Marx for Cats

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.

“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 Thiébaut (Revue Française d'Études Américaines) "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)

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction. Cat out of the Bag  1Part I. Menace and Menagerie: The Feudal Mode of Production and Its Cats, 800–15001. Lion Kings  25Intermezzo 1. The Lion-Cat Dialectic  532. The Devil’s Cats  58Part II. The Feline Call to Freedom: Slavery and Revolution in the Age of Empire, 1500–18003. Divine Lynxes  95Intermezzo 2. The Tiger-Tyger Dialectic  1254. Revolutionary Tigers  129Part III. Our Dumb Beasts: The Rise of the Bourgeoisie and Its Appropriation of Cats, 1800–19005. Wildcats  177Intermezzo 3. The Cat-Mouse Dialectic  2076. Domestic Cats, Communal and Servile  212Part IV. Every Paw Can Be a Claw: Revolutions with Cats, Revolutions Against Capitalism, 1900–20007. Sabo-Tabbies  251Intermezzo 4. The Cat-Comrade Dialectic  2888. Black Panthers  294Epilogue. Pussy Cats  329Notes  339Bibliography  363Index  383