Upstream - The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class with Catherine Liu

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

Traditionally within Marxist thought, there are two major classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or workers and capitalists. Within these two classes, however, there are many strata — and in this episode we take a deep dive into one particular stratum. The professional managerial class, or the PMC, is comprised of highly educated, often centrist or liberal leaning individuals who tend to uphold the systems and institutions of capitalist society while at the same time viewing itself as the virtuous vanguard of progress. And although this class falls within the working class, its allegiances and sympathies lie with capitalists. And indeed, in most ways, it does benefit from capitalism. To discuss the professional managerial class and its position within capitalism further, we’ve brought on someone who’s written an entire book about it. Catherine Liu is a professor of Film & Media Studies at UC Irvine and author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. In this conversation we discuss who the PMC is comprised of, how this class emerged, and why it poses a unique threat to socialist and communist aspirations.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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if you can, go there to donate. Thank you. It's class contradiction that moves history forward. And this is a class that no longer wants to move history forward. It might have nearly part of the 20th century, but right now the status quo suits it very well and there's a lot of popular rage that's unorganized that it does not want to deal with, it does not want to speak to, because if we're going to have massive redistribution of goods, it is going to suffer. I want the capitalist to suffer, but the PMC is going to suffer. My class is going to have to suffer.

There's a major redistribution that must happen. If we are going to work towards a universal emancipation of human capacity in this country and in this world. You are listening to upstream upstream upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Dela Duncan and I'm Robert Raymond. Traditionally within Marxist thought there are two major classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,

or workers and capitalists. Within these two classes, however, there are many strata, and today we're talking about one particular stratum. The professional managerial class, or the PMC, is comprised of highly educated, often centrist or liberalaning individuals who tend to uphold the systems and institutions of capitalist society while at the same time viewing itself

as the virtuous vanguard of progress. And although this class falls within the working class, its legions and sympathies lie with capitalists, and indeed, in most ways ways it does benefit from capitalism. To discuss the professional managerial class and its position within capitalism further, we've brought on someone who's written an entire book about it. Catherine Liu is a professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine and the author of Virtue Horders, the case against the professional managerial class. hoarders the case against the professional managerial class. In this conversation we discuss who the PMC is comprised of, how this class emerged, and why it poses a unique threat to socialist and communist aspirations. Here's

Robert in conversation with Catherine Liu. Hi, Catherine. Welcome to Upstream. It's great to have you on. And yeah, I'm wondering to start if you could just maybe briefly describe what inspired or drove you to want to write virtue orders. I think it's just being in my profession for as long as I've been in. And probably the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign sort of made me realize that actual socialist politics and commitments could be mass politics. Because I think up until that point, I was pretty closeted in the academy and I tried to both tow it to centrist line but also like I was involved in theory for years because I thought there's something about liberalism

that I don't understand. I come from a very immigrant dysauthoritarian family and I just have to keep in open mind about liberalism and then I gave it a chance. It was like 25 years. And I realized that I needed to go back to class politics. I had been, you know, having these thoughts a lot about my class. I also think I'm a, you know, new arrival to the class. My mother never finished middle school.

My father came from like real peasant background, just barely finished college, managed to get a job at the UN kind of by accident in 1967 when white collar workers were in great demand. He was a translator. And I saw how difficult it was for him to fit into his white collar environment. And I had some sympathy and misunderstanding about what it was that was going on. But one of the things I've come to realize, and I've had a lot of people come to me with emails about being first generation. They call it first gen in the academies, so that you don't call anyone by class denomination or working class, and they express like the same kinds

of rage and disappointment. Because when you come from outside the class, it really sets itself up as the class of reason, the class of democracy, the class of sense, and then I realized with the evolution of capitalism that my class was not at the spirit tip of struggling against capitalism to create redistribution. It was actually about hoarding not just knowledge and expertise, but actually a, what I would call, like a secular moral idea of virtue that is far divorced from either civic virtue or religious virtue. It's all about, especially after post 68, a kind of lifestyle virtue, a performative virtue, a consumerist virtue. And so that's a very long answer,

but I have to tell you like, with the 2020 elections, when I saw how people in my profession were going for war and I just elicit with war instead of Bernie Sanders, I just kind of realized how deeply out of touch the professional managerial class was from populist perceptions of politics. You know, just the fact that the PMC dominated progressive liberal elites thought that Warren a candidate who didn't win a single primary was a desirable candidate over Bernie Sanders,

just made my blood boil. I'd already written most of the book, but I think that's a fairly good overview of both an intellectual on sort of psychological growth, but I was always compelled by Marxism, but it wasn't a simple thing to be a Marxist through the 80s, 90s and early arts. I mean, I got to tell you the atmosphere in academia was really weird. So my dad, he's now retired, but he was the business subject specialist librarian at a well-known private university down here in the South Bay, and he always tells me the story whenever we get lunch and we talk politics. He's like, and I'm talking about Marxism and communism and stuff.

And he's like, you know, in like the late 90s, when he first started there, he ran into one of the business school professors in the library, and they introduced themselves. And he, you know, he's like, I'm the business school librarian. And the professor was like, oh, what are you checking out there? Because he was checking out a bunch of books for himself. And he was like, oh, you know, like this and this and this. And Marx's capital.

