The

The Hello and welcome to another episode of Politics Theory Other.

My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is Lee Claire LeBerge.

In 1998, Lee Claire, having recently graduated from university, was hired by a major communications

conglomerate, where she worked alongside employees of the soon-to-be-d disgraced Arthur Anderson,

one of the then Big Five Accountancy firms, which was the auditor of companies involved in high-profile

corporate fraud, such as WorldCom and Enron. Lee Claire and her colleagues were tasked with

working on the problem of Y2K, also known as the Millennium Bug, when it was predicted that

the turn of the millennium would cause all sorts of computer-based systems to fail with potentially

catastrophic consequences. Based on her experience of working for the conglomerate, Lee Claire

wrote a book titled Fake Work, How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke. We talked about the

absurd nature of the conglomerate's work on Y2K, the socio-cultural atmosphere of the late 1990s, and about how Lee Claire's experience of becoming a Marxist affected her perspective on the diary she wrote whilst working for the conglomerate, and we also touched on the extent to which the book fits in the tradition of workers' inquiry.

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Lee Claire LeBerge is Professor of English, a borough of Manhattan Community College at City

University of New York, and the author of Wages Against Artwork,

decommodified labour and the claims of socially engaged art, and Marks for Cats, a radical

bestiary. Her writing has appeared in N-plus-1 and the Los Angeles Review of Books, amongst other

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