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.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. Cat out of the Bag
- Part I: Menace and Menagerie: The Feudal Mode of Production and Its Cats, 800 –1500
- Chapter One. Lion Kings
- Intermezzo 1. The Lion-Cat Dialectic
- Chapter Two. The Devil’s Cats
- Part II: The Feline Call to Freedom: Slavery and Revolution in an Age of Empire, 1500 –1800
- Chapter Three. Divine Lynxes
- Intermezzo 2. The Tiger-Tyger Dialectic
- Chapter Four. Revolutionary Tigers
- Part III: Our Dumb Beasts: The Rise of the Bourgeoisie and Its Appropriation of Cats, 1800 –1900
- Chapter Five. Wildcats
- Intermezzo 3. The Cat-Mouse Dialectic
- Chapter Six. Domestic Cats, Communal and Servile
- Part IV: Every Paw Can Be a Claw: Revolutions with Cats, Revolutionsagainst Capitalism, 1900 – 2000
- Chapter Seven. Sabo-Tabbies
- Intermezzo 4. The Cat-Comrade Dialectic
- Chapter Eight. Black Panthers
- Epilogue. Pussy Cats
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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