Lions and Tigers and Tabbies, Oh My! Two Reviews of La Berge’s Marx for Cats

How can we better understand the history of capitalism—a his-story that tends to be largely phallocentric and anthropocentric? Leigh Claire La Berge says we’re missing a key character: Cats. Her new book, Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary (Duke University Press, 2023), provides a fabulously feline history of royalty and resistance. Below, Marta Wolny and Margaryta Golovchenko share their respective reviews.

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Paws in Time by Marta Wolny

During some of the sittings that I read Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary, my own cat, a corpulent Maine coon, was slumped on my lap, purring approvingly. As I type these words he is lolling on the floor behind me, a reminder that, as Claire La Berge writes in her book, “Domestic cats are creatures present at hand.” But La Berge doesn’t only focus on companionable cats, meowing to be fed in our homes. Her bestiary includes felines who are more out of reach: from regal lions to revolutionary tigers.

La Berge’s pursuit of cats reappearing across history reminded me of Ursula Le Guinn’s observation that: “In literature as in real life, women, children, and animals are the obscure matter upon which Civilization erects itself, phallologically.” By following cats through the annals of time, Marx for Cats subverts the tendency to turn animals, including cats, into this “obscure matter.”  In stitching together a prodigious “feline archive,” which draws on material ranging from poems to memes, La Berge departs from previous economic histories. While she draws on the work of some of the foremost Marxists thinkers, she goes further than their analyses of the political economy by recognizing animals as comrades in the carving out of radical possibilities.

From Royalty to Revolution

As Marx does in Capital, La Berge traces the feudal origins of capitalism in medieval Europe. But unlike Marx, La Berge does so through the relation between cats and the prevailing social order.

The story begins with lions. Medieval feudal rulers often styled themselves as lions (consider, for instance, Richard the Lionheart, or the iconic presence of lions in heraldic coats of arms). La Berge then takes readers across the Atlantic to track the fate of lions in the emergence of capitalist democracy.

In America, she argues, cats similarly “marked class position.” Colonial elites (including George Washington), seized upon various “symbols of royal authority,” like the lion, to represent themselves. This symbolic endurance is important, given that the American revolutionaries claimed to be breaking away from the old social and economic order of Europe.

But despite the kingly associations of the lion, La Berge convincingly makes the case that cats have come to be associated with undermining state and economic power. The black cat, for instance, represented the “proletarian revolution” in the figure of the sabo-tabby. This feline icon, used by the Industrial Workers of the World, reveals that those who strove for a more just world under capitalism were also cat lovers. 

Through these examples and many others, La Berge illustrates how human and nonhuman historical actors are “co-constituted,” defining each other both symbolically and materially—something missed by Marxist historians.

Telling the story of Western capitalism by following cats and cat references throughout history allows La Berge to playfully intervene in Marxist historiography. She uses the image of cats to aptly spotlight instances of resistance while distinguishing her scholarship from existing work preoccupied with the relations that capitalism occasions between human and nonhuman animals. Unlike, say, Wadiwell’s Animals and Capital (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), Marx for Cats goes beyond the exploitation of nonhuman life. Her more-than-human history pays attention to the ways that human and nonhuman exploitation are intimately entangled.

Feline Resistance to the Masculine Intellectual Tradition

La Berge inserts herself within the tradition of Marxist historiography by adopting the longue durée approach to recounting the past. Meaning “long duration,” longue durée was used by the historian Fernand Braudel to refer to study which considers historical change across large swathes of time. La Berge takes this further, arguing that “To follow history requires following the money, but also following the cats.” In so doing, she deftly reinterprets the history written by men concerned with the political economy. 

One of the most persuasive parts of La Berge’s book is her focus on the ways that cats have not only historically figured as companions and emblems, but also how they have been enrolled by Marxists in “all matters of political and theoretical endeavors.”

Cats lurk in Marxist critique: They can aid us to think about economic power as well as historical methods. La Berge notes, “Humans, including Marxists, use animals to develop both the fact and the narration of human history.” Walter Benjamin, for instance, used the feline notion of the Tigersprung to analyze revolutionary activity. He contended that the French Revolution was an amalgamation of the past and the present, a “tiger’s leap into that which has gone before.”

La Berge claims that “The historian who seeks a revolutionary past to guide her to an emancipatory future cannot simply leap forward; rather, she leaps backward to retrieve a new history.” It is only through this that one can begin to reimagine the relations possible between humans and nonhuman animals.

Reordering the World 

Marx for Cats bristles with anecdotes and scenes that reify the actual cats (as well as other animals) living within political communities.

Lions and tigers, alongside elephants, prowled in Louis XVI’s royal menagerie. They were allegedly liberated by the Jacobins during the French Revolution. Thus, cats have witnessed and participated in various “reformulations of economic power” through time. Though they have appeared as “symbolic and philosophical comrades,” La Berge shows that they, alongside other animals, ought to be remembered as “comrades in a more robust sense, too.” They are beings whose interests, like those of many humans, are not best served under capitalism. 