And this professor gave him this really strange look like, you know, you probably shouldn't tell me about that. And my dad's response was, oh, I didn't know it was not okay to read Mark still or something like that. And anyways, that just kind of reminds me a little bit of what you were talking about. Yeah, I mean, it was the Cold War hangover, the McCarthy era persecution of leftist was really intense. And if you look at the evolution of like two scholars from Southern California, Mike Davis, who's suffering right now with cancer and Frederick Jameson, they were like colleagues. You see where Jameson went and where Davis went. Davis kept talking about class in Southern California and the production side of how built

environments were produced by capital. And Jameson, who had a much more successful career in academia, kind of was the Marxist, but you know, embraced postmodernism, embraced the Liz and Watte-Terry. There were all these ways in which like you would just pull the way from Marxism. And you know, it has to be said that the left after 68 was either the new left or this kind of old left angry old guy who's going to lecture you to death about scientific Marxism. But the thing was that it was just a very very very scary atmosphere for my parents who had come from Taiwan, fled PRC. My father hadn't seen his family in many many years, right? He'd left in 49. It was 72. Nixon had just gone to China. So the UN paid for families to go home to see their

families who was like part of this, you know, British colonial thing. And so the first opportunity my father had, he went back to China with my brother to see his parents when seen since 49. So 72 winter 72. And I remember when we returned home to suburban New York we were visited by FBI and CIA agents Wow, no asking like mr. Lou. So what was your the reason of your visit? Is there anything you want to tell us and it's just scared my it's scared my parents completely my father still became Accompanied a synthesizer for his own reasons, but it was part of the tenor of the times. But you know, you just, I read Marx for the first time as an undergraduate, I attended some like Malice to Marxist reading groups of my dad and I was a kid and I was just sort of

listen inside. And so it was very exciting, but when I was in graduate school, the thing that was really the most, you know, sort of charismatic methodology for humanists was deconstruction. And I would say, at this point, deconstruction is an anti-Marxist European project. Yeah, and I appreciate how much you get into a lot of that history and a lot of those different sort of tendencies and philosophies in the book. And I want to get into a lot of that stuff as we move through here, but I think maybe just to start now, it might be helpful for our listeners to get, I guess, some definitions out of the way just to orient ourselves here. And so you describe the

professional managerial class or the PMC in the book at length. And I'm wondering just maybe in a nutshell here, just to orient, like, who's the professional managerial class? Like, as a class, how did they emerge? Is it accurate to call them their own class? Or are they more like a strata of the working class? And yeah, like, how would you situate the PMC within this broader understanding of class, sort of, from a Marxist perspective?

So from a strictly Marxist perspective, you would have to say that they are a strata of the working class because like all workers, they don't own the means of production. They, however, have credentials and they have networks that come out of their credentials, their college graduates, the most elite members of the class that dominate the media and finance go to very elite private universities. They adopt certain language and certain attitude about work and common goods. And so a very simple definition might be there, there are professionals who have degrees, credential at least, they manage other people. And one of the things that I was going to say within the work world now, in the post-industrial work world, is they do jobs that don't damage their bodies.

So during the pandemic, they did email jobs. Like, I had an email job. I could sit in front of my computer all day long. And it might damage my spine eventually, but I'm not lifting boxes like in Amazon or I'm not you know tightening rivets on the assembly line. I'm not driving 18 hour long haul shifts and I'm not doing 16 hour shifts on an assembly line in southern China, you know I'm soldering chips to or you know making chips through soldering. So there's a kind of physicality and a division of labor even within the labor and classes that the PMC has really profited from.

But if you'll be patient with me a little bit, I'll give you a more historical point of view. I was trained in the French 17th and 18th centuries. And I was really interested at that time in, because there were all these really great Marxists who were working that period like I'm Lucien Goldman and also Nobri Leis like Marxist sociologist literary critics and they were looking at the court society and how the court society of the Amciel regime of

feudal you know late feudalism was evolving and so the class of sort of literate people who interpreted the Bible, the clerics, the church, was becoming an essential part of the operations of the court. There's no one more important than Richard Liu, in the French court of Louis XIV, who was the absolute monarchy. So he not only interpreted the Bible and gave Louis XIV's divine right of kings, you know, kind of legitimacy to those church, but he also managed Louis XIV's finances. And so that kind of courteous figure is a precursor to contemporary PMC elites. Now, there are some orthodox Marxists who say

there can't be a new class. There's the working class, and then there's the bourgeoisie or the capitalist class. And I think there's a complexification within the working class. And you keep seeing when capitalism a drive for efficiency with regard to production

that demands ever more rigorous divisions of labor. So in the initial division of labor, when you break down a labor process and put it on the assembly line to make it efficient, you need people who oversee that breakdown because no longer the cobbler, then no longer becomes the initiator of his own process of production, you break down the production of shoes, you make it more fast and someone has to oversee and design those shoes. And that breakdown within even the industrial assembly line creates two different classes

workers, and there's a drive to deskill the lower class of workers and then monopolize the conception of the assembly line. And it's most intense development is in the United States under Taylorism who was able to break down labor, deskill labor, degrade the labor process, but it gave a lot of power to form an order I would say today, become engineers and then technocrats. After World War II, this class became really powerful because it had to prosecute the Cold War and think tanks emerged.

You know, we think of them now as part of the natural environment. They didn't always exist. The experts were basically producing policy papers to tell the government how to govern. And you could also say that within state's monster capitalism of all sort, you know, the coexistence of the state and markets was mediated in the great depression by a certain number of experts, progressive elites that Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought into the government to help execute the new deal. And so at the beginning, parts of the 20th century, I think 3% of the labor force was white-collar labor force.

