Next year Duke University Press is scheduled to publish Marx For Cats: A Radical Bestiary, by Leigh Claire La Berge, who teaches at Free University of Berlin. Here’s a sample from the introduction (which you can access here if you are a glutton):
Like any text in the Marxist tradition, Marx for Cats gestures in two directions at once. In asking how our society is structured and for whom, Marxism turns toward economic history. And with the materials it finds there, it begins to conceive of how the present might have been different and how the future still could be. In offering a feline narrative of our economic past, I argue that Marxism not only has the potential to be an interspecies project but that it already is one. And in using that knowledge and those histories presented here in cat-form, I suggest that we may collectively plot a new future together, one which recognizes the work that cats have always done for Marxists and one which wonders: what political commitments can Marxists make to cats? This is less a radical history of a single species than a history of how felines and humans have made each other radical, both radically progressive and radically conservative.
Now I know what you’re thinking: Surely this is yet another Sokal Hoax. Nope—Prof. La Berge is a for-real leftist, and a prime exhibit of the thesis that what civilization suffers most from today is an overproduction of (useless) elites. And surely “furries” (people who like to dress up as animals) are yet another legitimate victim class. And another client group for the diversity-industrial-complex.
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