THE HOLLOW GOSPEL OF THE LIBERAL LEISURE CLASS

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Re: THE HOLLOW GOSPEL OF THE LIBERAL LEISURE CLASS

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 27, 2021 12:51 pm

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Self-help as Capitalism Porn?
Originally published by Consented Magazine.

As a teenager whenever my Dad gave me a lift somewhere he’d stick a self-help tape on. The likes of Zig Ziglar or Jim Rohn. He’d chuckle at all their little witticisms and look over at me – did you hear that? Hehe, did you hear that? – Yes, Dad, I’d say, rolling my eyes. He was, in fact, a working class Thatcherite, as was my mother. I hope by the time you’ve finished reading you’ll see the significance of that.

Since then I’ve had an ambivalent relationship with self-help. I succumbed to the temptation to buy The 4-Hour Work Week. At some point, I stopped being merely skeptical about (and simultaneously beguiled by) self-help, but began to see it as a force for wrong in many aspects of our lives. It seems to be everywhere: professional training, education, healthcare, religion, popular culture… government policy. Of course, self-help is a broad church, there are all kinds of weird and wonderful varieties, many of which hold completely antithetical positions to others. I’m not going to argue that it is inherently harmful or that it’s some kind of government conspiracy to enslave us all. But we could divide self-help into that which urges you to change yourself rather than change anything else and that which urges you to change yourself in order to change social structures. Another time I’ll write on what’s great, or useful, about self-help. There’ll be much to say, but for now I’m saying something else – how self-help often merely helps the rich get richer. It helps them get richer and convinces the rest of us to cheer them on “go on and make more money, you’re our heroes, we want to be just like you!”.

“See you at the top!”

One of the core techniques of self-help is goal-setting. It’s pragmatic, sensible, prudent. If you want to do something, and as ‘desiring beings’ we generally do, it’s probably not a bad idea to articulate those things, set them down in detail, and work out a step-by-step plan to attain them. I’m not about to claim this is a fundamentally misguided way of going about your life. But, just as knives can be used to either repair or impair, maim or mend, so it depends on their purpose and intention. The goals promoted in See you at the Top by Zig Ziglar and 1000s of other self-help titles are things like acquiring money, getting promoted, accumulating possessions. It frames life as a struggle and society as a competition. Each human is framed as an antagonist rather than part of a community. And the mechanism of goal-setting transforms your unique life experiences, hopes, dreams, into measurable, quantifiable achievements (in the past) and goals (in the future).

These mathematical constructions can then be compared and contrasted with others, listed, tabulated, divided into wins and losses. If this doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, maybe you feel you’re one of the winners, maybe this way of thinking is so deeply embedded in your thought processes as to be unimpeachable, or maybe you haven’t considered that turning people’s lives into a contest, where the rules are so rigged in the favour of the winners, and the consequences of losing may include suffering, humiliation, poverty, illness, even death, is possibly not ideal?

Once you’ve absorbed the psychology of goal-setting you feel you’ve got to maximize opportunities. You’re struck by feelings of FOMO (fear of missing out) and YOLO (you only live once). The self-helper feels the constant pressure of their self-set goals, where just being is no longer tolerated. The frog on the lily is not restful or ruminative – it’s lazy, wasteful and irresponsible. Every second must be utilized. Sociologist Micki McGee christened this ‘the belaboured self’. So when goals are directed towards your job, work is reformulated as a primary way of expressing one’s identity, and a source of personal fulfilment. The sense of achievement derived from the adult equivalent of happy-face stickers.

I’m not saying if you get promoted you shouldn’t celebrate or feel proud. I’m just saying what about all the other things you’re relegating in importance: everyday kindness, support of your loved ones, doing favours (how about that?). What if you don’t achieve the conventional things like money, career success and so on? Should you then feel worthless? Of course not. But this can often be the effect of having faith in self-help books by people like Ziglar and Rohn. In See You at the Top (1975) Ziglar educates us that just like a balloon of any colour would rise in the air, it is always what is inside you that will make you rise (nothing to do with privileges or inheritance then). He insists you are obliged to earn more than you need, because in doing so, you will create job opportunities for less privileged than you (greed, for want of a better word, is good, then). Money, assuming it is legitimately earned, is a yardstick that simply measures the service you have rendered (don’t question the justice of social inequalities, whatever you do).

