An early autopsy of capitalism: La Berge dissects the office machine

Set in the years just before the turn of the millennium, it recounts the time La Berge, now a writer and English professor, spent in the corporate world, helping a Fortune 500 company prepare for Y2K
NYT
By Charles Finch
FAKE WORK: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke
by Leigh Claire La Berge
Published by Haymarket Books
213 pages $25.95
In some sense capitalism is already behind us. We live here in its fevered midst, to be sure, but a recognition is emerging, especially among younger generations: It isn't sustainable. The devastation of the natural world; the mindless consumerism; above all, the human misery that corporations trawl the world to extract, like ore, from souls as divine as yours or mine. All of it, increasingly, in service to the pathological greed of a few thousand mentally ill men. It cannot last. What comes next may be better, or it may be worse. But it won't be this.
Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke, by Leigh Claire La Berge, offers an early autopsy. Set in the years just before the turn of the millennium, it recounts the time La Berge, now a writer and English professor, spent in the corporate world, helping a Fortune 500 company prepare for Y2K.
Her experience was so surreal — capitalism, in its cubicle era, so far from Adam Smith's touchingly simple original conception of it as the propensity to truck, barter and exchange — that the book's tonic note is disbelief. 'Is this how companies are put together?' she wrote at the time, in a draft of an abandoned novel that she quotes throughout Fake Work. 'I find it incredible. These are the things that organize global commerce? Run governments? Fly planes? My second-grade soccer team was more carefully recruited and managed.'
Part of the absurdity is circumstantial. Working for a 'sprawling global conglomerate over whose imperial territory the sun never set,' she is seconded to Arthur Anderson, the infamous accounting firm that enabled Enron's crimes. There, she works in the 'burgeoning millennial-preparedness office,' helping to forestall a data catastrophe that the reader knows will never arise. 'On January 1, 2000,' a grave slide deck prepared by the firm dolefully asks: 'will I still have electricity, food, telephone, transportation?'
Yet this doubled unreality — a fraudulent firm solving a non-problem — only intensifies the universal elements of La Berge's story. She carefully details the farcical outcomes of corporate policy; for instance, employees have to fly coach if the trip is under a certain distance, so the team conveniently decides that Canada is 'fairly Y2K prepared' in order to fly first class to the Asia-Pacific region instead. And she also tracks, more soberly, the ennui, the dismay, of people doing labour 'so dissociative and diminutive that, for me anyway, the need for bathroom breaks seemed increased in proportion to the amount of it I completed.'
La Berge describes Fake Work as an ethnography, and while it has several nicely drawn characters and a few ephemeral moments of plot, it is mostly an extended meditation on the sensations of corporate life. This is both a weakness and strength: The book is earnest, wooden, repetitive, but superbly committed to its own beliefs — truthful, dryly funny and often subtly moving. 'To be a barnacle on the floating corpse of capital,' she writes. 'Was that the most I could hope for from a professional life?'
Fake Work arrives at the right moment, too, with questions like that one in the air. Part of the spell cast by the runaway hit Severance was the ultimate literalisation of the core truth La Berge is after: How completely corporate work estranges us from ourselves.
The natural complement to shows about the office (including The Office) is the post-apocalyptic drama, probably the defining narrative setting of our time. What's strange is how stealthily comforting such series and books and movies can be, perhaps partly for the way they depict existence within small, self-sufficient communities. It is the dream of a different life, beyond the workplace. The catch, as La Berge's memorable portrait of the mad hunger of corporate toil makes clear, is that we all know it may take the apocalypse to get that kind of do over.
The reviewer is the author, most recently, of ' What Just Happened,' a chronicle of 2020.

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