Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary

Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary argues that the history of Western capitalism can be told through the cat and that doing so reveals a heretofore unrecognized animality at the heart of Marx’s critique and of Western Marxist critique. That feline animality has been present in how Marxists have represented what constitutes the economy and imagined how the economy could be transformed from a site of exploitation into one of equality. From capitalism’s feudal prehistory to its contemporary moment of financialization, those seeking to maintain economic power as well as those seeking to challenge it have recruited cats into their efforts. Using a textual and visual archive that spans 800CE through the present, this book details how they did so. In offering a feline narrative of our economic past, it argues that Marxism not only has the potential to be an interspecies project but that it already is one. 

Leigh Claire La Berge is a Professor of English at BMCC CUNY. She is the author of numerous works of economically oriented criticism, including the books Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (Oxford: 2014), Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art (Duke, 2019), and Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary (Duke, 2023) as well as the co-editor of Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa, 2014). She is currently finishing a memoir entitled Fake Work, which will come out in 2025 from Haymarket Books.