Comrade Cat: An Interview with Leigh Claire La Berge

Over the ages, cats have had varied and strong associations. Some meanings have been uncannily similar around the world, such as the black cat’s association with witchcraft or the lion’s association with royalty and monarchs; while others differ vastly.

This feline fascination has carried over into contemporary culture. Whether we’re watching endless cat videos or chasing the thrill of spotting big cats in the wild, cats remain, as Arati Kumar-Rao reminds us in her essay, eminently consumable.

Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary (2023) by Leigh Claire La Berge, uses this passion for cats–material and symbolic–to get readers interested in something that might not be as easily accessible–Marxism, its history and possible futures.

A compelling book, both in content and format (it draws on the bestiary, a medieval Christian genre), it was one of the primary inspirations behind our Cataplisms project, which explores the intersections of capitalism and cats. Like a bestiary, each chapter is organized through the central role of one feline as it becomes available to tell a socioeconomic history of a particular moment. Illustrated with compelling images drawn from various archives that La Berge was able to access online during the pandemic, the book is shaped in part by what she refers to as “covid randomness” of what information was accessible.

The term ‘Marxism’ is bandied about frequently, often without a clear understanding of what it is, and why it’s still so important. A political philosophy focused on social and economic emancipation, Marxism was born out of the work of 19th-century philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels but has since been interpreted and applied in varied ways. At their core, the philosophies and movements evaluate the ways in which capital and capitalism have transformed social and economic relations, and advocate and work towards a classless society and redistribution over control of capital and resources.

La Berge’s engagement at this intersection of cats and capitalism began as an offshoot of her previous book, Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art (2019). La Berge, a professor of English at City University of New York, was persuaded to create a series of videos explaining modern capitalist and Marxist concepts like commodification and definitions of labour and work, in simple and relatable terms–with and to cats. This eventually developed into Marx for Cats which traces economic history, and the trajectory of revolutions and movements, over the past 1200 years through the cats that are present at each turn; a lens that some might consider absurd, but lends itself excellently to a wide-ranging critique on commodification, “the dreaded katzenjammer” (literally, cat’s wail) of bourgeois revolutions, industrial animal agriculture, and on war itself as an “imperialist racket.”

By using feline symbols, institutions, movements and organisations draw on the perceived qualities of these creatures, attempting to harness an idea, a sense of power to their own ends. For example, Tipu Sultan, an 18th century king in South India, who was referred to as Sher-e-Mysore (the tiger of Mysore) liberally used it as his symbol, even commissioning an automaton of one mauling a European soldier. Marx for Cats illustrates this varied and powerful feline symbolism, “The first real capitalist empire, Great Britain, adopted a leonine symbol, while some of the most powerful worker actions against capitalism have been known as wildcat strikes. In the eighteenth century, French and Haitian revolutionaries were denigrated as tigers by the conservatives who opposed them; in the twentieth century, the Black Panther Party insisted that capitalism was a fundamentally racist system and demanded its overthrow.”

It’s not just felines that have appeal across space and time. Movements and institutions also intersect and inform each other in terms of recognition, and political and economic agency. So while Marx for Cats focuses on Europe and America, the movements that it refers to have ties to many others across the globe. For example, the Black Panthers in the USA, were inspired by the qualities of the panther, and later themselves inspired the Dalit Panthers in India.

La Berge writes in the book that, “one of the chief freedoms that capitalism provides the bourgeoise is the freedom to criticize the unfreedoms of capitalism.” And this often results in, as Marx said, asking the wrong question–for example asking for fair wages, instead of the abolition of the wage system. But how does one ask the right questions when the capitalist system is so entrenched in our society—from our education system to our retirement plans, healthcare to vacations, weddings to social media? Especially when capitalism, as La Berge writes, “instructs people to turn away with indifference from animals, the poor, those who suffer. Blame the commodity.”

It doesn’t pretend to be a book of success stories, but in compiling this archive of revolutionary moments, one that reminds us that the uneven trajectory of justice is one worth following. Among other things, it invites the field of animal studies to think economically, historically and culturally. As Marx himself said, “The philosophers have interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” And as La Berge writes, the ‘how’ “may only be answered in egalitarian and interspecies form, collectively, practically, and repeatedly.” Marx for Cats takes us through not just a millennium of revolutions that radically reimagined their worlds, but calls for another radical reimagining and empathy, broadening the net of solidarity to usher in a new interspecies and multispecies politics, to see past the commodified lens through which the world has been painted. Marx for Cats advocates for practical action–changes in diet, agricultural practices, even rethinking the idea of ‘pets’.

Below are excerpts from our conversation, where we talked about how to persuade people to care, La Berge’s personal affinity for cats and animals, how powerful symbols can be, the complex and contradictory effects of recognising the agency of animals other than humans, and more.

Marx’s critique of capitalism could have been, but early on stopped short of being, an interspecies project. How does Marx for Cats reclaim this perspective, and why through the feline lens?