Most people are agricultural workers and factory workers. Today, we have very few farm workers, very few agricultural workers, fewer industrial workers, still most people doing working class jobs, do logistics and service work. But the white collar professions have actually expanded about 25% of the workforce. Gotcha. Yeah, thank you so much for that history of sort of where this class emerged. Yeah, so basically the thesis of your book is, and in the title, is this idea of virtues and the idea of hoarding virtues. And I know, you know, this isn't something that you can sort of summarize because it's

quite, you know, a drawn out argument throughout the entire book. But I I'm wondering, we are going to get into a lot of the facets and more depth, but just to provide some basic, orienting ideas, what do you mean when you say that the professional managerial class of today hordes virtues? You said post 68, this is sort of something that emerged, I think, a little bit more. So I'm, yeah, I'm wondering if you could just maybe flesh that out a bit. Well, the bourgeoisie and the upper class has always considered themselves culturally and innately superior to the working classes. But this kind of acceleration really happens, I think, post 68 in the United States, because college-educated elites decided

that they were the most progressive force in America and not the working class. And they were differentiating themselves on the level of consumption habits. But I want to go back to a concept that Marx discusses at the end of capital, where he talks about primitive accumulation and how in 16th century England, these, the land de-gentry, you know, basically had open fields, farmers and

inchevards could farm their land and pasture their sheep with this sense of like giving some of their harvest to the Lord or Lady of the Manor, but you basically had like the comments, you know, there were fields, there were places that people could use as communal property or property that they had sort of vague definitions. And then, by about the 16th century, there was a way in which the landed gentry started enclosing their lands. They prevented shepherds from passing their sheep. They declared themselves like the proprietors of what had had been like communal

territory, and so there's this like that moment marks cause permittative accumulation, right? So I feel like virtue itself had been from the conservative side of things if you think about the American notions of virtue they have to do with puritan autism, but they also have to do very deeply like grounded in a kind of autonomy and independence that comes out of yo-menry. It does come out of a mode of production. So the result that there was enough land in America that people could come, farm their own land, be their own person. This is the notion of Jeffersonian democracy, be independent and think about their obligations, politics, and to civic life as something that they did.

This was all white men, of course, on top of their ability to reproduce what they needed for themselves on the farm. We know that that is no longer possible, so that kind of civic virtue is something that this country is based on that, is really in trouble, doesn't really exist anymore. And what you have is an evolving class that wants to accrue advantages to itself because it is not necessarily independent or has its own little firm, but the PMC are mirrored across. Like, they got into good schools. They work really hard in schools. They have better grades.

They make more money. And then somehow these material advantages are turned into like moral and secular crypto religious advantages. Like, I'm just a better person because I'm more tolerant than working class people. I use better language than working class people. I more tolerant than working class people. I use better language than working class people. I recycle more than working class people. And so this area of like secular virtues and religious virtues suddenly becomes the object of I would say primitive accumulation

by the part of a liberal elite who want to make being a good person their monopolized sphere of influence. I love that idea of primitive accumulation in this context. And what I also love so much about your book is that I think it really touched on something really important. You get the antagonism against this idea know, sort of this idea of liberal elitism that, you know, honestly so many idiots on the right run with, right, like right wingers, but you, like you firmly situate it with an antagonistic class framework, like, yes, the PMC are elitist to use, you know, the rights term. They look down on the masses, but this

isn't just problematic because it makes us feel bad about ourselves. So many people on the right hate liberals because they're smug or whatever, and that's where their analysis ends. But you situated all in this solidly material analysis and really drive home the point that yes, liberal, technocratic, PMC types can be super annoying. And it matters because of its material consequences that they're standing in the way of meaningful change.

Yeah, and you know, it's not just like being annoying. It's like, they're actually antagonistic towards any kind of redistribution. Like if they were just irritating, I know that people have run with their charm and like on social media, they're saying, oh yeah, you're just saying, you're just criticizing them because you're finding just irritating. I know that people have run with their charm and neck on social media. They're saying, oh, yeah, you're just saying, you're just criticizing them because you're buying them irritating.

Well, no, liberalism and the BMC rules of liberalism and American capitalism say that we can harmonize relations between different strata of workers from the Reaganomics time, you know, trickle down economics or I don't even kinsianism and classical liberalism. I don't even know what the program of the democratic elites is right now. Like how they want to harmonize American society and class difference by just like imposing like a pluralistic regime of different kinds of tolerance that we have to impose on each other with some kind of environmentalism and gun control and civil rights put in, but they don't want to really change the mode of capitalist distribution. And what I want to show, and it's not necessarily

like, it's not an original thought, is that it's class contradiction that moves history forward. This is a class that no longer wants to move history forward. It might have nearly part of the 20th century, but right now the status quo suits it very well. There's a lot of popular rage that's unorganized, that it does not want to deal with, it does not want to speak to, because if we're going to have a massive redistribution of goods, it is going to suffer.

I want the capitalist to suffer, but the PMC is going to suffer. My class is going to have to suffer. If there's a major redistribution that must happen, if we are going to work towards a universal emancipation of human capacity in this country and in this world, it doesn't want that though. It's notions of emancipation right now in freedom

are completely intenuated by like etiquette rules and policing of ideological positions. Look at the Ukraine war. Look at how the liberals and the PMC elites and the military industrial complex just made us all conform to supporting that war and looked at Putin as House of Cards that was going to go down. They were just wrong, but they demanded conformity with regard to the support of that war. And I guess I get on Twitter and I have these fights, but if I expressed skepticism and I was immediately called a putinist, an authoritarian. So there's an evolution right now of how the PMC is going. And I think it's like,

