Leigh Claire La Berge
@marxforcats
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Lit Prof @CUNY books ⬇️ Scandals and Abstraction (2014) Reading Capitalist Realism, Ed (2014) Wages Against Artwork (2019) Marx for Cats (2023) Fake Work (2025)
Joined May 2019
The collected reminisces of my life as a businessman, circa 1999. Coming soon from @haymarketbooks
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RIP Karl Marx who passed 140 years ago today, on March 14, 1883. This morning a black cat was offering its respects at Highgate.
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Fredric Jameson has passed--what an unmatched American intellectual presence for the last 50 (at least) years. "Marxism and Form" is his best book, imho, but my favorite line of his comes from "Brecht and Method": "History puts its worst foot forward." Rest in Power, Fred.
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writer's contextual query: if I say "4-H" or "local 4-H society" does anyone know what I mean?.
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Great line from @dbessner's piece on Curbed."."In the 1980s, [David] lived in Manhattan Plaza, a federally subsidized affordable-housing complex designed for artists." That's right folks, socialized artists' housing helped give us Larry David.
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The amazing if slightly discomfiting feeling of submitting one's final manuscript to @DukePress. I'm so excited for this book to be in the world, and so grateful to the help and vision of the people at this press.
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And we have a cover, comrades. Each cat represents one age of capitalism, one chapter in its development, from Lion Kings to Black Panthers. And a special visual flourish: note the hammer and sickle- like tail crossings. Out this fall from @DukePress
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I know there are much bigger issues right now but, Christ, the NYTimes’ answer to the question why is college so expensive:
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Walter Benjamin Memorial, Portbou, Spain; he passed 84 years ago today. Who will write the Arcades Project for Amazon?
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Happy birthday, Karl Marx, b. May 5, 1818; stopped by Highgate to pay my respects and a black cat was already there doing so. Marx's last words, as recorded by his daughter: "Last words are for fools who haven't said enough."
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Just confirmed by the @DukePress Editorial Board--"Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary" will be in the fall 2023 catalogue. To those cat-haters who said a longue duree history couldn't critique capitalism en toto using the figure of the feline, I say: meow.
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I've never seen NYU and Columbia's efforts to end free tuition @CUNY so clearly narrated--(and found in a footnote no less)--thanks @AshleyDawsonNYC. Private universities make free/low cost public education politically difficult if not impossible. We don't talk about this enough.
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Karl Marx's paternal family lineage is the famed Katzenellenbogens, a Jewish family who fled from Rhineland to Venice in early 15th cent. The family crest was a small cat; at the small Jewish cemetery in Padua cats appear on each of the family's tombstones
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Cat-lovers and Comrades: I'm so excited to share the intro to "Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary" now up on @DukePress site. It was a labor of feline love, and a realization of how much work all cats, big and small, have done for Marxism.
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Get in on the ground-floor of feline Marxism. "Marx for Cats" is available for pre-order @DukePress, its Marxism discounted by 30% with promo code E23BERGE. It was a fun book to write; I'm excited to have it in our world & to think about building new ones
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"Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary" ships today! Using over 100 images and 1200 years of feline history, the book shows how the rise and consolidation of capitalism can be told through the cat. Order from @DukePress for 30% off w/ code: E23BERGE.
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Melinda Cooper is one of the smartest and, more importantly, most creative thinkers I know. Her work in political economy surpasses--I think--almost everyone of her generation. (And in person she's so funny and modest, but that's a different story. Or maybe not?)
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At a conference a few years ago at Columbia reflecting on this book a knowledgeable speaker claimed “Imagined Communities” accounted for 40 % of Verso’s yearly profit. Still.
Benedict Anderson’s, “Imagined Communities,” was published 40 years ago in 1983. Given the current times, a bit surprising that not much has been written, as far as I know, on the fortieth anniversary of the book.
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In the Middle Ages it was easier to imagine than end of the world than the beginning of capitalism.
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My favorite of Barbara Ehrenreich was her older work, 70s/early 80s, particularly. Do people remember that she wrote the English forward to Klaus Theweleit's magisterial "Male Fantasies"? Indeed what could be more apropos our moment than her then-interest in masculine fascism?
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You, a contemporary reader, would understand an off-hand reference to "The Maginot Line"?.
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Had dinner with the daughter of a psychoanalyst of some fame and asked--a little embarrassing--what was it like growing up with him? Her answer: "there was never I time when I didn't know: everyone is angry and everyone is bisexual.".
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RIP to an utterly amazing scholar; when I first arrived at U Chicago for a post-doc I thought: everyone will be like Lauren Berlant. Reader: no one was like Lauren Berlant.
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Waiting for someone to write an article about how many academics have turned away from UP monographs to pursue trade books, and how that speaks to the collapse of university humanities, and, finally, how the best trade deals go to those for whom a collapse exits in different 1/2.
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What better way to celebrate our fake May Day, Labor Day, than to announce that my book "Fake Work" will be coming out next year with @haymarketbooks; the book recounts my time working as a management consultant on a corporate Y2K project.
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Rest in Power Mark Fisher who passed away seven years ago today. I had breakfast in Cambridge with him once and he left by saying “there’s never enough time. That’s capitalism.” Too true in so many ways.
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Rest in Power. Cat-Loving revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, assassinated by the fascist Freikorps in Berlin, 1/15/1919. Brecht's haunting epitaph: ."Red Rosa now has vanished too.Where she lies is hid from view.She told the poor what life's about.And so the rich have rubbed her out"
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How about instead of gendered parents’ day we just have parents day except it’s not a day but a social commitment to free day care, good public education, free meals and medical care for children and it’s all year long?.