Other prominent gurus share the worldview that the status-quo is as it should be and that we have only ourselves to blame or credit with our lot: M. Scott Peck, for example, deems it childish to even discuss oppressive forces in society. Stephen Covey (7 Habits guy) quotes Eleanor Roosevelt “no one can hurt you without your consent” (woah there Covey! Sure about that?). Some of the blunt titles of self-help works are enough to give you the gist of their thinking: How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (1974) by Harry Browne, Power: How to Get it, How to Use it (1976) by Michael Korda, Looking out for Number One (1977) by Robert Ringer, Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive (1988) by Harvey MacKay. Life is a jungle and only predators survive. Go ahead and be selfish, you have our blessing, in fact it’s the right thing to do. These are naked appeals to our baser instincts, our infantile fantasies of omnipotence, based on the fundamental assumption that might is right. And sometimes they explicitly link these ideas to capitalism. Ziglar goes on explicitly anti-communist rants. Jessica Lamb-Shapiro reports Mark Victor Hansen (author of Chicken Soup for the Soul) as insisting: “in case you ain’t got it, I’m pro-capitalism and free enterprise”.

In many of these type of self-help works, an old folk hero has been revived: the self-made man. In his new guise as the entrepreneur (which could now also appear in female form). This savvy superhero is thought to be equipped with a Swiss army knife of business skills. They can negotiate the hell out of any deal, sell the living daylights out of a product, motivate the stuffing out of themselves. They have the willpower of an ubermensch, the likeability and charisma of a moviestar, the smarts of a brain surgeon. The descendent of pioneers, adventurers and empire-builders. Resilient as a goddamn mediaeval castle. Able to deal with whatever life throws at them. It’s easy to see why this figure is so celebrated by those of a certain ideological persuasion. It recasts those at the top as entrepreneurs in retrospect – they’re at the top, they must have got there somehow, and that somehow must be by being a bloody amazing entrepreneur, right? Nothing to do with inheritance, nepotism or privilege of course. As if all business owners worked their way up from the bottom. Those dreary souls who stay in their safe little world of being employed by someone else are just lacking in spirit, correct attitude, and vision.

“How to Make Friends and Influence People”

The purpose of the self-help technique may also be about interpersonal skills. How to be likeable, be confident, assertive, happy, or calm. It was no coincidence that How to Make Friends and Influence People was published during the 1930s American Great Depression, while industry was developing huge middle management structures, managers needed a guide on how to suck up and shit down. How to fake a smile, remember names to give the impression you gave a damn about someone you’d met maybe once before. In Britain the economy has since transformed from predominantly manufacturing to service and finance. Again self-help books have catered to a changing market, where so many employees are client-facing (who isn’t these days?) and need to reconfigure their personalities to the exacting tastes of the consumer class: to be friendly without actually being friends, be eager to please, fake enthusiasm and ‘charisma’.

While the self-help products work busily to fashion certain types of workers ideal for a service economy, they simultaneously shape the ideal ‘consumer-citizen’.

The economy (by that we could just say ‘big capital’), requires citizens to buy stuff. Then buy more stuff. They must continually buy more stuff, eternally, whether it’s needed or not. Otherwise the economy (capital, remember) will get sad (or ‘depressed’ as the pundits say). So first the consumer buys self-help products, books, DVDs, mentors, boot camps, conferences. The self-help products then teach the consumer how to commodify aspects of their self. For example, it teaches them how to smile winningly. The smile wins them a new job, which translates into financial gain. Maybe it teaches a negotiation technique, for example, ‘go high or go home’. The self-helper has now acquired a way of being, a habit which forms part of their regular behaviour and so becomes part of who they are. And this acquired characteristic, paid for in full, is converted into economic value: they haggle a bit extra money out of a deal, or enhance their performance so that their employer rewards them with a pay rise. Thus: habits which become essential parts of who we are, a facet of our humanness, are bought and converted into monetary value just like any other commodity – like an iphone you buy and sell on ebay for profit. That new smile, that new way of thinking positively, that new mindfulness – all mere accessories, not much different from handbags and wallets. I’ll leave you to pursue your own comparisons of this with the commodification of human beings involved in slavery…

“Think and Grow Rich”

I’ve had more than one previous career (I’m currently a historian-in-training). One of them was involved in sales where I had meetings with various clients. On more than one occasion the subject of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret was brought up – “have you read The Secret?” they asked. If you’re one of the few that doesn’t know what it is by now (it has sold well over 28M copies since 2006), I’ll spill the beans (Byrne does not need any more royalties!). It’s disappointingly simple: if you think positively about something, you’ll attract it. Let’s say, £9.26. Think positively about £9.26 and the universe will send you a cheque. As simple (and stupid) as that. Not everyone has the knack, of course. And if you don’t succeed at first attempt, the answer is to keep practising and most importantly keep buying further products which repeat practically the same message.

