This conversation was originally aired on YouTube in the autumn of 2024 as part of a series called “Doomscroll” powered by the artist, thinker, and head of the do.not.research discord Joshua Citarella. It opens with a critique of leftist politics, exploring how elite capture has narrowed its scope, leading to a purported ideological rigidity. Catherine Liu, Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, traces the origins of what she refers to as “trauma studies” back to her time at Yale in the 1980s. During that time, professors interested in psychoanalysis and deconstruction expanded the field of literary studies and literary theory to include theories of witnessing and testimony that directly addressed memory and historical violence. She notes that trauma as a concept has become depoliticized and individualized, shifting from the use of a collective, historical lens to a personal narrative — fueled, in part, by the media and prominent figures such as Oprah Winfrey. This shift, Liu argues, has blurred the line between genuine political struggle and personal branding, creating a “trauma economy” that diverts attention from systemic exploitation. She begins by connecting what she considers the trauma industry to the military-industrial complex.
Catherine Liu: A lot of books now are called things like The End of Trauma, No More Trauma, etc., and if you look at all their techniques, they’re derived from military therapy methods to “cure” Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in soldiers returning from battlefields or bunkers.
Joshua Citarella: You mention them in your most recent book, Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. What is the “professional managerial class”?
CL: Many people refer to it as a professional middle class, mixing professionals and managers. But it was a term that Barbara and John Ehrenreich pioneered, and I think they derived it from C. Wright Mills’s book White Collar. They — the PMC — are white-collar workers, usually heavily credentialed, with not just an undergraduate degree but a graduate degree, and they manage other people. Another way of thinking about them is they’re not paid by the hour — they have a salary. Their work is supposed to be more satisfying. Their expertise is highly socially valued, and, in most professions, there’s a professional organization that offers guidelines. For instance, the AMA — the American Medical Association — provides strict guidelines about how a doctor should behave. In my case, it’s the Modern Languages Association, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and the Association of American University Professors. These professional organizations were mostly created when the robber barons had taken over the American economy, and you had college-educated elites who wanted to create a buffer zone between this rapacious marketized activity of the Mellons, the Hills, and the Morgans, etc... You had this cadre of people becoming more and more powerful because more people were college and professionally educated. They realized they needed to protect their activities from the pressures of the billionaire class at the time, so those professions that are regulated by a professional organization, like the Bar for lawyers, demand credential elite degrees and have a managerial function in terms of disciplining other workers. Some people ask me, what about nurses and teachers? They have professional degrees. But they don’t manage other people. When they become principals, then they ascend to professional managerial class status, but as professionals, they’re not managers. Another way of thinking about this is what John and Barbara Ehrenreich called the “liberal professions”. They’re part of the culture industry, for people who are more into creative expression. That can also be part of this professional class.
JC: When I look at the original essay published in Radical America in 1977 by Barbara and John Ehrenreich, the definition of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) includes all sorts of things that I wouldn’t categorize as such today, like nurses, for example. When I think of the PMC now, I think of blue-check journalists on Twitter, people working in NGOs, people in salaried positions. Would it be fair to call them non-productive workers? Is that also part of the definition?
CL: Yes. They are workers. In the classical Marxist sense, they are workers who produce things the capitalist can resell for surplus value. The professional classes now produce images, styles, and content like this, and manipulate them. So a lot of [their work] is about performative, non-productive activity. But if we want to go by the classical Marxist sense, the capitalists are willing to give some of their profits to this class because this class plays a disciplinary function in relation to the rest of the working population. You could think of this class as an intermediate class. They’re larger than ever before in the American workforce — it’s like 25%. In the 1900s, it was about 2-3%.
JC: The last numbers I saw were about 18%, so that’s significant.
