‘Managers and professionals were unfortunately never part of [the vanguard] class, but their complicity with capital is something they want to disguise as “resilience” and “flexibility,” qualities that working- class losers do not possess in the PMC worldview,’ writes the acerbic
and outspoken critical theorist Liu in Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, her much-discussed 2021 polemic against pseudo-radical liberal politics. A frequent contributor to arts magazines during the 1990s and vocal opponent of artworld elitism today, Liu now writes mainly about film, television and current affairs – articles that she often self-publishes on her widely read Substack CLiuAnon. Adopting the persona of a charismatic outsider, she hacks away with plainspoken ease and fury at such thorny topics as the instrumentalisation of personal trauma and public suffering in contemporary culture. Trauma is the subject of her next book, due out in 2026, which she teased this year on Joshua Citarella’s podcast Doomscroll and at a packed public lecture at New York’s MoMA PS1.