Cats continue to feature in various critiques of the present economic order. Dorothy Gambrell’s webcomic Cat and Girl is a notable example. Marx for Cats joins these in its sprightly and frolicsome account of the political economy. However, it also goes further to invite readers to speculate on the possibilities springing, tigerlike, from the present moment. To reorder the world, we must leap both backwards and forwards.

My Maine coon, Vincent, is a heavy sleeper. He shows no sign of stirring from his slumbers. But it’s only a matter of time before he leaps, reordering the world in his wake. 

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The Cat Behind the Curtain by Margaryta Golovchenko

In Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary, Leigh Claire La Berge draws on and engages with the abundance of cat imagery in Western Europe and North America from the Middle Ages to the present day on both a visual and ideological level. Drawing on a range of case studies, from memes and artworks to feline language in political and popular texts, La Berge makes a case for the creation of “a feline archive for the theorizing and writing of economic history,” a task her book models for its readers.

Cats As Symbols, Witnesses, and Agents

Cats are never just cats in Marx for Cats.

On the surface, Marx for Cats draws from the field of semiotics by examining cats as icons, indices, and symbols. However, where previous monographs have focused exclusively on the symbolism of animals, LaBerge takes the social history of cats further, asking how their visual and physical presence influenced human thinking.

La Berge’s motivations are grounded in animal studies, acknowledging the agency of cats and their ability to act as both collaborators and disruptors in the evolution of economic history from European feudalism to today’s necrocapitalism.

La Berge presents readers with three main roles cats played historically: as witnesses of history, as markers of economic history (whether as symbols or as “material residues”), and as metaphors for advancing political and economic narratives.

Narrating the Felines of History

Each chapter of Marx for Cats revolves around a specific feline, and each section’s felines invoke the connotations of the period. For instance, the first section on the feudal period (800-1500) takes lions as its primary subjects. At this time, lions were associated with royalty, but domestic cats were seen as demonic, affiliated with the peasant class and, increasingly, with Jews and with heresy in what La Berge describes as a “cat-cathar-heretic” system.

By comparison, the final section of the book, which focuses on class and race-driven protests against capitalism, focuses on “sabo-tabbies” (or “sabotage cats”, as conceptualized by Ralph Chaplin in his black cat stickers) and panthers in their connection to pro-union worker protests and the fight for Black Power.

All but one chapter of the book focuses on a feline we associate with immediate danger. Across history, these associations reflect shifting socio-political and economic ideology. Yet the regular domestic cat is also always present, reminding us that the everyday can also become dangerous.

La Berge’s book is a chronological compendium. She acknowledges that a chronological bestiary in many ways undermines the more rhizomatic, à la Deleuze and Guittari, approach that Marxist history often demands. Such texts do exist: Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani’s co-edited Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times is a recent example that explores how animals served as unwitting agents of empire.

Yet to say that Marx for Cats is designed merely to highlight members of the feline family in chronological order is to overlook the fact that any wild cat, be it a lion, a tiger, or a lynx, may be secularized and domesticated in a way that serves the goals of the capitalist movement. La Berge suggests being attentive to the way animals shape our thinking and behavior can help us think beyond whiteness and capitalism.

La Berge demonstrates that cats are not only “good to think with,” as Claude Lévi-Strauss would say, but they are also “here to live with,” to redirect Donna Haraway’s well-known love for dogs into a feline context.

Thinking With and Living With Cats

Recent scholarship, such as the two-day art history symposium “Cat/People” held at Southern Methodist University, speaks to academia’s ongoing fascination with cats. The organizer of the conference, Amy Freund, has come to be associated with cats following her influential article “Cats: The Soft Underbelly of the Enlightenment”, co-authored with fellow attendee and cat enthusiast Michael Yonan back in 2019. Freund and Yonan demonstrate cats as political creatures in the eighteenth century, often associated with an inherent aversion to power that was sometimes praised as a model of political independence and responsible citizenship.

La Berge’s own provocation of how we can “think with” and “live with” cats is most evident in the book’s four intermezzos.

The first intermezzo asks how we can make sense of sameness as a status threat. Royalty sought to distinguish themselves as leonine, fearing the commonality they shared with their cat commoners.

The fourth Intermezzo, on the other hand, asks how cats can be comrades, a question that forces the reader to look past the visuals (such as a poster in which a cat has replaced the figure of Lenin) and instead contemplate how human actions can be guided more by feline instincts and behaviors.

La Berge never truly defines what constitutes “feline instincts” or “feline behaviors.” In fact, to give a definition would go against the narrative of adaptation, response, and transformation that Marx for Cats lays out. For La Berge, felines are defined by persistence and resilience, and it is human beings who have sought to contort them into neat categories.

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Featured image: An orange cat. Photo by Thirdman, 2021.

Margaryta Golovchenko (she/her) holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Oregon and conducts research at the intersection of the environmental humanities and visual and material culture. She is a sessional instructor at the University of Calgary and the Alberta University of the Arts, a poet, a critic, the reviews editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, and an associate editor for Material Culture Review. Contact.

Marta Wolny studied literature at the University of Cambridge and completed a Master’s in Environment, Culture and Society at the University of Edinburgh. Her dissertation looked at bison introductions in a southern English landscape. She enjoys romping through books and forests. Contact.