Positive thinking sounds straightforward to many people. So what’s the problem? Be positive, it’s good for you. No-one likes a stick-in-the-mud (I tend to find). But it all gets pretty nasty when Byrne tells us that the flipside of the Law of Attraction is that if you think negatively about something you attract that too. She encourages us not to look at fat people if we want to lose weight. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you read that correctly. Don’t look at fat people, turn away, avert your gaze as if they were gorgons or scatography. Nice. It gets much worse: people afflicted by earthquakes in Asia only have themselves and their silly negative thoughts to blame. They should think on that as they crawl from the ruins of their cities and towns where entire families lie buried. I wonder if anyone has asked Rhonda what she thinks about victims of rape or domestic abuse, in fact, what she thinks of anyone oppressed by anything for that matter. All part of some grand cosmic plan, no doubt. Their fault. The poor are lazy, feckless good-for-nothings and the successful are worthy, blessed and sanctified. Everything they do is flawless and unassailable. Some will say I’m being hyperbolic but this panglossian view of the world isn’t just childish and illogical, it’s downright heinous. It’s an attempt to shut down all thought: don’t try to explain a single thing, don’t think, all is well, all is right, for we live in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire dispatched this ridiculous way of thinking centuries ago, and yet here we all are, having to dispatch it once again.

But positive thinking isn’t reducible to the Law of Attraction, it’s most extreme form. We might settle for a milder version, more commonsensical. Something like the good old British stiff upper lip, rather than the American Pollyanna. Again, I don’t take issue with the idea itself, shorn of all context. It’s the purpose it’s put to. An enjoinder to make do. These are the cards you’re dealt so make the best of it. Don’t try to change things. Don’t demand new cards. New rules even. Be happy with what you’re given. This school of self-help distinguishes itself by not actually advising very much at all. There are no elaborate programmes of self-discipline, rather, it relies on a more passive plan to simply change your attitude.

“Rich Dad Poor Dad”

The core concepts of certain types of self-help are intimately bound up with an ideology of meritocracy. Don’t forget that this term was originally conceived negatively (by Michael Young). Somehow, possibly through the enormous influence self-help has had, it has come to be seen in a positive, even utopian, light. The cream rises to the top, they say (unless society is unstirred stew, rather than milk, where it’s actually the scum that rises). But this involves a scary level of self-deception to maintain belief in: you’d have to ignore the existence of gross inequalities in education provision (public/private schools), leg-ups that the middle-class receive like Old Boy networks, nepotism, inheritance, cultural capital (accent, ‘manners’, shared taste, deportment etc), internships which presume financial independence, class/race/gender privilege, effects of environment, family expectations and so on and so on. Thus the rejoinder is ‘what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger’. Proponents of this view like to argue anecdotally here: “my Dad started from scratch…”. But let’s be grown-up and focus on classes as a whole. The argument of meritocracy is somehow to claim the moral high ground, of fairness. Everyone’s got a fair crack, ‘free enterprise’, anyone can get rich. It doesn’t even make sense: of course not everyone can get rich, hierarchy is built into our very economic system, and it’s colossally more difficult for someone at the bottom than someone nearer the top of the ladder. Meritocracy spreads the huge deception of a level playing field.

One facet of self-help common to all its forms, is an emphasis on individualism. Full and unqualified responsibility is dumped unceremoniously on the shoulders of the individual. In this way of thinking, humans are kidnapped from their heritage, context, social structure, collectivity and social class. If you have nothing to start with, what’s the big deal? Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps. Stop making excuses. Stop playing the blame game. So what if you had no education, turbulent home life, no money, just do it. This ties neatly in with changes in rhetoric about government and their relationship with the people, from the ‘70s. A new phraseology appeared in politicians’ speeches the world over, denouncing government intervention and a culture of dependence, and praising laissez-faire policy (now every other word is ‘strivers’ or ‘aspiration’). The State would no longer be able to encroach on personal freedom without a damn good fight. If everyone were just left alone they’d be fine.

