Marx for Cats with Leigh Claire La Berge

A video of this February 24, 2024, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.

“All history is the history of cat struggle.” In Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary, our guest speaker Leigh Claire 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. Attending to myriad archival appearance of lions, tigers, wildcats, and other felines, La Berge argues that these creatures have been central to Marxist understandings of the economy and politics. Asking what humans and animals owe each other in a moment of ecological crisis, La Berge joins current debates about ecosocialism. This playful and generously illustrated radical bestiary demonstrates that class struggle is ultimately an interspecies collaboration.

This event is held in conjunction with the MEP’s reading group Multispecies Marxism where we are discussing the central role of nonhuman animals in the capitalist economy, historically and today.

Leigh Claire La Berge is Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, and author of Marx for Cats as well as Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art.

Register for the Zoom event and you will receive a 40% discount code to purchase Marx for Cats from Duke University Press. Participants are encouraged to read some or all of the book beforehand.