CL: It depends on how you parse it. You have the 1%, which has the 18-25% doing its bidding to oppress the rest of the population. The 1% decided to pay these people well so they can maintain the status quo and keep the working class down. It’s been really effective, especially on the left-liberal side of the spectrum, because you see the working-class politics of the Democratic Party being eviscerated year after year. I don’t remember in my lifetime the Democratic Party ever having a strong working-class agenda. Everyone says Joe Biden was the closest to enacting [favorable] labor policies, but now, who knows what will happen. We have the perfect postmodern candidate in Kamala Harris. If you look at her campaign website, there are few concrete policy positions, just “donate” or “join the movement.” There’s this emptying out of politics, this depoliticization of politics, for this moralizing, performative activity.
JC: The Biden stuff is weird because my friends who work in the labor movement will say indisputably that Biden has been the best president for labor in my lifetime — and I’m 37. Even though he’s been the best, it’s still incredibly insufficient. But you know, a little bit is better than nothing; so it’s complicated. We should probably also mention that both you and I are part of the professional managerial class, as university professors, elite thought-leaders, podcast commentators, or whatever the hell it is we do. So, as we’re ripping them to shreds, we should probably acknowledge our own position within this.
CL: I don’t think it’s so bad to acknowledge our position and criticize it. In my understanding, when I was younger, the difference between a leftist and a liberal or conservative was that leftists have a tradition of being self-critical. We have to always criticize what we’ve done, who we are, where we are, and how we got here, when we lose, and when we win. Because that self-criticism is the spur of progress on the left. If you’re just walking around thinking that everything you’ve done is perfect, then you’re not a leftist. So I really don’t understand why that’s such a problem. Of course, we’re not saying we should do Maoist self-criticism, where you confess and then everyone beats you, but there is a way to engage with it. Nowadays, with cancel culture and the left’s circular firing squad, I don’t think we’re making space for this stuff, and it’s just passive-aggressive. Stop accusing other people. Look at the movement and how it’s been managed and think about how we can expand the base. Think about how we can appeal to more people. American leftists seem to believe that the fewer people we appeal to, the better. It’s never about how we can make the political program more [positive] for the largest number of people. It’s always “How can we make something really, really obscure that the fewest number of people will identify with, and we’ll be able to wag our fingers at them,” because that’s the PMC thing — wagging your finger and policing each other. Self-criticism is not about mutual policing, which seems to be the farcical activity of the American left.
JC: At this point, there’s a clear class dealignment in the American left. There’s a lot of middle-class graphic designers that look like me and are approximately my age, and they constitute what we call today’s left. There also seems to be a rising class resentment towards the PMC — particularly among working people, but also from everyone. And to a certain degree, I don’t blame them. I don’t like people who are richer than me either. I want their stuff too.
CL: Or they’re telling you that they’re better people than you.
JC: Or telling you how to behave. There’s a real cultural resentment towards this professed moral superiority, and that’s in the title of your book, Virtue Hoarders. Why do they feel the need for this moral superiority? Why are they hoarding the virtue? What value does that give them?
CL: Traumatic is a good word for the capitalist mode of production — I'm using it very specifically here because it relates to how this mode of production denigrates, degrades, and exploits the masses who work with their bodies. On the other hand, mental labor is increasingly overvalued by the owners of the means of production.
JC: You mention that there's a pull towards the far right for many young men. The rise of right-wing populism is happening worldwide, in the US, the UK, Hungary, Poland, Germany, too many countries to name. Is there something about how the left used to be, say, when I was growing up, where it was a space for vulgarity, pissing off the elites, being punk and anti-authority, that has receded in recent years? It seems like many of these young men, who are angry, underemployed, and lack upward mobility, are attracted to far-right ideas. But they’re also drawn to left-wing comedians who are incredibly vulgar and popular. So they seem open to both, even when they disagree on a lot of things. What explains the disappearance of the anti-authority impulse from the left in recent years? How did we get here?
CL: If you look at the essay by John and Barbara Ehrenreich on the Professional-Managerial Class, you'll see how the values of that class completely took over left-liberal political spaces. That takeover was successful beyond anything they could have imagined. The Ehrenreichs were idealistic about this class, thinking it would eventually say, "We want our meaningful work and non-market values to be universal." But instead, what happened was the PMC said, "We have the material resources, and we want our neoliberal values to become universal, even if they're against the working class's material interests." It’s tied to the triumph of ideological reproduction at a time when institutions are collapsing in legitimacy.
The left used to be a place where you could critique that. But now, it’s increasingly conformed to a dominant neoliberal PMC program, partly due to mutual surveillance on social media. Punk culture, for example, could be ephemeral — just one spirited concert. But now, everything is preserved, shared, and meme-ified. There’s a vicious transgressiveness, but less tolerance for real vulgarity, which, for both Marx and Freud, was essential to building solidarity. Freud’s theory of humor was that when we laugh together, we’re laughing at the takedown of an authority figure, like a super-egoic authority. For example, we're not supposed to say "egg", but I know you, so I say "egg", and we laugh because there's a relief from the repression.
JC: Right and that relates to the unconscious, which you mentioned in your book, for people who are interested.
CL: Exactly. Let’s not get stuck on "egg". Pick any word you’re not supposed to say and imagine us saying it. I get pleasure from using taboo words in intimate circles, like the "r-word", because it's so forbidden. The problem is, that language policing in liberalism has reached a point where liberalism itself has become the super-ego.
JC: Is there also an element of intra-elite competition? With the increasing precarity within the PMC or middle class, the stakes of falling out are incredibly high. Is there a career incentive for people to become more cutthroat, eliminate their competition, and secure their upward mobility in these increasingly hard-to-ascend institutions?
CL: Yes, I’ve heard it described as an intergenerational struggle within the professions. Take, for instance, a young doctor offended by an older doctor saying "ladies". This younger doctor, eager to move up, might accuse the older one of being out of touch, part of a wider pattern of policing the language of previous generations. In the PMC, everyone jockeys to be the most virtuous.
From personal experience — my mother was very ill before she passed away — I noticed the older doctors maintained eye contact and delivered hard truths, while younger doctors, who were trained in trauma-informed counseling, often looked down and recited memorized formulas. It was strange. Here was my mom with stage four cancer, and they couldn’t say it straight to my face. The older doctors could, though. This kind of realness, that presence, is being eroded by managerial-speak. Younger professionals are finding it harder to establish authentic relationships with patients because their language and time are managed by HR protocols. It's all becoming algorithmically managed.
JC: When we look at the history of the left, in the US and Europe, there's the idea of the "long march through the institutions", often associated with the 1960s. At that time, conditions for revolution weren’t great, so left-wing intellectuals retreated into institutions, often higher education. In a positive light, this could be seen as safeguarding these values for the future. But on the flip side, these people developed narrow class interests, got tenure, and comfortable housing, and when conditions improved for revolution, they weren’t keen on jeopardizing their positions. Could we see this as part of the stripping away of Marxist values from the left, turning them into the language of elite academia over time?
CL: I think that’s a flattering interpretation for many of these academics. Take Judith Butler, who supported Kamala Harris over Bernie Sanders. They were more liberal pluralists and pseudo-radicals who got very comfortable in their position, where they reproduced liberal pluralism. They never really wanted or imagined changing material conditions.
But if we want real change now, I think the working class is more ready to revolt than we give them credit for. The issue is, we lack the cadres with expertise. We need leftist engineers to create new infrastructures, and leftist agricultural businesspeople to break up corporate monopolies. Look at Lina Khan, the most controversial figure in the Biden administration. She’s a capitalist, but she understands that monopoly capitalism is damaging, and she’s breaking up those giant conglomerates because competition matters. We need cadres like her in every sector. What we really need is a leftist Project 2025.
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This transcription version was drafted by María Inés Plaza Lazo, in collaboration with Rita Duarte Torres, and copy-edited by Habib William Kherbek. A full version can be heard HERE.
- Image credits
Cover: Deutsches Fächer Museum, Barisch Stiftung, Bielefeld, 2023. Photo taken by Katrin Mayer for #c0dacomptoir #fannybookofcarolsruh, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, 2024.