Many commentators have also attacked self-help for representing and fostering a culture of narcissism (most famously, Christopher Lasch). For them it represents a loss of community and wise elders; a crisis of the self. All of a sudden, when the self-helper has absorbed self-help into their very psychology, it’s impossible for them to do anything for anyone but themselves. Any attempt at altruism is ultimately part of the self-help project. One’s ultimate goal is to create a certain kind of self – and every move forward from that point is merely aspect of this self-creation, whether it helps others or not.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Self-help for Dummies

Thatcher was a huge admirer of the original self-help guru Samuel Smiles. Her svengali Keith Joseph even had a new edition of his 1859 Self-help published. When I was a teenager I didn’t get that connection between self-help and Thatcherism, or the wider neoliberal project, but I knew there was something fishy about it as I sat there in the car and listened to Tony Robbins tapes with my Dad.

What the self-help industry often does is cleverly target our dreams, latch onto the lack of fundamental aspects of humanity in our lives, and promises them to us without ever being able to provide. It’s pernicious because it does not address underlying problems and yet claims to: it does not address alienation in either the Marxist or Sartrean sense, nor uncertain unemployment, practical impotence in the workplace, the megadeath of meaning under late capitalism (the simulations and simulacra, the fetishization of commodities, the commitment to growth and productivity beyond all reason). And it holds you, the individual, responsible for your life, back and belly. And it refuses to brook any defence, for after all, what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. By this rationale, the most oppressed should become the most powerful, and if they don’t they should look hard in the mirror before holding bosses, shareholders, or politicians to account.

http://pitchforkcosmonaut.org/self-help ... lism-porn/
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Re: THE HOLLOW GOSPEL OF THE LIBERAL LEISURE CLASS

Post by blindpig » Thu Oct 28, 2021 2:04 pm

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The New Dangerous Class? The PMC and Virtue Hoarding

Originally published: Conter by James Foley (February 24, 2021 ) | - Posted Oct 28, 2021

I have long been of opinion that the Socialist movement…was to a great extent hampered by the presence in its ranks of faddists and cranks, who were in the movement, not for the cause of Socialism, but because they thought they saw in it a means of ventilating their theories on such questions as sex, religion, vaccination, vegetarianism, etc.

Those anxieties belong to Edinburgh’s own James Connolly and date to the turn of the twentieth century, with socialist movements still in their infancy. Three decades later, George Orwell was similarly exasperated. The typical socialist, he found, was “a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings…One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England…”

This testifies to a long history of fears that leftist movements will be overrun by the hang-ups of middle-class eccentrics. Remembering this can help contextualise our own doubts: despite all that pessimism about quacks, faddists and cranks, subsequent years did witness mass, proletarian socialist projects. Perhaps the same will apply in our age. Yet times have changed since Connolly or Orwell, qualitatively and decisively. Intellectuals of their day could still appeal to the autonomous wisdom of self-organised artisans, working-class women, soldiers, peasants and factory workers. Working-class associational life has since reached a peak and collapsed, not just in party organisation and trade unionism, but also in religion, sport and culture. A working class (though changed) remains the social majority, but a “void”, as Peter Mair said, separates it from political and cultural representation.

Conversely, the traditional middle classes were transformed by the expansion of universities and white-collar occupations. This also reached a peak, somewhat later, when the over-production of cultural elites collided with the post-2008 breakdown of the capitalist system. Graduate wages fell to levels often indistinguishable from working class occupations. But economic convergence was matched by cultural and political divergence. While graduates entered the left and the unions in droves, their hunger for distinction entered with them. For this reason, universalist appeals to ‘the 99%’ fell flat: today’s leftism presents itself as an immense accumulation of subcultures, all seeking moral differentiation from a fallen cultural majority.

Here, I believe, lies the root controversy over the “professional managerial class” (PMC). The term emerged in the 1970s during the retreat of the first wave of New Left social movements. Barbara and John Ehrenreich, who popularised the term, were not the first to notice the accumulation of managerial and professional bureaucracies that were both causes and consequences of university expansion. Earlier notions of a “new class”, distinct from an earlier petty bourgeoisie or traditional professionals, can be traced to the post-war theories of James Burnham, John Kenneth Galbraith and Milovan Djilas.

The Ehrenreichs’ innovation lay in linking the rise of this class to post-68 social movement leftism. Thus, from the start, it mixed sociological description with political diagnosis. “The PMC’s objective class interests,” they observed, “lie in the overthrow of the capitalist class, but not in the triumph of the working class; and their actual attitudes often mix hostility towards the capitalist class with elitism towards the working class”. The PMC origins of the New Left, the Ehrenreichs contended, “shaped its growth and ideology”. That said, their assessment, as of the seventies, was ambivalent rather than hostile: the PMC was by nature haughty towards the working-class majority, but also structurally antagonistic to capitalism. It was a potential ally, though not one to trust further than you could throw.

Post-68 radicalism ebbed away, leaving a cultural imprint on academic faculty, who, in a ponytailed, blue-jeaned, turtle-necked spirit of rebellion, passed hand-me-down ideas to their students. The resulting mixture of cultural radicalism, political quiescence and economic yuppiehood still dominates campuses today, and radiates out into graduate professions like fashion, journalism and the arts. David Graeber was an acute observer of this trend in academia:

On the one hand, campuses that in the 1960s had been the focus of actual social movements, even revolutionary movements, were largely depoliticized…On the other hand, much of the language and sensibilities of such movements were maintained even as this period saw the consolidation of the university as the place for the reproduction of a class that in its upper echelons at least had become no longer a mere auxiliary to power, but something at least very close to a branch of the ruling class in its own right.

Thus, when leftist protest re-emerged from the nineties deep freeze, it was increasingly inseparable from a great gloop of PMC mores. This formed a natural upper limit to the left’s hegemonic ambitions. Confronted with austerity, left populist parties initially tried to recapture a majoritarian spirit–“we are the 99%!”–but frequently found themselves prisoners of the predilections of their core supporters, those subcultures of downwardly mobile graduates.

The great historical irony is that post-2008 left experiments, styling themselves against the establishment, would eventually reinforce the sociology of the Third Way. Perhaps the quintessential case, despite its early promise, was Labour’s recent lurch to the left. “Ideologically, Corbynism was a break from New Labour centrism,” notes Chris Bickerton, “but sociologically, it was more Blairite than Tony Blair.” Cynical though this assessment might sound, it is reasonably founded in fact. Blair’s clique had emphasised the “Southern question”, the need to break Labour from its “northern heartlands” (as Peter Mandelson is said to have sneered, who else would they vote for?) and speak to a younger, aspirational middle-class who had embraced market globalisation. By the time the Corbyn experiment had concluded–or, by the time the People’s Vote had colonised Momentum–this base of broadly liberal voters was effectively the party’s new heartland.

The result, not just in Britain, is a leftism where class dare not speak its name. Stimulated by a postmodern curriculum, graduates encourage–indeed, mandate–wrenching self-examination of whiteness, heteronormativity and patriarchy. Privilege, as they call it. But, on class, they have built paranoid, insulated walls against critique. When the question is even asked, some retort (correctly) that the “working class has changed”, implying (incorrectly) that they are the vanguard of a new social majority that passes through top tier universities. Others bristle at the tag PMC, the mere mention of which invites charges of “class reductionism”, now regarded as the greatest academic sin one can commit.

Within living memory, there were socialist cultures that defined themselves as working class, sometimes at the cost of silliness. At any activist get-together, there were Mockney accents, tracksuits and flat caps aplenty. Perhaps it was necessary to break from this live action role playing. But today, all of that has been replaced by an excruciating silence, punctuated by occasional explosions like 2016, which only reinforce a paranoid distrust of class analysis. Discussing the left’s class profile has thus become the proverbial minefield.

In that sense, Catherine Liu deliberately treads on just about every landmine. Virtue Hoarders, a book she styles as a “short introduction to the false consciousness of a class”, charts the decline of American intellectual life, the advance of PMC cultures, and an attendant hostility towards the working-class majority–all of it legitimised by radical rhetoric.

Back in America’s Progressive era, Liu observes, the PMC rose as the enemies of robber barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie. They were the muckrakers, the social workers, the reforming allies of trade unions seeking to replace the rule of the corporations with the authority of the planners. But since the seventies, they have become allies of capitalist philanthropy–their highest aspiration being, ironically, a Rockefeller or Carnegie endowment. They serve the (post)-neoliberal epoch by providing its moral vocabulary, built on the holy trinity of meritocracy, managed transgression and the centring of excluded voices.

