Just How Alienated Are Our Masters and Commanders?
By Jeffrey A. Tucker January
15, 2024
The
Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu (October 2020).
Here are some excerpts:
For as long as most of us can remember, the professional managerial class
(PMC) has been fighting a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but
against the working classes. Members of the PMC have memories of a time when
they were more progressive—during the Progressive Era, specifically. They once
supported working-class militancy in its epic struggles against robber barons
and capitalists like Mrs. Leland Stanford Jr., Andrew Carnegie, John D.
Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon, but today, they go to Stanford and view private
foundations bearing those same names as models of philanthropy and sources of
critical funding and recognition.
They still believe themselves to be the heroes of history, fighting to
defend innocent victims against their evil victimizers, but the working class
is not a group they find worth saving, because by PMC standards, they do not
behave properly: they are either disengaged politically or too angry to be
civil. Liberal members of the credentialed classes love to use the word empower
when they talk about “people,” but the use of that verb objectifies the
recipients of their help while implying that the people have no access to power
without them.
The PMC as a proxy for today’s ruling class is shameless about hoarding all
forms of secularized virtue: whenever it addresses a political and economic
crisis produced by capitalism itself, the PMC reworks political struggles for
policy change and redistribution into individual passion plays, focusing its
efforts on individual acts of “giving back” or reified forms of self-transformation.
It finds in its particular tastes and cultural proclivities the justification
for its unshakable sense of superiority to ordinary working-class people.
If its politics amount to little more than virtue signaling, it loves
nothing more than moral panics to incite its members to ever more pointless
forms of pseudo-politics and hypervigilance. The much-maligned Hillary Clinton
was honest in her contempt for ordinary people when, in 2016, she dismissed
Trump supporters as “deplorables.” Their 2016 defiance of PMC and liberal
nostra has only hardened into reactionary antiauthoritarianism, which another
reactionary demagogue will seek to exploit.
PMC virtue hoarding is the insult added to injury when white-collar
managers, having downsized their blue-collar workforce, then disparage them for
their bad taste in literature, bad diets, unstable families, and deplorable
child-rearing habits. When the PMC sympathized with the plight of masses of
working people, it also pioneered professional standards of research grounded
in professional organizations like the American Medical Association, the
Association of University Professors, and all the professional organizations
that currently dominate academic life. In organizing professional life, the PMC
tried to protect the integrity of specialists and experts against the power of
capitalists and the markets…..Those heady days of PMC heroism are long gone.
The PMC, with its professional discipline and aura of disinterestedness, did
very well for itself during the Depression, during World War II, and in the
postwar period with the expansion of universities and the growing complexity of
the American and social economic order.
When the tide turned against American workers, the PMC preferred to fight
culture wars against the classes below while currying the favor of capitalists
it once despised….The post-1968 PMC elite has become ideologically convinced of
its own unassailable position as comprising the most advanced people the earth
has ever seen. They have, in fact, made a virtue of their vanguardism. Drawing
on the legacy of the counterculture and its commitment to technological and
spiritual innovations, PMC elites try to tell the rest of us how to live, and
in large part, they have succeeded in destroying and building in its own image
the physical and now cybernetic infrastructure of our everyday lives.
As the fortunes of the PMC elites rose, the class insisted on its ability to
do ordinary things in extraordinary, fundamentally superior and more virtuous
ways: as a class, it was reading books, raising children, eating food, staying
healthy, and having sex as the most culturally and affectively advanced people
in human history….
Although the PMC is profoundly secular in nature, its rhetorical tone is
pseudo-religious. While the PMC infuriates conservative Christians with its
media monopoly on liberal righteousness, it finds salvation, like most
Protestant sects, in material and earthly success. In liberal circles, talking
about class or class consciousness before other forms of difference is not just
controversial; it is heretical. They call you a “class reductionist” if you
argue that race, gender, and class are not interchangeable categories. They
pile on with the legalistic and deadly term intersectional to accommodate the
materialist critique of their politics.
The PMC simply does not want its class identity or interests unmasked. Young
people wanting to enter what the Ehrenreichs called the “liberal professions”
and gain positions in academia and the culture and media industries have had to
adapt themselves to the Procrustean bed of PMC-dominated networks of
influence.….
It wants to play the virtuous social hero, but as a class, it is hopelessly
reactionary. The interests of the PMC are now tied more than ever to its
corporate overlords than to the struggles of the majority of Americans whose
suffering is merely background décor for the PMC’s elite volunteerism. Members
of the PMC soften the sharpness of their guilt about collective suffering by
stroking their credentials and telling themselves that they are better and more
qualified to lead and guide than other people. PMC centrism is a powerful
ideology. Its priorities in research and innovation have been shaped more and
more by corporate interests and the profit motive, while in the humanities and
social sciences, scholars are rewarded by private foundations for their general
disregard for historical knowledge, not to mention historical
materialism.
The rewards for following ruling-class directives are just too great, but
the intellectual and psychic price that has to be paid for compliance should be
too high for any member of society. In academia, the American PMC has achieved
a great deal in establishing the rigors of peer review consensus and research autonomy,
but we can no longer afford to defend its cherished principle of
epistemological neutrality as a secret weapon against “extremism.” We live in a
political, environmental, and social emergency: class war over distribution of
resources is the critical battle of our times.
