This past week I was fortunate to be on a panel at Red May about Leigh Claire La Berge's book Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke. I have posted my comments, as well as the whole panel (which included Leigh Claire, Sarah Jaffe, and Madeline Lane-McKinley) below.
Leigh Claire La Berge and I had a somewhat similar trajectory, we both graduate from Hampshire College, we both studied primarily post-structuralist thinkers there, and we both developed an interest in Marx afterwards in graduate school. I wish I could say that my post-college work had something to do with that interest, but I only worked in the mailroom of a law firm in San Francisco for one summer before going straight to graduate school.
Which is to say that I have a lot to learn from Fake Work. The book can first of all be considered a contribution to worker’s inquiry. The tradition of worker’s inquiry can be traced back to a questionnaire that Marx sent out in 1880, asking about working conditions from hours, breaks, and the number of children employed. Marx got few responses but that has not kept the tradition of worker’s inquiry continuing throughout the Marxist tradition. There are multiple interpretations and traditions of how to conduct a worker’s inquiry, and different understandings of what it means. Some have followed Marx’s method in which a questionnaire or a brief interview with workers is enough, while other have taken Mao’s maxim, “No investigation, no right to speak” in a much more transformative way, the inquiry becomes a task to go into the factory or call center, to learn first-hand about work. The inquiry becomes a kind of ethnography. There is also a disagreement of what the inquiry is meant to do. For some, it is a matter of gathering information, information that then can become part of a strategy once it is relayed back to the party or communicated to the masses. While for others, the inquiry itself is a method of organizing as much as information gathering. Talking about work, asking about work, changes how one thinks about it and changing how one thinks about it necessarily raises the question of why it is done in a particular way and not others. What is overlooked in this long tradition of debate and discussion about the nature of workers’ inquiry is that for most of us whether or not we enter the workplace is not a matter of choice at all. We need to work in order to survive. Leigh Claire did not take a job at on the Y2K task force of an international advertising conglomerate because she wanted to know what it was like, or to organize the workers, but because she, like most of us, needed a job. I bring this up because the necessity that forces us to adapt to given working conditions, and to adopt new ways of living and thinking for work, is perhaps the one thing that more even touristic or even sociological“workers’ inquiries” cannot touch.
Leigh Claire’s book is very much about a transformation. It is in its own way a Bildungsroman, even if it is not the Bildungsroman she tells us about. The latter is the title of book that she tried to write over twenty five years ago when she first started working as a Y2K consultant in 1998. This book is not a rewriting of that book, but in some sense a testament to that book’s impossibility, impossible because after a few years in the corporate world Leigh Claire is not the same person. That experiences change people is nothing knew or revelatory, but Fake Work is not just about Leigh Claire’s own transformation, but the limitations of different ways of knowing that compel and demand transformation. Leigh Claire initially makes sense of work through the lenses of post-structuralism. Guided by the Derridian mantra that there is nothing outside of the text, she makes sense of a different mantra, Arthur Anderson’s mantra for dealing with Y2K , that it is a documentation problem not a technology problem. As Leigh Claire details much of her work on Y2K was spent not so much attempting to resolve the impending crisis, but documenting what had already been done. Derrida’s “there is nothing outside of the text” takes on a different meaning in corporate America, where nothing exists outside of its paper trail. What matters is not what is actually done, what issues are addressed, but the process, that everything is documented, and appears to be done. That such a mantra is put forward by Author Anderson give is a particular irony. As we know now, the real crisis of the early 2000s was not brought about by the gap between the actual date and its two digit years on computer databases, but the gap between Enron’s value on paper and its actual value, a scandal that Arthur Anderson played a formative role in. Focusing on the performative nature of texts, the way that they create their own reality, can get you pretty far in understanding a Y2K task force that seeks to document a solution rather than actually a explore a problem, but that only goes so far. As Leigh Claire documents she finds herself drawn to Marx, compelled to understand the hidden abode of production. This search for the hidden abode comes up against the limit of contemporary capitalism in which circulation displaces production. What this looked like at work was a focus on keep things moving with little concern for the results. Questionnaires are sent out, but never returned, trips are taken to conduct meetings that could have been an email. As Leigh Claire writes.
I was appalled at what I considered the sheer wastefulness of the entire enterprise, with no realization of the fact that, at this level of corporate composition, money cannot be lost, only spent, because circulation itself is part of the point.
As much as Leigh Claire documents her transition from post-structuralist theories of texts to Marxist understanding of production, she is confronted by a type of capitalism, embodied by consultants and other forms of work at the upper echelons of capital, where capital is as much about the circulation of texts than it is the production of things.
It is hard to not compare Leigh Claire’s work on “fake work” with David Graeber’s influential text on Bullshit Jobs. Graeber documented a slew of different “fake jobs,” such as box tickers who exist more to produce the appearance of addressing an issue than actual addressing it. In some sense the entire Y2K process was all about checking a box. Beyond the specifics of box ticking, Graeber gives the following definition of Bullshit Jobs in general “a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” Graeber focuses on the subjective dimension of Bullshit Jobs, the employee thinks it is bullshit, he does this because if he did not do so any attempt to define bullshit jobs would just be a list of jobs that other people think are pointless, people who do not bowl think that running a bowling alley is pointless, people who do not use hairdresser would think their job is pointless. Or, more to the point, a lot of people think being an economic anthropologist, or philosophy professor is bullshit. Framed in such a way the concept gets us nowhere. That is why Graeber insists that a bullshit job is a job that the person doing it thinks is pointless. Graeber’s book is filled with people who have written him about their pointless or pernicious jobs. However, what if people do not know their job is pointless? Leigh Claire’s book documents her own shifting understanding of her work, as she seeks a philosophy that could make sense of the emptiness of her work. It is stunning how honest and straightforward Leigh Claire’s book is about her own transformation, and about how much of a different person she was at the beginning of this process than at the end. She very much wanted to be a businessman and ended up being a Marxist professor. However, it is not clear that any of her co-workers have the same search or questions. It seems that many respond to such fake work by trying to get the best fake work they can find, and to make the system work as much as it can for them. Marx’s workers with nothing to lose but their chains have been replaced by workers who fear losing their frequent flyer miles.
In following Leigh Claire’s trajectory that leads in and then out of the world of corporate hotels and executive lounges I am wondering about those she left behind. What would get them to leave the world of fake work?
Full video of the panel here:
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