The book’s central concept, “virtue hoarding”, offers a useful window into contemporary leftist dispositions. “The post-68 PMC elite,” Liu observes, believes itself to comprise not just our era’s best and brightest, but also “the most advanced people the earth has ever seen”. Yet while their elitism may be pronounced, it is also historically peculiar. Today’s leftists are not the first to style themselves as a vanguard of virtue. Traditional Leninism, to its critics, was guilty of adopting the lofty vantage point of the “true” proletarian, in contrast to the masses deluded by false consciousness. Much ink was spilled–often, ironically, by postmodern academics–condemning this outlook’s pretentiousness. Nonetheless, even at its worst, the Leninist stance implied a dynamic relationship to the majority: the goal was to “win” or “guide” the masses to the truth.

By contrast, today’s ideal-typical activists are radically different. Our vanguardists of virtue have no time for proselytising among workers–not even notionally. Instead, their goal is distinction, culturally, against a fallen majority, what Hillary Clinton called the “deplorables”. Virtue isn’t spread but hoarded. This explains the curiosity that, even where this group’s libertarian value system enjoys majority support, they continue to act as excluded moral minorities. Rather than stress common ground, which, ironically, has grown abundantly over the neoliberal epoch, they stress whatever makes them better than the masses. Increasingly, this is framed through Star Wars, Harry Potter or Tolkien tropes of plucky, geeky resistance movements, the teacher’s pet who saves the day (again, note the difference with the ideal-typical Trotskyist, who proclaims that the masses are on side even when their parties command miniscule support).

Meanwhile, among peers, competitive virtue becomes a zero-sum game: I can have it only insofar as you are denied it. And, at the risk of reductionism, this directly mirrors the rationality of their class position: graduates specialising in symbolic manipulation–the hallmark of the PMC–compete for a shrinking number of jobs. Since their contributions are not measured in abstract numerical units, such as profit and loss for capitalists, or productivity for workers, their employability is defined by intangible status competition. Virtue here becomes a marketable commodity–and all the more when perceived as scarce.

People trained in this regime of symbolic manipulation love to weaponize outrage to fuel moral panics, but they are unable and unwilling to face their identity as a class. In the liberal professions, they police each other to enforce the sort of social and intellectual conformity required by their class, one that is fundamentally fragmented by competition and individualism. All PMC-approved policies about inequality, racism, and bias circle back to strengthening their sense of political agency and cultural and moral superiority. In a viciously competitive market environment, they have abandoned once cherished professional standards of research while fetishizing transgression, or better yet, the performance of transgression.

Liu’s book is best enjoyed as a class-based critique of American left-liberal foibles. It offers a sterling critique of Occupy Wall Street which, theoretically, should have been the point where the downwardly mobile PMC joined hands with a multi-ethnic working class to form the “99%”. That this happy marriage never happened is the central disappointment of our era. The problem resided, at least partly, in those dense cultural thickets of lower PMC, who, panicked at their shrinking prospects, doubled down on their distinguishing virtues, under what Liu calls “the legalistic and deadly term intersectional”.

Equally, academia made activists poorly equipped for the realities of political organisation. Liu thus shows how Occupy was doomed from birth by another direct product of the PMC class position, namely a fetish for (anarchist) procedures:

The highly educated members of Occupy fetishized the procedural regulation and management of discussion to reach consensus about all collective decisions. Daily meetings or General Assemblies were managed according to a technique called the progressive stack. Its fanatical commitment to proceduralism and administrative strategy suppressed real discussion of priorities or politics and ended up promoting only the integrity of the progressive stack itself. Protecting the stack became more important than formulating political demands that might have resonated with hundreds of millions of Americans whose lives were being directly destroyed by finance capital.

Rather often, measures formally aimed at inclusion or centring voices eventually become ends in themselves. Evidence that they promote elitism, the opposite of their formal aim, never leads to self-reflection: as the joke used to say of Communism, the Theory is sound! Again, it echoes the social foundations of contemporary anarchism in the academy with its curriculum (explicit or implicit) in human resource management. This explains the apparent irony, familiar to anyone who has been an activist: the incessant bureaucratism of the libertarian left.

Virtue Hoarders excels as a series of short vignettes of cultural critique. Liu is a film and literature scholar, with a training in old fashioned critical theory. This may lead to a certain impressionism. Considered as sociology, the book leaves unanswered questions. Critics may, for instance, charge that it says too little about the distinction between right-leaning and left-leaning PMC. Indeed, sometimes Liu’s rhetoric gives the impression that all PMC have a left-activist (but also neoliberal) outlook. Naturally, just because most left activists are PMC does not mean that most PMC are activists (though it may appear that way). There are obvious tensions between, say, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Pelosi over climate, immigration or prisons. The social base of Pelosi-ism may require deeper examination.