There's an evolution right now of how the PMC is going. And I think it's a form of neoliberal authoritarianism on a ideological level that is pretty intense, and it demands a kind of conformity on the left liberal side, things that most Americans hate. But for me, and this I go into in the book is that, you know, the great values of liberalism should be preserved within a socialist political frame, which is that you should be able to have debates. You should have skepticism. There should be robust debate about everything. And we see a kind of inability to question the status quo, inability to question, you know, sort of the totality of our political economic situation within the elites, within the liberal elites, because there is such an

intense demand for thought conformity. And one of the things that I've been trying to read up on, and it's chilling, is the evolution of privately funded foundations and grant-making institutions and how we deal with poverty and how we deal with war, and how we deal with the humanities, which is my preview, the melon foundation, like almost has an endowment of a billion dollars, and it controls what humanities research gets recognized right now. And Melon was founded by Andrew Carnegie, who these were Robert Beards, who founded many of these organizations, the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, defined how we look at social sciences, international relations, and all of these foundations are giving money to NGOs, they give money to universities. And so you have like young, aspirant white-collar workers in the sort of liberal professions

feeling as if they have to conform to the ideological demands of these organizations. And right now, those demands are ever more powerful because young people have a really hard time trying to make a profession and trying to make their lives. And so even though I see, you know, with despair how left liberal spaces, I mean, you know, have been conquered by PMC values, I understand that it's about this need to conform to the demands of a PMC super ego. So you and I can have this debate. I can have this

debate with just readers and podcasters and we have and colleagues and you know other people who are politically engaged, but we don't really have like a a job ladder structure that would give you you know the next your next job in the grant making world or your next job on K-Street. There are real rewards for speaking that language for conforming to this kind of really fragmented, progressive identitarian language. And it's because the institutions have been taken over by the donor interests that then feed the PMC who served them. So I want to read a couple of quotes of your book just because I think that they are just really great quotes and also might launch us into the next question here. You write quote, the professional managerial class is a proxy for today's ruling class

and is shameless about hoarding all forms of secularized virtue. Whether it addresses a political and economic crisis produced by capitalism itself, the PMC reworks political struggles for policy change and redistribution into individual passion place. And you also open your book with the opening line, which I love, is, quote, for as long as most of us can remember, the professional managerial class have been fighting a class war, not against capitalism or capitalists, but against the working class. And then, finally, quote, while the right represents an obdurate obstacle to economic reorganization and large-scale social redistribution, it is actually the liberal PMC that stands in the way of the political revolution necessary to forge a different kind of society in the world, and one which the dignity of ordinary people and the working class takes center

stage. And then I'm sort of pulling these from different parts of the book here ordinary people and the working class takes center stage. And then I'm sort of pulling these from different parts of the book here, but just the last one I wanted to read was, quote, centrist liberals want to ignore popular distrust of incremental solutionism by dismissing the collective desire for radical economic reorganization. But we live in a political, environmental, and social emergency. Class War over distribution of resources is the critical battle of our times. And you had touched on this too in the sense that like this class doesn't want things to change because it's working well for them, but it seems like there are some major cracks for them also, just to take

the most recent example of the Supreme Court decision on row, you see this anger coming from these classes of people who largely never experienced the kind of oppression that many different groups of people under capitalism have for centuries, but they are angry, but they don't know how to redirect their anger. And like, obviously, you know, it's beyond a joke now, this idea of like the Democratic Party, like begging people to vote for them and contribute- And give them money. Yeah, like contribute money to them. Like, even a lot of people who would buy into that

in the past are starting to question that, but I don't think that they have, they don't know what to do, right? So they just rely on these sort of like, gotcha, performative types of like, if we expose their hypocrisy enough, maybe things will change or like, I don't know. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that just in our current sort of environment right now, post-row, like, what's going on with the PMC and what do you think that they're thinking and like, where are they going? Yeah, I have a really, really cynical take on this. Everyone knew that this was going to be in trouble if Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn't retire during the Obama administration so that he could point someone else. Everyone knew that if Obama didn't make the sort of interterm appointment, I think of Merrick Garland that Bro was going to be in trouble. But nobody did anything on the Democratic side. No one put pressure on RBG, who's like a hero of

PMC feminism. No one put pressure on Obama to appoint Merrick Garland and place in power politics and guarantee the preservation of Roe. It serves NGOs on the left-lippable side of things that there's this crisis because it is a great fund raising opportunity for them or they thought it was and it has been in the past. Because you know, playing parenthood, not all are always like, oh, our civil liberties are under attack.

I'm like, yeah, go talk to your bosses and get our BG retire. So there's a whole orientation that could have also been taken with regard to feminism that would have allowed them not to play defense but play some serious offense by really going hard for Medicare for all or single-payer healthcare in the United States in which reproductive rights would be guaranteed under single-payer. That could have happened a number of times. That could have happened in the first Clinton era when Hillary botched the healthcare bill. And then it could have happened in the early days

when they were developing Obamacare. And all of these liberals, including Ezra Klein and the American prospect, came out and said, we can't have single payer, we can't have Medicare for all. So they made this monster called Obamacare, which does guarantee more healthcare for young people who are covered by their parents and it does guarantee some

modicum of care for freelancers, but it is so expensive for anyone who is paying for their own health insurance. It's $800 to $1,200 a month often. And so who can afford that? They could have come out. PMC feminists could have come out for universal healthcare and folded abortion rights into that. They didn't. And there are a lot of reasons why they didn't. But among them, I think is the fact that big pharma, big insurance, some of their donors are profiting from our fucked up for

profit health care system and they don't want that. They don't want to come out for that. Number one, number two, and this Biden has worked on and the Bruinics have created some policy changes. You can be really pro child tax credit, like drive that hard, Biden will let that go. During COVID, it was actually Trump, I think initially put it in and Biden enshrined a more generous child tax credit and it has expired. Why isn't there a more robust like pro childcare pro mother campaign on the part of PMC feminists. I mean, there should be a stronger push, like a massive stronger push for universal pre-K, right? Or

universal, um, infant care. I cannot tell you how stressful and horrible it was to have a small child to be working, to have my husband in and out of employment. You know, when we were parents, I'm a very small child. The childcare costs were insane, and they're now even more insane. So, I don't know why they can't make childcare and healthcare part of the front and center political policy positions of feminists. They won't because they're a BNC feminist and they're doing all these like really, they might be really angry, but the rhetoric of it is off-putting to a lot of women.

