‘Fake Work’ with Leigh Claire La Berge

A video of this September 24, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.

Using the most banal of office settings – corporate documentation – in the most extraordinary of circumstances – a looming Y2K apocalypse, Leigh Claire La Berge‘s newly published Fake Work offers not only a unique experience of alienated labor, but a novel type of Marxism: Marxist humor. The book recounts how a young white-collar worker discovers what capitalism is, what it does, and for whom. Described by the New York Times as a “memorable portrait of the mad hunger of corporate toil … superbly committed to its own beliefs — truthful, dryly funny and often subtly moving,” Fake Work is a story for anyone who has ever needed a job.

Leigh Claire La Berge is Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, and author of Fake Work, Marx for Cats, and Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art. She was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Free University of Berlin in 2021-2023.