In this genre-bending memoir, Leigh Claire La Berge reflects on her stint at one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the country and what it teaches us about the absurdity of work—for readers of Bullshit Jobs and fans of Office Space and Sorry to Bother You
The year is 1999, and the world is about to end. The only thing standing between corporate America and certain annihilation is a freshly employed twenty-two year old and her three-ring binders.
While headlines blazed with doomsaying prophecies about the looming Y2K apocalypse, our protagonist Leigh Claire was quickly introduced to the mysterious workings of The Process—a mythical and ever-changing corporate ethos The Anderson People (her fellow consultants) believe holds world saving powers. Her heroic task: printing physical copies of spreadsheets and sending them to a secure storage facility somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey. After a series of equally mundane tasks, and one well timed deployment of an anecdote about a legendary quarterback, she soon found herself jet-setting on the firm's dime to thirty-minute lunch meetings in Johannesburg, giving impromptu lectures to Japanese executives about limiting liability at the end of the world, and leaping from burning vehicles on Mexico City's busiest highway.
As present-day Leigh Claire reflects on the inanity of her former employment, we're introduced to a carousel of characters plucked from a Mike Judge screenplay, and are treated to post-facto theoretical interjections about the nature of financialized capitalism that recall David Graeber at his best.
-
Praise for Fake Work
“In this brilliant fusion of memoir and critique, La Berge has given us the anti-bildungsroman of the second millennium. As it slowly dawns on her that management consulting is an exercise in interminable interpretation, with no discernible referent, she finds an unexpected use for her training in 1990s poststructuralism, but also has to unlearn everything she thought she knew about corporate capitalism. At once hilarious and deadly serious, La Berge’s chronicle of the absurd tells us more about the logic of contemporary capitalism than any work of standard economic history or organization theory.”
—Melinda Cooper, author of Family Values
“What if Severance was a documentary? Leigh Claire's Y2K autofiction is a message in a bottle, an artifact from a lost world, a reminder that even—or precisely—when it was most buoyant, the lifeworld of capitalism was most hollow”
—Quinn Slobodian, author of Hayek’s Bastards and Crack-Up Capitalism
Praise for Marx for Cats
“ Marx for Cats is an undomesticated and indefinable meow de coeur. You can open this book anywhere—it's a Marxist Choose Your Own Adventure—and come away as unsettled, possessed, and reflective as any transportative encounter with a cat might leave you.”
―Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
“Who knew that following cats could open up history and enliven Marxism? This delightful archive of the feline in class struggle reminds us that cats are our comrades. Hand in paw, we have a world to win!”
―Jodi Dean, author of Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging