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.