I mean, I went women like me, women who are more liberal and centrist than I am. We went to a lot of the protests in New York because I was there right after a row, and, you know, people who are carrying signs like if I, you know, I don't want to focus on it or get out of my uterus, I had abortions, I don't care. You know what? Like that is extremely off-putting rhetoric for ordinary people. And I had an abortion, and it was really, really, really hard. And I think about it all the time still. And luckily I only had one. But I paid for our pocket. I didn't have any insurance time. And it's just not we're like very

anti-mother, anti-child as a society. And I don't know, the PMC doesn't really care about these issues. The way that they're positioned like the pro-abortion positions are really, really provocative, maybe, but seriously off-putting, I'd say, the ordinary Americans and ordinary American women. And I just have to be cynical about it. The PMC liberal elites right now are addicted to outrage. They're addicted to it because it allows them to get their shrinking base fired up to give them money, but their base still has a lot of money, right? If you're working 60 hours a week and you're a family, you're not going to be involved in this kind of thing. But at this point, like if we're

going to turn things around and think about what a socialist future might be, you should be thinking, how can we make the government a site of redistribution and help those families? That's hardly what the PMC wants to do. Not even help the government make an infrastructural change in America so that we're not all driven by the infertile rhythms of capitalism and we can actually preserve something of childhood that isn't about your parents worrying if they're going to be able to pay the rent and your bills and the child care costs. That is a vision of a different society.

It's not a vision of, I went and had abortion and I don't care. I just have completely given up on PMC feminism. I think there is a freaking sia up at this point. I don't want to be too conspiratorial, but... By all means, no. I do think that there is something to be said about sort of trying to normalize. I heard a really interesting critique of liberal feminism recently on actually our episode on abortion that we did a couple of weeks before

we were taping this. And you know, this idea that the Democratic Party does not want to even use the word abortion, like oftentimes it's a framedist choice and like there's it's sort of like this allergy to to normalizing abortion as opposed to it being rare as opposed to just being normalized as something we can talk about as just being a regular part of healthcare. And so I do sort of like I do get where some some of the more sort of outrageous stuff that you see on certain like protests, science and stuff, like I get what's behind that.

And at the same time, like I was walking down the street the other day yesterday and I saw a, someone had put up this like, you know, stuck some piece of paper on the wall. And that was a picture of the Supreme Court justices in like, you know, he jobs and like, with long beards and just like, basically like a super Islamophobic caricature of them.

And I was just thinking like this is the most bankrupt and hollow form of protest that I could imagine. It was, you know, this is obviously a liberal neighborhood that I was walking through. And a lot of liberals cannot even practice some semblance of anti-fascism, for example, without it being just completely shrouded in Islamophobia and racism and imperialism and it's like that's what happens when you don't have a structural analysis right? Like you focus on these like performative gotcha kind of things that don't contribute a fucking thing to any kind of like progress moving forward or material change

that it's just like this gotcha thing. And it's very much like, you know, it's just about stoking the outrage. Your listening to an upstream conversation with Catherine Liu, author of Virtue Horders, the case against the professional managerial class, we'll be right back. We'll be right back. My baby loves me, I'm so happy. Happy makes me a modern girl.

Took my money, bought a TV. TV makes me closer to the world. I'm a home-line. It makes me closer to the world of life Hold on The black picture of a sunny day My Hold on The black picture of a sunny day I'm so through this I'm gonna make some of my heart and I'm gonna make some of my heart and

I'm gonna make some of my heart and I'm gonna make some of my heart and I'm gonna make some of my heart and I'm gonna make some of my heart and My baby loves me, I'm so good, hunger makes me a heart of beauty My man, I'm far better doing I, I was the size of this entire world My home land, this life picture of a sunny day, my home life With a fucking picture of a sunny day

I'm sorry, yeah, and you make me a lot of girls You take my man, I can't find my man I'm sick of this, if you will, my whole night It's like a bewildered, my whole life It's like a picture of a sunny day, my whole life It's like a picture of a sunny day, my whole life It's like a picture of a sunny day, my whole life That was Modern Girl by Slider Kinney. Now back to our conversation with Catherine Liu, author of Virtue Horders, the case against the Professional Managerial Class. Okay, so you started off talking about how it was the motivation to inject a class analysis

sort of back into your work, which inspired to write virtue orders. And in the book, you write that as a class, the PMC love to quote, talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation. Tolerance for them is the highest secular virtue, but tolerance has almost no economic or political meaning. And I'm just wondering if you could unpack this a bit and really just maybe if you could talk about like why and how class is such a blind spot among the PMC, why this is problematic, who does it serve? And just yeah, if you could talk about that a little bit. Well, I want to be good, but you know, up the skating class really serves the status quo.

It promotes our acceptance of the ways that the mode of production is organized right now, where you have working class people or people who don't have college educations relegated to this kind of economic insecurity, economic marginalization, and I don't want to use marginalization, just like having non-college educated people become this kind of surplus population available for exploitation at all times, and income equality, though under the PMC lens,

becomes like a problem that needs to be solved rather than a structural formation of how the hierarchies of capitalism are working today. So one concrete example I can give is you know I work in higher education I've worked as a professor for you know almost 25-30 years now and one of the things that you can see about the changing function of higher education through the span of my career is that when you had a more redistributive state, which America actually was after World War II up until 1972 and then the Reagan era

really punched down on any notion of social mobility that was like a massive attempt to social mobility. What you have when you have like the stratification of inequality and it appears being immovable is this idea on the one hand that you know through like pluck and hard work you can live the Horatio algorithm myth and become an entrepreneur and innovate and make lots of money if you're a working class kid and rise up. That's a very 19th century model, but it still holds for free marketers and libertarians that government needs to get out of the way.