But let’s also be clear: such niceties do often evaporate in practice. Consider, in Britain, the convergence of whole sections of the Labour left with the old Blairite leadership during the “People’s Vote” campaign. Or layers of the Scottish independence left-wing, which have fallen behind Nicola Sturgeon and her corporate-neoliberal allies in Charlotte Street Partners, who effectively write all key economic policy. Theatrical left-right spats not only obscure common class interests, but actually help reproduce the professional class in power. Nonetheless, while Virtue Hoarders benefits from a no bullshit account of leftism’s class biases, some may prefer a more nuanced theorisation (although I take Liu’s point that “nuanced” accounts often mean embracing the worst of bad faith grifting, as with N+1’s apologia for Elizabeth Warren).

Virtue Hoarders is equally ‘guilty’ of national biases: it focused almost exclusively on American cultural habits. For me, this did not lessen its impact, for two reasons: firstly, because culture is central to class reproduction, and the PMC, more than any other class, distinguishes itself by consumer preferences; secondly, because the European PMC are infatuated with American liberalism–especially on all matters of taste. Thus, despite living in Glasgow, nothing in these essays was alien to me. Class prejudices cut across all national contexts, particularly in an age of social media. My frustration, then, is that the European PMC remains a relatively unexplored and interesting topic. Even the term “PMC” has only recently entered our toolkit of political analysis, and it still lacks the rhetorical sting that it possesses in American leftism.

Liu’s book has polemical aims. It wants to jolt the left into recognition. And it wants to embrace the promise of the Sanders campaign in 2016–a revival of serious socialist class politics. What was inspiring in that campaign, at its best, was precisely that it was forced to distinguish a class-based message from the gloop of PMC liberalism that spread from Clinton to Warren. Given that European leftists failed comprehensively on this front, the themes should have wide resonance.

And even readers outside of America will recognise the bravery in Virtue Hoarders. It takes guts to address the peccadilloes of your own kind. The PMC may specialise in self-examination and “call outs”, but simply naming it as a class, with distinct interests, alliances and agency, risks excommunication. And ethically it falls to academics, arguably the guiltiest party, to endanger their standing in a peer-reviewed field by speaking up.

Crucially, while defending the need for a distinct working-class politics, Virtue Hoarders is anything but anti-intellectual. Indeed, perhaps the worst calumny is to believe that critics of professional elites despise learning and cultural innovation. The truth is quite the opposite. PMC domination dresses up conformity as a war on cultural backwardness. It is defiantly middle brow (witness the liberal obsession with “woke” superhero movies). And if a meaningful intellectual current does emerge from the wreckage of contemporary capitalism, it may well begin from the demystification of PMC liberal mores.

https://mronline.org/2021/10/28/the-new ... -hoarding/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: THE HOLLOW GOSPEL OF THE LIBERAL LEISURE CLASS

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 10, 2023 2:43 pm

(Posted here for my old buddy Chlamor. The Llama was his despised neighbor. Read the rest of the thread.)

The Dalai Lama Is A Creepy Asshole

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(Readers sensitive to discussion of inappropriate adult behavior toward children may want to skip this one.)

There’s a really gross video going around of the Dalai Lama kissing a young boy on the lips and telling him to suck his tongue while an adult audience looks on approvingly. A tweet from Tibet.net last month shows a video clip of the Tibetan spiritual leader with the child and says the encounter took place during his “meeting with students and members of M3M Foundation,” though Tibet.net’s clip cuts out the sexually inappropriate part of the encounter.

Here is a hyperlink to a video of the interaction. For those who understandably do not wish to see such a thing but are comfortable with a text description, here’s a new write-up from News.com.au:

The Dalai Lama has raised eyebrows after kissing a young Indian boy on the lips and asking him to “suck” his tongue at a recent event.



Footage of the bizarre interaction, which occurred last month during an event for India’s M3M Foundation, has gone viral on social media.



The leader of Tibetan Buddhism, Tenzin Gyatso, was hosting students and members of the foundation at his temple in Dharamshala, India, where he lives in exile.



In the video, the boy approaches the microphone and asks, “Can I hug you?”



The 87-year-old says “OK, come” and invites him on stage.



The Dalai Lama motions to his cheek and says “first here” and the boy gives him a hug and kiss.