Well, there are several answers to this question. One of them is the political project of asking why Marxism would have not made an allowance for emancipating animals, particularly when animal agriculture is quite exploitative and ruthless.

The choice of the cat is, in a sense, both an addition and a little bit of contradiction to what I just said about the political project. Most of the engaged Marxist thinkers that I know and read come out of a tradition of critical political economy that would interpret that question, of including animals in a kind of pantheon of those deserving of a better life alongside humans, as a kind of joke—dismissively. We can talk more about the problems of comparisons and what that does, but I thought, well, if it’s going to be interpreted as a joke, why not make it a joke? So, the book has a bit of humour and satire to it. It is a joke, but a joke is real. The best satires have a certain fidelity and appreciation of their object. And so, this book is written as a genuine question about the aims and scope of an emancipatory political project, but also a satire of the way that academics—I mean, I’m a professor—go about engaging in questions of critique and emancipation. So that’s one answer. The second answer is much more prosaic. And it’s that I love cats and I love to spend time with them.

Why did you pick the bestiary format for this?

A bestiary is a kind of religious text from the Christian Middle Ages, with an animal foregrounding each chapter, each moral and biblical lesson. Bestiaries were quite lavishly illustrated with images printed in gold. They’re incredible aesthetic objects. Marx for Cats is far from a Christian book, but what I appreciate about the bestiary and about the role of animals in the European Middle Ages is that animals were taken quite seriously as bearers of knowledge, wisdom, and power. That does not mean that things always turned out well for the animals—they were hung, terrorized, tortured, put on trial. But this was because they were understood to be social and political creatures with their own agency. During the timeframe the book traces, in the Global North, animals are divested of their socio-political and religious power and their significance and turned into sort of fetish objects.

You talk about how cats and humans have made each other radical—both radically progressive and radically conservative. What are your favourite examples of this?

One of the things that’s so interesting is that you can’t say with any clarity that the animal politics in this book are either liberal or progressive; they span the entire political spectrum. For instance, the keeping, production and significance of lions has been a really radically conservative enterprise. It’s an animal that has been associated with the British royal family for a thousand years. Here’s an animal that’s not indigenous to northern Europe, a colonial bounty turned into a symbol of an absolutely oppressive enterprise–European royalty. At the same time, another big cat, the black panther has been used in the service of absolutely radical anti-capitalist politics for over a hundred years, for example, by the Black Panther Party of the United States in the 1960s and 70s.

Over the timeframe of the book, one gets to watch as these animals move in and out of radical positions. The black cat in the European Middle Ages was a satanic symbol. The cat was repeatedly killed, burnt and drowned. They were understood to be accompaniments of heretics against Christianity. By the 1820s and 30s, the black cat was still understood as a reactionary and anti-authoritarian force, but now one of labour.

The promise and the demand of any kind of Marxist work is always to show an influence that goes in multiple directions. So, cats too would have been changed in the process. So how have they been changed? And this is where we can observe that for many big cats and wild cats, their recruitment into human political communities has led to a kind of tragedy—hunting, endangerment and death.

On the other hand, domestic cats have flourished. They have been welcomed indoors in many countries and understood to be pets with a kind of agency. And they too have wreaked havoc on bird communities. There’s no moment in this story in which one can say this is a victory, or a happy moment for a human-feline alliance because there are always so many contingencies.

And finally, the book is also speculative because if cats are already part of our politics, what would they say and want? So, part of the book is trying to ask that we make room—sociopolitical room, economic room—for a different kind of interspecies politics, and hope for an emergence.

In the book, I talk about this town called Ypres in Belgium. For hundreds of years, they had a cat drowning festival where they would put cats in bags and throw them off buildings into a river to exorcise magic and evil from the community. The last cat drowning happened in 1802. Now they have a yearly cat parade in which they ask for collective forgiveness. So, I ask in the book: if we say our treatment of cats in a particular town has been abominable and something we need to ask forgiveness for, how do we extend that to other animals? How do we extrapolate a kind of animal politics that is not just this cat in this location? What would interspecies equality look like?

Could you speak to this tradition of using feline symbols across the world, the role of these symbols, heralds and logos in organizing ideologies and movements, and how that process changes across contexts?

I think that the ultimate and broadest answer is that signification, the process of imbuing something with meaning and then translating that meaning from one space to another, is such an elastic imaginative process. The book tries to track the ways in which certain meanings seem more resistant to change and others more open to it. So, for example, the lion is a symbol, but also a material token of royalty, monarchy and power. At a certain point, one can’t really answer ‘why’ definitively, but what one can say is the more examples that proliferate, and the more they proliferate across different socio-cultural and historical moments, the more a meaning comes to seem fixed. And then at moments of radical change and eruption, one of the things that is undone is the fixity of meaning. For example, the labour movement beginning in 19th century England, which began to reshape Great Britain as an industrial society, also turned to the lion. So, the lion is now taken away from the monarchical context and used as a symbol of collective power. The anti-slavery movement in the United States also used the lion.