We just have free competition. But what actually has happened within the past 40 years is that as economic inequality and exploitation have become more and more pronounced and intense, higher education has become a gatekeeper for anyone who wants to aspire to a social mobility, right? Or it appears as the gatekeeper, it's ideologically configured as the gatekeeper or it appears as the gatekeeper, it's ideologically configured as the gatekeeper for bettering yourself, for making more money, for becoming more culturally enlightened. And so the making more money part is part of that myth of the meritocracy and social mobility.

I mean, in all the studies have been done, but OECD countries, the US is actually one of the least socially mobile countries among advanced industrial societies. It's actually the Scandinavian countries where there's more. You can be born into poverty of a higher chance of like ascending classes. The social mobility's basically stopped in the US, but we still have this idea that if you are competitive with regard to higher education or if you're a very plucky and you work in a kind of like a Horaceous Well grown myth way that you can rise to the top. And what happens is now that the cultural and social capital of higher education has become the triage method for saying you know

what you can make it to college. Therefore you deserve to have a shitty job and or you made it to the best job. Or you made it to the best college. And then you made it to the best graduate school. You deserve to be paid, you know, ungodly sums of money because you came out of Harvard Business School or Yale Law. And you deserve this because you are just smarter than everyone else. And now, you know, my book has a lot to say with the fact that it's not just that raw attribution of being smarter than everyone else, that justifies the kind of selection of the meritocracy. It's also that you actually become a better person.

And that is the ideological illusion that I wanted to break from. That, you know, you have this idea that you become more tolerant with education, you become more enlightened, you speak a special language of liberalism. And within these spaces, like they like to call it though, I find the lack of dissent, the illiberalism dominating, but if you don't double down on this kind of ideology of selection, and one way that you can look at how class haunts this system of selection is that within all the diversity, equity, and inclusion categories of identity, we have this pluralism and respect for difference. I see it's very cosmetic, but it's still out there now where by race, by gender, by ethnicity, sexuality, and then gender identity, you should have a place

that's visible within colleges, and it's defended, and it's within the institution, some mission to promote your identity, promote its visibility, promote greater numbers of you within the select elite who are part of this educational program, but if you are a working class person from a working class family, they have an identity category for you and you're called first generation college student and because we're so Silicon Valley abled, we can't actually say first generation we shortened it to first gen. You're a first gen student and that implies an assimilationist a mission, right? Because you're not going to be ever again a working class non college

educated member of a family. You are ascending like through all the generations after you. We'll also be going to college too and this is a net good and you have to get rid of your working class background and working class culture to become part of the elite. So you're the first generation of that elite and then all of your progeny will become part of that elite. You never say like first gen woman or first gen person of color because it's you're supposed to respect that difference as a difference that makes the institution stronger. But with first gen you really are like assigned position like you're going to be part of the board now and you're going to be assimilated, resistance, as futile, your class identity will be absorbed into the greater identity of higher education. And I just find it like enormously insulting. I mean, it's true working class students have

enormous trouble in college because the loans, the playgrounds, the economic demands on their families like places incredible amount of pressure on them. And it's a kind of economic pressure that the university doesn't want to think about. The university thinks like we're we've let you in here, we're giving you a scholarship, everything should be good. But there are like concrete material factors in working class student slides that make it very typical for them in this environment. And so you have someone like JD Vance who represents like the working class success story. And his story, he uses it, he weaponizes it himself to show like that they're undeserving working class

people like his family who are just around drinking beers and smoking meth. And they're never going to get anywhere. But he went to Yale Law School and Amy Chowat-Tegrimom was his mentor and now he's like running for a state senate and is not great. So he punishes people with his story but let's look at the democratic side of things. There's less and less talk about class at all, especially like white working class identities. So you kind of leave that space open for the Republicans to occupy. And they occupy it with the worst, most regressive, and reactionary stories and myths about working class social and economic mobility and higher education. That was a very long answer

to your question. No, I really appreciated that illustration of the lack of class analysis within liberalism and how it manifests in higher education specifically. I also really appreciate it how you sort of made this distinction between when income inequality is brought up because obviously income inequality is a major issue, but whenever I hear that, it's always a little bit of a red flag for me because I'm like, okay, we're thinking within capitalism, how do we tinker around the edges

to create slightly more equal incomes, right? And there's this lack of focus on zooming out. And I think that's a huge thread among our conversation is the inability to think structurally, systemically, and really zoom out. And also, I think it's really important to emphasize that capitalism strives to pay workers as little as possible. But the innovation or the evolution of finance capitalism or post-industrial capitalism, whatever you want to call it, is that and it began with, you know, Taylorism and the idea that you could have these managerial techniques that would extract more labor from workers and that these techniques were not something like the big boss or the top hat knew, but there would be a cadre of engineers and managers who could extract more labor

and make labor processes more efficient. The innovation of that was that in the 20th century, and even more so in the 21st century, is that you would have this intermediate-laid area, like for men and more. We call them engineers and managers now, who would be copiously and very well rewarded. If the capitalist takes their plus value and says, I've extracted all this profit, I'm going to keep the lion's share for me. I'm going to pay my workers as little as possible.

