The Southern Volunteerist

"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. According to John and Barbara Ehrenreich, the PMC is made up of “salaried 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 clas relations.” While Siegfried Kracauer and C. Wright Mills described white-collar workers as clerks, salespeople, and office workers who were shielded from physical labor, the Ehrenreichs’ PMC comprises deracinated, credentialed professionals, such as culture industry creatives, journalists, software engineers, scientists, professors, doctors, bankers, and lawyers, who play important managerial roles in large organizations. As a class, the PMC loves to 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 political or economic meaning. The Right is well aware of liberal preening, and it has weaponized popular resentment against this class of alleged hypocrites. Fox News lives to own liberals; reactionary hatred of professionals and professionalism come not out of love for the people but out of fealty to the special sovereignty of free markets to solve all social problems. In fact, conservatives need a functioning and powerful PMC cadre of inhibited professionals to serve as punching bags for their politics of popular resentment. The PMC continues to oblige these reactionaries by betraying popular policies like Medicare for All, opting instead for means-tested, think tank–brewed Big Pharma and lobbyist-approved forms of health care that allow for profit taking to take place at the expense of public health and health care workers." —Catherine Liu, Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class