The tiger was everywhere in the French Revolution. So conservatives would denigrate and dismiss French revolutionaries as tigers. The French revolution is actually referred to as a ‘tigresse’, a kind of government appropriate for tigers, by conservatives who wanted nothing to do with it. But, at the same time, France was also an empire and France’s most prized and most wealthy colonial possession—Haiti—underwent its own revolution. This was the biggest successful slave revolution in history. They also turned to the tiger. Marxists have written about the Haitian revolution as being able to marshal the strength and patience of a tiger. That’s similar to how the black panther was used in the United States in the 20th century. So, shifting from the European context to the Euro-colonial context to the American context, you can see both continuities and radical disruptions.

How has your own relationship with the feline, with cats you’ve lived with or other felines you’ve encountered, influenced your ideologies and practices?

I grew up next to a cow pasture in Virginia in the American South. The southern part of the United States has a lot of industrial agriculture which is very environmentally destructive. For me, one of the effects of growing up next to a place where animals are confined, given drugs, pumped full of hormones, and killed, has been a life of vegetarianism. Everybody else I grew up with saw the same things, but it had no effect. So, the book also asks, as a form of political education, how does one convince someone else? I don’t know, but presenting facts doesn’t seem to help. But one of the things I think might convince people is humour or fun. I don’t think people need to hear that farming cattle at a mass scale is bad for everyone. I think everyone knows it and they don’t care, or not enough to change their own lives as a result. But people absolutely do care about their pets. And so the book asks one to consider: how is it that you can care about your animal, but not the animal?

Although, and I could be wrong, it’s come to be my understanding that keeping pets or domestic animals are a real impediment to the kind of multispecies politics and society that I’m calling for in the book. Integrating them into one’s family, having a domestic animal who lives with you and provides a certain amount of enjoyment and comfort, not only does not convince people to think about broader interspecies politics and coalitions, but it actually renders them less inclined to do so. The pet industry is part of the brutal industrial agriculture industry. There are so many domestic cats and dogs in the United States that if they were treated as a separate country, they would rank 4th in the world in meat consumption. And it interrupts and it constrains our abilities to imagine different and more equal relationships with animals. That was a surprise to me, it’s not something that I would have ever thought about before doing the research for this book. So even though this book was written as an appreciation of cats, one effect of this research is that I can’t imagine ever having a pet again. I love cats. I grew up with them. I just won’t have one anymore.

Cats sell. You make a connection between how prominent cats are in our economy and the bourgeois transactional relationships that we have. Could you talk a little about this connection between cats and capitalism; and the flip side, non-transactional, non-exploitative relationships between felines and humans?

Cats have maintained, for about a thousand years, an anti-authoritarian association. With the rise of capitalism in different European states in the 16th, 17th, 18th century, social and political authority shifted from the church to the market. Cats continue to be anti-authoritarian, but now the authority is different. For example, as I mention in the book, in New York in 1828, a group of weavers left a note for their boss signed by ‘The Black Cat’, which I think is the first time cats have been called on in a specifically proletarian and anti-capitalist form. But one of the ironies of capitalism is that which is seen as antithetical to capitalism becomes just as valuable to capitalism. And so, cats become a sort of anti-capitalist capitalist token. In this sense, cats are no different than any other form of commodification. But what is different about cats is the long history of anti-authoritarianism, including anti-economic authoritarianism, that they have maintained as economic systems have changed.

Humans understand their relationship with pets as non-economic—it might be economic broadly speaking, but that’s how individuals understand it. But there is also a history of people saying that there’s something about these animals–materially or symbolically–that can be marshalled toward broader socio-political ends. The book draws on these two kinds of relationships with cats to create a space for the flourishing of a different sort of multispecies society. One that would be more equal, more inclusive. So, the book tracks different figures who tried to do this. Someone like Louise Michelle of the Paris Commune of the 1870s who wrote letters to her cat from her exile in the South Pacific. And Rosa Luxemberg, who participated in the revolution in Germany in 1918, who wasn’t able to turn her love for her cat and the freedom and equality found in that relationship into a broader politics. But this is not a book of success stories; this is more a book of contradictions and potential failures because, as the American Marxist Jameson says, “history puts its worst foot forward.” And so, we have to contend with that as we move through animal history too.

Since the book’s publication, has there been any unexpected feedback that you’ve received?

The book, among other things, is a collection of interesting and surprising cat stories. And every time I present this book, immediately people raise their hand to say, ‘Oh, did you know about this cat?’

But what has most excited me is that people who never thought they would be interested in radical economics, because of the fun and levity of the book, have read it. And so, I think the idea of using cats, and our love and appreciation for them as an entrance into a different multispecies potential has been successful. One of my hopes for the book is that the style of writing of taking an animal and tracing its history through a broad socio-economic setting might become more common, that the book might encourage other people to undertake this kind of research. I’m not sure if it has happened, or that it will. But I have a colleague, for example, who said, “maybe I will write a Spinoza for dogs”, which is quite exciting. I think it would be a hit.