He had the capitalist class had the brilliant idea to say, you know, we're going to compensate are the intermediate class will execute the efficiency measures and the austerity measures when necessary very well. We're going to compensate them really well. And we're going to put in a triage system where you're going to have to go to college and get this special credential that will allow you to be like professional managers and execute you know the extraction of property from the labor of the great masses of people. It's really hard to keep in mind that most people in America do not have a college degree and most people within even the white color classes and people who have college degrees did not go to exclusive small liberal arts colleges or Ivy League schools or the prestige

schools. So you keep layering down like a small and smaller tranches of the American population of the national population. But this population is so powerful. And within those institutions, there's a lot of internationalism and cosmopolitanism, and since the Cold War, America has been training people and colleges because higher education is still one of our biggest exports, our most desirable exports. So you train like international elites, and at the time it was very Cold War-oriented anti-communist international elites to absorb these values, go home and execute them. Like, be technocratic, identify with the global organizations that educated you from forward

and Rockefeller to today's IMF for the Fulbright. And you're just like supposed to be going home to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, or Thailand and saying, I learned so much about democracy and I'm coming home to share what I've learned with you from the United States. And it was always in the anti-mark, the Santa Claus' Communist Project, the Education of the Leeds, international leads and domestically as well. Absolutely. And what a great segue into the idea of the social reproduction of capitalism, right? And so I think we'd be a little remiss if we were not to at least once mention John and

Barbara Aaron Reich in a discussion about the professional managerial class. So you quoted John and Barbara Aaron Reich in the book as saying, quote, salary mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major Reich in the book, as saying, quote, salary mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations. And I'd love it if you could maybe talk a little bit more about how the PMC serve the function of inculcating capitalist ideology.

Well, right now, some of its most glamorous and less prestigious activities have to do with content production, right? We all went through a pandemic. We're all consuming a lot of content. The PMC dominates content production, whether it be it Hollywood to podcast, like this one, even, and cultural production in general. The really important thing about Barbara and John Ayrmreich's essay, which I owe a great deal, is that they sought the American left as being increasingly dominated by the professional

manager of class. And so today we're so inert to this, but we're like, yeah, you know what, in GEO's, DSA, everyone been to college. That wasn't the case. Even the Democratic Party, and especially unions, was not dominated in most of the 20th century by these college-educated people. And one of the most interesting things about you know democratic machines is that they were often dominated by local bosses like ethnic

bosses who came up through like gangster culture even in Chicago and New York and they had to protect the interests of the working class and they had you know the parish system in Chicago and the kinds of ethnic neighborhoods in New York and these politicians would come up through these different avenues. In the UK, a lot of labor politicians came up through Union organizing, right? We still have some remnant of that in the United States, but increasingly small remnant of that, especially in the NGO Democratic Party world. Actually, I would say it's probably pretty much gone. There's a research and union movement, but I don't know

if it's really connected to NGO world and Democratic Party world now. It shouldn't be anyway. But anyway, so you have this, what they identified as this Carter of people who worked white color jobs, worked in the liberal professions, was that they were bringing their values, many of them steeped in the countercultural, vanguardist, libertarian ideas that came out of 68, into left, liberal organizations. And they said, you know, this is unprecedented. They wrote in 1977, and I think they were prophetic. Now, one of the things that happened was it was the left at the time that attacked them, the most, especially the new left, because they were identifying, like, the new left is dominated by the professional manager of class.

There was an old left that was dominated by labor, union organizing, and ethnic issues, right? And the new left hated it, hated it. And I just talked to someone recently from that era and they said, you know, people were so angry on the left at the publication of that essay. And the guy was like, you know, you've got to look at all these debates. And I was like, you know what? I don't have to look at all the debates. And what other people said because there's other critiques were not that interesting. And the Aaronroix essay had the sting power. Like they had the theory that was realized in history.

And then what else was mad at them? You know, we're arguing in this very mechanical way like, you know, there is no PMC in marks. Therefore there cannot be a PMC and that was partially their argument and another part of their argument I think had to do with the narcissism of just saying, you know, what we can't They've identified us, you know, their rights have identified the nature of the new left. And so if you wanted to say that they believe in a new class, that's one argument to criticize them, but I really think they identified, if you like, the evolution of a very, very copiously rewarded class within wage labor, which executed the will of capital

by performing the work of ideological reproduction, content production, NGOs, political position papers. And the air makes it that uniquely this class was now taking over left liberal spaces of political education. And so now this left liberal professional manager class had taken over mostly what they were going to say, the liberal professions, which we could talk about as journalism, content production, NGO world, now liberal think tanks, and that the values that it brought in, which were the values of the new left, were anti-working class. And the new left, believe that they were on the vanguard of critiques, even of capitalism in the 70s.

Now, you know, liberals don't really save it that much. They like to say, race, gender, class, but they don't really want to talk about class. They she horned in. And so what happened was Barbara Aeronryk became an incredible author. She left these leftist circles where they were all attacked each other. Many of the people who tapped her went on to become professors and have really big careers in academia, and she ended up having a really good career as a journalist and as an author of these amazing

books. She's really, I think, one of the national treasures of our country. So I feel like her legacy and her importance hasn't been fully realized because the academic left like rejected this new class PMC analysis and what the Ernox report to you out was that the values of the new left and the professional manager of class within liberal institutions was going to progressively alienate the working class.

They could not have predicted better the rise of this kind of Republican appeal to the populist working class and the democratic abandonment of bread and butter working class issues that has ensued since they wrote in 77. And so today, like the predictions about this kind of division has really gone through. I mean, 2016 was this full realization when Hillary Clinton,

as the queen of the PMC was rejected by Americans, you can say, oh, she got the popular vote, but she didn't get the popular vote in critical deindustrializing states. With that, it is other two had really strong support for unions were economically devastated and had gone to Obama because he had this kind of appeal, the cross over appeal everyone was very hopeful about him, you know, states like Indiana and Ohio were critical, she had no support there Wisconsin, support for the Dems collapsed.

