At the outset of Marx for Cats, Leigh Claire La Berge declares that "all history is the history of cat struggle." Revising the medieval bestiary form to meet Marxist critique, La Berge follows feline footprints through Western economic history to reveal an animality at the heart of Marxism. She draws on a 1200-year arc spanning capitalism's feudal prehistory, its colonialist and imperialist ages, the Bourgeois revolutions that supported capitalism and the Communist revolutions that opposed it, to outline how cats have long been understood as creatures of economic critique and liberatory possibility. By attending to the repeated archival appearance of lions, tigers, wildcats, and "sabo-tabbies," La Berge argues that felines are central to how Marxists have imagined the economy itself, and by asking what humans and animals owe each other in a moment of ecological crisis, La Berge joins current debates about the need for and possibility of eco-socialism. In this playful and generously illustrated radical bestiary, La Berge demonstrates that class struggle is ultimately an interspecies collaboration.
Leigh Claire La Berge is Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and author of Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art, also published by Duke University Press.
Acknowledgments ix Introduction. Cat out of the Bag 1 Part I. Menace and Menagerie: The Feudal Mode of Production and Its Cats, 800-1500 1. Lion Kings 25 Intermezzo 1. The Lion-Cat Dialectic 53 2. The Devil's Cats 58 Part II. The Feline Call to Freedom: Slavery and Revolution in the Age of Empire, 1500-1800 3. Divine Lynxes 95 Intermezzo 2. The Tiger-Tyger Dialectic 125 4. Revolutionary Tigers 129 Part III. Our Dumb Beasts: The Rise of the Bourgeoisie and Its Appropriation of Cats, 1800-1900 5. Wildcats 177 Intermezzo 3. The Cat-Mouse Dialectic 207 6. Domestic Cats, Communal and Servile 212 Part IV. Every Paw Can Be a Claw: Revolutions with Cats, Revolutions Against Capitalism, 1900-2000 7. Sabo-Tabbies 251 Intermezzo 4. The Cat-Comrade Dialectic 288 8. Black Panthers 294 Epilogue. Pussy Cats 329 Notes 339 Bibliography 363 Index 383
"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) "Marx for Cats is at all times a playful, curious, and erudite foray into feline-inspired language and compelling anecdotes about cats. Its unrepenting attitude towards issues of linguistics and representation in interspecies economics will provoke, intrigue, and maybe seduce adepts of postmodernism, obscure etymologies, and puns." - Emma Thiebaut (Revue Francaise d'Etudes Americaines) "Marx for Cats is fun, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, and often surprising. It is intended to leaven not just dense theory but also our bloody history of slavery, terror, civil wars, and strike-breaking. But there is also a serious project at work here too - namely a call for interspecies solidarity." - Thomas Fleischman (Labour History Review) "Marx for Cats is more than just a cat-centred history of capitalism. It is a work of animal rescue, a project of meticulous retrieval and dazzling curation. . . . Marx for Cats is a formally inventive academic beast book that's worth the cost of entry as much for its clarifying guided tour of Marx's critique of political economy as for its collage of obscure and bizarre moments of human-cat relations." - Dominic O'Key (Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory) "La Berge has put together an almost encyclopedic history of the connection between cats and class struggle, something to make every Marxist a cat lover and every cat lover a Marxist. . . . La Berge demonstrates the connection between cat and class struggle, and how cats can help us make sense of our history, but maybe they can also help us think about the future; about a world that is organized not by work or consumption, but the thriving of different species." - Jason Read (Theory & Event)
