Mary Poppins with a Class Conscience: Catherine Liu’s Umbrella Covers Worker Uprisings, Not PMC Parades
She’s here to organize the nursery, overthrow the bourgeoisie, and still make it home for a solidarity tea party
Catherine Liu—film professor, forklift veteran, and the Professional Managerial Class’s (PMC) personal migraine—writes about virtue like it’s a toxic asset class traded by people who use “problematize” unironically.1 Her book, Virtue Hoarders, isn’t just a critique; it’s a 90-page exorcism of the credentialed elite2, those salaried exorcists who’ve turned social justice into a LinkedIn side-hustle while the actual world burns in the background, ignored like a Groupon for colonoscopies. Liu, see, is that rarest of academic unicorns: a tenured Marxist who actually scraped shit off tiles3 before theorizing about the shit-scrapers. Foreign born in Taipei, Taiwan. with financial success obsessed immigrant parents? Check. A CV dotted with gigs that smell of stale fry oil and existential dread? Double-check. She’s the left’s unlikely janitor, mopping up the PMC’s spilled fair-trade lattes and their even messier moral preening.
The PMC, in Liu’s telling, is capitalism’s most insidious PR firm4—a “buffer class” ballooned from 3% to 25% of the workforce since 1900, whose real job is to manage the human fallout of late-stage capitalism while tweeting pithily about its evils. They’re the therapists monetizing your trauma5 , the DEI consultants turning systemic rot into PowerPoints about microaggressions, the blue-checks performing solidarity like it’s community theater sponsored by Pfizer. Their virtue? A hoarded commodity, polished and displayed like a trophy wife at a Davos afterparty. Liu skewers their “depoliticization of trauma”6—this alchemy where Yale lit crit theorists in the ‘80s turned historical suffering into personal branding opportunities, birthing an economy where your pain is content, your oppression a TED Talk, your rage a subscription model. It’s oppression as lifestyle, curated and commodified until even revolution feels like choosing between almond or oat milk in your $9 cold brew of dissent.7
And Liu? She’s the wrench in their gears.8 The Yale grad and CUNY Ph.D. who’s been the gear. She calls herself a “bureaucat” on Twitter (@bureaucatliu), a sly dig at the PMC’s love of managerial jargon and their feral instinct for clawing their way up the privilege pyramid. Her critique bites precisely because she’s inside the cathedral—tenured, credentialed, theoretically one of them—yet she’d rather pass a union flyer than a peer-review rubric. She’s seen the PMC from the stockroom floor and the faculty lounge, and both views disgust her equally.9 Liberals abandoned class struggle for kaleidoscopic identity politics? Liu didn’t get the memo. Or she burned it for warmth during a gig-economy winter.
Conservatives, naturally, adore her.10 Virtue Hoarders got fawning nods from the Washington Examiner crowd—not because Liu’s a fellow traveler (she’d rather gargle bleach than vote GOP), but because she exposes the PMC’s bipartisan uselessness. Democrats? Liu laughs—a dry, mirthless sound like gravel in a tin can—at their “pro-labor” pantomime. “I don’t remember the Democratic Party ever having a strong working-class agenda.” Republicans? Just PMC-lite with better firearms and worse haircuts. The PMC’s real sin, Liu argues, isn’t ideology—it’s distraction. They turn solidarity into self-flagellation, class war into pronoun wars, material needs into mindfulness apps. They’re human fidget spinners: frantic, noisy, accomplishing nothing but the soothing illusion of motion.11
Her solution? Not subtle. Liquidate the PMC’s moral monopoly. Return to the grimy, unsexy work of actual socialism: redistribution, solidarity, class struggle sans the Instagram filters. “We must be heretics,” she insists. “Blaspheme.” Forget trauma olympics. Organize a damn union. Pass the wrench12—not the symbolic one, but the greasy, tangible tool that dismantles systems, not just critiques them in journals paywalled by Elsevier.
Why I Admire Catherine
Catherine Liu is, in the end, the left’s Joan of Arc with a forklift certification13—a heretic holding a tenure track and a blowtorch to the cathedral of her own class- the people who’ve replaced the joy of intellectual curiosity with an vacuus catalogue of expensive curios.
And the PMC? They’re still sipping that cold brew, wondering why the revolution hasn’t liked their latest post.
SOURCES (SNUCK IN LIKE A CONTRABAND MARXIST PAMPHLET):
Liu's Virtue Hoarders (U Minn Press, 2021)
Ehrenreichs' PMC theory (Radical America, 1977)
UC Irvine faculty lore; Trauma-Industrial Complex rants; & the haunting specter of a Yale English Dept. circa 1987.
Footnotes to show respect for the fact that Catherine’s a published academic.
See: “synergistic praxis,” “lived experience matrices,” or any sentence containing “neoliberal biopolitics” uttered at a rooftop bar in Brooklyn.
The PMC: Heavily credentialed managers of human capital. Not nurses or teachers—unless they’ve metastasized into deans or diversity deacons.
Literal shit. Also metaphorical shit. Mostly the latter these days.
Specializing in rebranding exploitation as “equity” and callousness as “self-care.”
Trauma™: Now with 20% more pathos and affiliate marketing opportunities!
Where your grandfather’s PTSD at Omaha Beach becomes your coworker’s “trigger” because someone misgendered their reusable cup.
The PMC’s preferred fuel. Tastes like guilt and Colombian beans roasted by a co-op you can’t afford.
Or possibly the pallet jack. Details matter less than the metaphor’s heft.
The view from below: fluorescent lights, aching feet. The view from above: PowerPoints about “deconstructing hegemony.” Both induce nausea.
Conservatives love a leftist eating their own. It’s like rugby for the soul—violent, pointless, weirdly satisfying.
The PMC’s mantra: Look busy! The apocalypse is performance art!
Metaphorical, literal, hydraulic—just pass it. The working class knows what to do.
Certification pending. But her theoretical forklift operates at maximum dialectical lift capacity.