And you could also say that in 2008, and it's aftermath, there was another moment of populeness where I thought, okay, so you have this newly elected Democratic president. We've seen how awful the financial institutions are, Americans lost our trillion dollars in wealth, the country is devastated, and Obama is going to come in and do something like, at least in antitrust, you know, new deal type of situation could occur because he had the control of all three houses and through branches of government. And then, you know, what happens? He bailed out the bank with the help of Bernanke and Etal. We're all Harvard and Yale educated.

And the banks did not redistribute the government bailout to families that had lost their homes. People lost their homes and the banks were able to reconcile their bottom lines. So if you wanted a more succinct definition of how the PMC covers its ass for financialization and capitalism, there it was. There was no requirement for the bailout to actually reach people, ordinary people working across the Americans. The same thing happened with PPP and the PPP loans doing COVID and after COVID, those were supposed to bail out small businesses. God forbid you would bail out workers, right? Although people didn't get those checks, but there were billions of dollars now spent that

are very unaccountable, but it helped small businesses and did it really help workers. We don't know. People like to say, oh, that's why we have a worker shortage because everyone's like living off the government's time. If that $2,000 they gave in 2020 still last for you, that's crazy, right? You must be living on air or something. But anyway, so there are real ways

which what the Eric Stuygg knows is the problem of the American liberal left has really become realized. So now, you know, what do we do as people who are critical liberalism and on the left? You know, how do we do as people who are critical of liberalism and on the left? How do we separate what we think from what the liberal bull work thinks and is doing in the country? So the situation, I don't think looks good, but I really thought criticizing the Democrats now is just not enough.

Criticizing the PMC is not enough. We have to look at actually how they collaborate with capitalism to continue to support what we all know is a very, very crisis-ridden and illegitimate form of political and economic rule. Okay, so yeah, I wanted to end on the note that I guess we sort of started on this idea that the professional managerial class isn't is not just like an annoying distraction, but they're actually actively standing in the way of real progress by rejecting historically grounded accounts of the past,

prioritizing individualized struggles over collective class alliances and, and always advocating for, as you say, incrementalism over revolution. So you write, quote, in historicizing the PMC's ideological investments, I am not simply trying to understand its identity, to add a precious repository of scholastic knowledge. I'm interested in criticizing its values in order to abandon its politics. To build a socialist future, we have to engage in a constant struggle to overcome the political paralysis to which both centrism and pseudo-radicalism lead. And yeah, so I guess you end this book with like a genuine sincere plea to readers who you acknowledge are probably part of the professional managerial class. And so what is that plea? What is that plea? That invitation?

What did you hope to accomplish in that with your book? I hope that as a writer as an intellectual, what I can do and communicate to my readers, to people around me is the sense of our participation in a historical, universal, material struggle for the emancipation of the greatest number of people, of human beings possible on the planet. And for me, that emancipation has to do with changing the mode of protection, changing capitalism and its distribution of the treasures of our civilization and society. And I feel like what I would like to do is endow people with both a sense of humility and awe about the epic struggle of the working class for freedom and dignity

for everyone and that we are embedded in a human struggle that has gone on throughout history to create a more just, more egalitarian society. And capitalism is a dead end right now with regard to that there might have been a possibility of this dream in the post World War II world when there was a massive redistribution of the American treasure from the top down it had to do with the Cold War It had to do with American industrialization. But since 72, it's the top. One percent or the capitalist cost has really known how to profit from every economic crisis to crush the hopes of average working class people and to create a sense among elites that it cultivates that this

is the best world possible, this is all that we can help for. No, I refuse to believe that, but I also refuse the narcissism of PMC scholars or activists by saying, you know, we're inventing something completely new. We are not inventing something completely new. We are joining in a mass universal struggle for freedom and emancipation of the largest number of human beings by using the tools that capitalism has given us, like the efficiency, the industrialization, to create a more just, more egalitarian world where every human being can live up to her capacities, can enjoy the things that have been hoarded by the PMC, by the capital, at least that that includes leisure time, and that includes appreciation of the arts,

that includes sex, that includes having children. And I want to really refocus our efforts on looking at how we participate in this world historical struggle for emancipation, for the largest number of human beings. And for me, leftism, Marxism has shown the way it has been defeated, it has been, you know, misused in the creation of the Soviet state and the Communist parties, but at the same time, the ideals that were laid down like universal dignity for workers, universal health care so that you're not bankrupt and humiliated by being ill, those things are really important and really, really critical to dignity and to freedom. And so having people be able to enjoy their lives as workers, as parents, as participants in politics, and as thinkers, that's like everything that Mark wanted when he saw the exploitation of the working class in the most developed industrialized country at the time, which was England, he saw people,

masses of people being destroyed by industrialization. He saw children, families, you know, everything destroyed by the needs of industrial capitalism in northern England. And he also understood that they were forced off the farm under the primitive accumulation strategies and forced into this laboring world, but he also saw that the factory and that capitalism concentrating the working class in factories and cities was going to create the condition for collective action and for class solidarity. So I just want people to think of themselves as participating in an epic struggle, and

that is really critical to undoing the ideological stranglehold that were under in terms of like the individualism of the PMC and the utopic horizon of capitalism, which has to do with three markets, and as you say, individual expression. Like, forget about yourself for a little bit, but also think about what you can do to be part of this world's historical struggle. As you say in closing in your book, quote, my goal is simple, help normalize socialist economics and politics in the face of the concerted demonization of its vision of what is collectively possible. And I love that and I think that's a

great place to end. So yeah, thank you so much, Catherine. It's wonderful to have you on. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Catherine Liu, author of Virtue Hortars, the case against the professional managerial class. Thank you to Sleeter Kinney for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of you, our listeners and fans.

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