THE PROFESSIONAL MANAGERIAL CLASS AND THEIR POLITICS: Dan Evans with Catherine Liu and George Hoare

This event is hosted in conjunction with Bungacast

Dan will be joined by Catherine Liu and George Hoare to discuss the rise of the professional managerial class. A defining aspect of neoliberalism has been the inordinate growth of the ‘professional managerial class’ who have played a prominent role in British politics over the last 20 years. While other professions have been decimated by the various financial crises of recent decades the managerial class has only grown. Liu, one of the first thinkers to write on this phenomena, defines them as a group which loyally serves capitalism while insisting on their own progressive heroism. Dan, Catherine and George will talk about the ways in which ‘professional managerial’ values have slipped into, and nullified, contemporary left-wing discourses around class and how these tendencies might be critiqued from a left perspective.

Catherine Liu is a professor of film and media studies and visual studies at University of California Irvine. She is also a writer and a contributor to Jacobin magazine. She is the author of ‘Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class’, a book that exposes the hypocrisy and self-interest of the credentialed elite class that claims to be progressive while serving capitalism.

George Hoare is a writer based in London. His books include Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit, The End of the End of History, and An Introduction to Antonio Gramsci: His Life, Thought, and Legacy. He is an editor at The Northern Star and one of the hosts of Bungacast. His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Compact, Damage Magazine, and elsewhere.