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.