Catherine Liu challenges performative activism, liberal elites, and the "woke" narrative.
When did identity politics replace class struggle?
With a free trial, you can watch Catherine debate the failures of modern academia at https://iai.tv/video/crisis-in-the-academy?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=description
We tend to think that today’s progressive politics advances equality through moral awareness and identity. But Catherine Liu argues that it has been captured by the professional managerial class, which replaces material redistribution with virtue signalling and cultural status. In this interview, Liu examines how universities, identity politics and trauma culture can obscure class struggle and what a renewed working-class politics might look like.
#capitalism #politics #economics
Catherine Liu is an American cultural theorist, critic, and professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. A sharp public intellectual, Liu is best known for her incisive critiques of elite liberalism, academic hypocrisy, and the commodification of virtue. She brings together Marxist cultural analysis with polemic flair, offering a compelling—and at times confrontational—challenge to the moral self-image of the contemporary professional class.
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00:00 "Democrats can't answer a simple question"
00:44 What role does trauma play in modern politics?
05:19 Why are public figures increasingly sharing their traumas?
07:24 Does suffering make us seem more pure or innocent?
08:47 Does the focus on lived experience come from philosophers?
12:07 How can we be truly intersubjective?
17:19 Who are the professional-managerial class?
23:29 Is the hatred between the working class and the professional-managerial class reciprocal?
24:35 What does the professional-managerial class tell us about the dream of education?
29:31 Why is meritocracy sliding into technocracy?
30:29 Why do you defend the wage as a site of political struggle?
33:54 How can workers form a coalition against the elites of the professional-managerial class and the Trumps of the world?
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