CUNY English Prof Pens Book: ‘Marx for Cats’
“The history of Western capitalism can be told through the cat”
Just what we needed. Another book about Marxism for college students.
The College Fix reports:
English prof’s book ‘Marx for Cats’ offers leftist history ‘through a feline lens’
A City University of New York English professor’s new book presents a history of cats and capitalism, arguing for Marxism as an “interspecies project.”
“The history of Western capitalism can be told through the cat,” CUNY English Professor Leigh La Berge argued in “Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary.” The book proposes “a history in which class struggle and cat struggle intertwine.”
Duke University Press will release the 408-page book on Nov. 3, according to its website. A PDF preview is accessible online.
In “Marx for Cats,” La Berge (pictured) “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,” according to the university publisher.
Other titles from Duke University Press’ most recent catalogue include “Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction,” “Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” by the group INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence.
On September 5, The College Fix reached out via email to La Berge to schedule an interview as well as CUNY and all organizations acknowledged in “Marx for Cats” as supporting the endeavor to inquire about their support for other works on Marxism. No replies have been received.
La Berge critiqued ‘humanity’s relationship with nonhuman animals’
La Berge argued in “Marx for Cats” that “throughout the capitalist era…cats have signaled the transition from one regime of accumulation on a world scale to another.”
Through this telling, “a heretofore unrecognized animality at the heart of both Marx’s critique and Western Marxist critique” is revealed.
La Berge also challenged “humanity’s relationships with nonhuman animals” as “exploitative and unsustainable,” criticizing the “inhabitants of the Global North, and most Marxists,” for failing to recognize this.
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Comments
Sounds like a silly piece of fiction. At the end of 408 pages, if a reader is not a little mentally ‘off’, he will be fully so. Communism on campus has been there in bits and pieces since, well, the era of Marx himself. Marx got a kick start in 1901-2 via V. Lenin publishing his pamphlet(s) called “What is to be done”. Lenin believed in Marxism but noticed that it never caught on among the masses. He was clever enough to figure how to bring Marx-ism from class struggle to a political movement. The rest is history..
The professor sounds like a full on loon. Someday, he’ll be running the university.
Marxism starts off all soft and fuzzy, like a housecat.
But then it grows up.
If I could figure out how to trap the bobcat that’s been living in one of my corrugated outbuildings, I could name it “Stalin” and ship it to this guy as an object lesson.
Cats as Marxists?
Yeah, right. On the one hand, they sleep 20 hours a day; on the other hand, they absolutely do not take orders.
Sounds like animal abuse to me. Cats are the ultimate capitalists
Dogs have masters, cats have staff.