He holds the boy’s arm and turns to him, saying “then I think fine here also” as he points to his lips.



The spiritual leader then grabs the boy’s chin and kisses him on the mouth as the audience laughs.



“And suck my tongue,” the Dalai Lama tells the boy, sticking out his tongue.



They press their foreheads together and the boy briefly pokes out his tongue before backing away, as the Dalai Lama gives him a playful slap on the chest and laughs.


What is it with power-adjacent clergymen and child molestation, anyway? As Michael Parenti noted in 2003, sexual abuse was commonplace in the tyrannical environment of feudal Tibet, over which the 14th Dalai Lama would still preside had it not been forcibly annexed by the PRC in the 1950s. While the slogan of “Free Tibet” has long been used as a propaganda bludgeon by the west against China particularly and against communism generally, the truth of the matter is that Tibet was quantifiably a far more tyrannical and oppressive place to live back when it was supposedly “free”.

I went to see the Dalai Lama a long time ago when he came to speak at Melbourne, and I remember what stood out the most for me was how completely lacking in depth or profundity it was. As someone with an intense interest in spirituality and enlightenment I always found it perplexing that someone so highly regarded in the circles I moved in had nothing to say on such matters besides superficial, Sesame Street-level remarks about being nice and trying to make the world a better place. Probably no one alive today is more commonly associated with Buddhism and spiritual awakening in western consciousness than the Dalai Lama, yet everything I’ve ever read or heard from him has struck me as unskillful, unhelpful and vapid when compared to the words of other spiritual teachers.

That confusing discrepancy cleared up after I got into political analysis and learned that the Dalai Lama is probably not someone who should be looked to for spiritual guidance, and is actually far too messed up inside to have accomplished much inner development as a person.

Take an interview he did back in September 2003, a solid six months after the invasion of Iraq. The Dalai Lama told AP that he believed the US invasion of Afghanistan was “perhaps some kind of liberation” that could “protect the rest of civilization,” as was the USA’s brutal intervention in Korea, and that the US invasion of Iraq was “complicated” and would take more time before its morality could be determined. In 2005, years after the invasion, after normal mainstream members of the public had realized the war was a disaster, the Dalai Lama still said “The Iraq war — it’s too early to say, right or wrong.”

This is plainly someone with a broken moral compass. These are basic, bare-minimum assessments that any normal person with any degree of psychological and emotional health can quickly sort out for themselves, and he still winds up basically on the same side of these issues as some of the worst people on earth.


But I guess that’s about the best anyone could expect from a literal CIA asset. His administration received $1.7 million a year from the Central Intelligence Agency through the 1960s, and it’s reported that he himself personally received $180,000 a year from the CIA for decades.

From The New York Review of Books:

Many friends of Tibet and admirers of the Dalai Lama, who has always advocated nonviolence, believe he knew nothing about the CIA program. But Gyalo Thondup, one of the Dalai Lama’s brothers, was closely involved in the operations, and [CIA veteran John Kenneth] Knaus, who took part in the operation, writes that “Gyalo Thondup kept his brother the Dalai Lama informed of the general terms of the CIA support.” According to Knaus, starting in the late 1950s, the Agency paid the Dalai Lama $15,000 a month. Those payments came to an end in 1974.

The CIA is easily the most depraved institution in the world today, so it would be reasonable to expect the moral development of someone so intimately involved with it to be a bit stunted. Ten or fifteen years ago it would’ve surprised me to learn that I would one day type these words, but it turns out the Dalai Lama is a real asshole.

It’s rare to find a spiritual teacher who has expanded their consciousness inwardly enough to have useful things to say about enlightenment, and of those who do it’s extremely rare to find one who has also expanded their consciousness outwardly enough to discuss world events from a place of wisdom and understanding as well. The Dalai Lama is as far from this as you could possibly get: he has lived his life in cooperation with the most unwise institutions on earth, and he is less inwardly developed than most people you might pass on the street.

People should stop looking up to this freak.

UPDATE: The Dalai Lama has issued a statement on the “suck my tongue” incident. Here it is in full:

A video clip has been circulating that shows a recent meeting when a young boy asked His Holiness the Dalai Lama if he could give him a hug. His Holiness wishes to apologize to the boy and his family, as well as his many friends across the world, for the hurt his words may have caused.

His Holiness often teases people he meets in an innocent and playful way, even in public and before cameras. He regrets the incident.


https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/04/10 ... y-asshole/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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