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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 twelve-hundred-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, 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.
List of contents
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
About the author
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.
Summary
Leigh Claire La Berge revises the medieval form of the bestiary to meet Marxist critique to show how cats have been central to both the consolidation of capitalism as well as some of its most fiercest critics.
