
I, like Catherine Liu, am of the professional managerial class. I was even a would-be academic in the same field as Liu, also at a University of California campus. I understand the contempt running through this polemic on a deep level; trust me. These are the reasons why I give enough credence to this book to review it.
Virtue Hoarders has a serious problem: Liu herself is so caught up in the academic PMC's tunnel vision that the book is completely disconnected from the poor and working-class people and movements that she purports to defend and speak for. Her critique, for starters, manages to position purportedly leftist PMC people as the left. This version of the left is weak, depoliticized, and needs to be transformed. Hard for anyone to disagree. But to hammer home that position, she adopts the PMC’s caricatures of concepts such as intersectionality in order to sneer at them without acknowledging how working-class Black women have had to struggle to keep the focus on the actual material politics of that concept. Non-Black people really need to stop finding proxies through which to trash Black feminism. This move makes no sense in the context of Liu's overall argument in particular, considering that Black feminism is the foundation for the most viable leftist politics of the last decade. Nonetheless, Liu tears down any politics in which class matters equally with race or any other so-called identity. The nuances of working-class people's movements that foreground the intersection of race, class, and gender by necessity -- the very movements that badly need class-privileged people to understand ideas like intersectionality and identity politics -- are invisible and irrelevant to Liu’s framework.
Most invisible of all is the work of people who have technically become part of the PMC but struggle with how to make it useful to the poor and working-class communities they come from. Why not highlight or at at least name-check the actual working-class organizing that comes out of UC campuses alone, by first-generation grad students striking for cost of living adjustments to their pay, by formerly incarcerated students continuing to build solidarity across prison walls, by undocumented students fighting for their families?
You could say Virtue Hoarders is a short polemic and these things are beside the point. But they are the point. Why would you go out of your way to center and engage the harmful ideas of the PMC instead of amplifying the visions of people who are excluded from it? The logic here is the same logic that led people to stage debates with Milo Yiannopoulos and that leads to the suggestion that white people invested in racial justice need to keep engaging white supremacists. Like people who take comfort in white supremacy, people who feel the PMC is where they belong are generally not going to be persuaded otherwise. Liu must realize this on some level, so who is this book really for? Is there any kind of power that Liu imagines could be dismantled through this line of critique? Spoiler alert: There isn't, because the point is for Liu to let her colleagues know they're wrong, not to persuade anyone who doesn't already more or less agree with her.
At the end of the day, Virtue Hoarders epitomizes why I tuned out of academic conversations unless they are widely taken up by people in grassroots leftist organizing. A second-generation class-privileged person such as Liu does not need to participate in academic conversations, or in PMC discourse at all. They do not HAVE to be a tenured professor at an elitist university, even one that is public. (As a UC PhD alum, I consider the UC a leech on the more equity-advancing, “lower-tier” California higher education systems, even though those also have their problems. If Liu taught at a community college or Cal State, I think she’d be much more likely to find the conversation she’s initiated here pointless.)
Liu’s ultimate argument is for her PMC peers to have a spine and fight for socialism. Yet Liu is so fixated on what she can’t stand about her peers that no working-class solidarity comes through at all. She makes the argument for it, but that argument comes up empty when what she actually accomplishes with Virtue Hoarders is a catalog of her own virtue hoarding. It’s just that in her case, the virtue she hoards is opposing the PMC. If you want to read this book, well, just read it. It’s not very long. But you could also not be a tenured professor, detach from PMC discourse, and steep yourself in the work and ideas of people who are building other worlds out of necessity and with much more nuance than “the left” to whom Liu gives undue importance.
In Virtue Hoarders, a polemic about the length of a longform journalistic article, Catherine Liu argues that elite professionals such as academics, creatives, journalists, and lawyers -- the professional managerial class or PMC -- drive a consumption-centered politics that masquerades as social justice but "loves to talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation." The PMC's moral capitalism masquerading as politics, Liu asserts, has "undermined our trust in public institutions, destroyed public health, diminished our childhoods, and litigated our pleasures."
I, like Catherine Liu, am of the professional managerial class. I was even a would-be academic in the same field as Liu, also at a University of California campus. I understand the contempt running through this polemic on a deep level; trust me. These are the reasons why I give enough credence to this book to review it.
Virtue Hoarders has a serious problem: Liu herself is so caught up in the academic PMC's tunnel vision that the book is completely disconnected from the poor and working-class people and movements that she purports to defend and speak for. Her critique, for starters, manages to position purportedly leftist PMC people as the left. This version of the left is weak, depoliticized, and needs to be transformed. Hard for anyone to disagree. But to hammer home that position, she adopts the PMC’s caricatures of concepts such as intersectionality in order to sneer at them without acknowledging how working-class Black women have had to struggle to keep the focus on the actual material politics of that concept. Non-Black people really need to stop finding proxies through which to trash Black feminism. This move makes no sense in the context of Liu's overall argument in particular, considering that Black feminism is the foundation for the most viable leftist politics of the last decade. Nonetheless, Liu tears down any politics in which class matters equally with race or any other so-called identity. The nuances of working-class people's movements that foreground the intersection of race, class, and gender by necessity -- the very movements that badly need class-privileged people to understand ideas like intersectionality and identity politics -- are invisible and irrelevant to Liu’s framework.
Most invisible of all is the work of people who have technically become part of the PMC but struggle with how to make it useful to the poor and working-class communities they come from. Why not highlight or at at least name-check the actual working-class organizing that comes out of UC campuses alone, by first-generation grad students striking for cost of living adjustments to their pay, by formerly incarcerated students continuing to build solidarity across prison walls, by undocumented students fighting for their families?
You could say Virtue Hoarders is a short polemic and these things are beside the point. But they are the point. Why would you go out of your way to center and engage the harmful ideas of the PMC instead of amplifying the visions of people who are excluded from it? The logic here is the same logic that led people to stage debates with Milo Yiannopoulos and that leads to the suggestion that white people invested in racial justice need to keep engaging white supremacists. Like people who take comfort in white supremacy, people who feel the PMC is where they belong are generally not going to be persuaded otherwise. Liu must realize this on some level, so who is this book really for? Is there any kind of power that Liu imagines could be dismantled through this line of critique? Spoiler alert: There isn't, because the point is for Liu to let her colleagues know they're wrong, not to persuade anyone who doesn't already more or less agree with her.
At the end of the day, Virtue Hoarders epitomizes why I tuned out of academic conversations unless they are widely taken up by people in grassroots leftist organizing. A second-generation class-privileged person such as Liu does not need to participate in academic conversations, or in PMC discourse at all. They do not HAVE to be a tenured professor at an elitist university, even one that is public. (As a UC PhD alum, I consider the UC a leech on the more equity-advancing, “lower-tier” California higher education systems, even though those also have their problems. If Liu taught at a community college or Cal State, I think she’d be much more likely to find the conversation she’s initiated here pointless.)
Liu’s ultimate argument is for her PMC peers to have a spine and fight for socialism. Yet Liu is so fixated on what she can’t stand about her peers that no working-class solidarity comes through at all. She makes the argument for it, but that argument comes up empty when what she actually accomplishes with Virtue Hoarders is a catalog of her own virtue hoarding. It’s just that in her case, the virtue she hoards is opposing the PMC. If you want to read this book, well, just read it. It’s not very long. But you could also not be a tenured professor, detach from PMC discourse, and steep yourself in the work and ideas of people who are building other worlds out of necessity and with much more nuance than “the left” to whom Liu gives undue importance.
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