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A wildcat strike is afoot @cuny on this day, May 1, international working people's day and a moment of state repression. Follow @cunyonstrike for updates. And here's the note from the CUNY faculty union. The reality of labor organizing in NY STATE--state & union threaten jail.
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Judith Butler offers an accidental bit of academic labor history in today's @nytimes. They mean to discuss their own academic precarity--but I'm pretty sure they mean five classes a year which, by today's standards, is pretty cushy and would be considered a good research enviro
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One of two original frontispieces for Rousseau's "Social Contract." (Both had cats). Rousseau: Cats are "my test of character" & "Those who don't enjoy cats have the despotic instinct of men. They do not like cats because the cat is free."
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One never knows how one's books will land in the material world, but I'm genuinely delighted to report that "Marx for Cats" is a top new release in Cat Care.
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My alma mater, folks: a officer of a wealthy private university skims 660,000 thousand of *public* grant money to add to her pool. Love the detail: not to build a pool, but to modify and expand her existing one.
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New academic low? Friend JUST found out they didn't get a TT job for which they had been a finalist by checking the Linked In page of another finalist who listed having started the new position on July 1. Friend wrote to committee to confirm and, wait for it, STILL no response.
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I’m tired of 45 year-old faculty using images of their 32 year old-selves as their headshot photos. Let’s use pics from our early 20’s instead.
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Dropped capital letters on the first page of each chapter of "Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary," which, with typesetting like this, becomes more and more bestial by the day. Out in late fall from @DukePress
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Happy feline May Day from the International Workers of the World, circa 1912; the original sabo-tabby
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Solidarity from Marxists and former Bourdieu followers with @ucu and all the incredible academic workers and strikers throughout the UK. I hope @cinemiasma will remember this gem, for our NYU strike days.
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A lot of talk about English, Lit., and unions in response to Guillory Gate. But this from ACLA is fantastic. No professionalization w/o unionization. Unions as sites of literary criticism; unions for grad students; for profs; for UPs; if literary studies has a future, it's here.
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@oliviastowell Lisa Duggan once had a great riposte to this: “plumbers’ manuals are too complicated; all the jargon and technical references. Who needs them?”.
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How does this shit get through a basic edit? The NY Times tackles the declining middle class and the consumer goods that did and didn't exist in the 1960s.
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Rest in power Toni Negri. My first week of NYU grad school—the first week of September 2001, I started reading “Empire” and was literally reading its intermezzo when I watched the first plane hit the twin tower out the window of my Brooklyn apt. Marxist memories.
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Melinda Cooper on financial counter-revolution at the CUNY GC in mid-April. With comments by @GeoffPMann and @DanielaGabor. Link for registration below.
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"Finance Aesthetics" out soon from Goldsmiths Press with some amazing and creative entries by @oikeios, Anna Kornbluh, @maxhaiven, @brouillettese, @la_louve_rouge_ and so many more. So pleased to have "Animals" included as my entry. This book is fun; we should do more like it.
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As a U Chicago post-doc I was co-chair of its Society of Fellows. I met regularly with deans, often to ask for better working conditions. My favorite response ever: "Think of this as a TT position, you just won't get tenure here." Unions = only way forward for academics. Congrats.
Congratulations to our colleagues and soon to be union siblings, Writing Faculty United! The University tried to divide us, but the NLRB ruled that there is no basis for writing instructors and instructional faculty to be separated. Solidarity wins!.
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9/11 tributes coming fast and furious. But another 9/11 memory is possible:.Theodor Adorno, born 9/11/1903: reminds us that "dialectics is the ontology of the wrong state of things." True then, true now, true tomorrow, his birthday.
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RIP Bruno Latour. He shaped a whole generation of literary studies to think about rocks, objects, matter, things. For those wanting a riposte to the longer, theoretical tributes that will follow soon, check out Andreas Malm, "The Progress of this Storm.".
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Happy birthday day to cat-loving anarchist Peter Kropotkin (b.1842)--who raised a cat while in prison, took the feline with him on his release, and believed, Lacan-like, in a kitten mirror stage. Cat-comradeship seems a rare and fertile place for anarchist-Marxist overlap.
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Amazing to see grad students at U Chicago, Duke, Northwestern, Harvard etc, organizing grad labor. We need to be real: tenure is pretty much lost for most academics; it was never meant for everyone and it can't save profs. Unions might. @uchicagogsu @d.@GSOCUAW .@hgsuuaw.
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So important that we stand in support of Jodi Dean. A true COMRADE.
McCarthyism is real. I’ve been relieved of teaching responsibilities. Don’t stop talking about Palestine.
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@steinjordan For starters Universities employ a lot of homosexuals and they have expensive tastes.
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form because they have tenure. But the academic commons that supports and nurtures and makes meaningful the monograph really has ceased to exist.
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RIP Leo Bersani. What a wonderful mind--his book INTIMACIES with Adam Phillips is an enduring favorite of mine .
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Writing about the late 1990s and wait: was Monica Lewinsky an unpaid intern?.
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Still can't get over getting introductory emails from 1st yr. grad students with lines like "I've been published in four journals; trade book in progress; serve as asst. editor," etc. The only thing more impressive than their professionalization is the lack of a future profession.
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"After Marx" edited by Chris Nealon and Colleen Lye is ready for the world. Fantastic table of contents, and I think it will be a great grad and /undergrad theory companion with @Amy_De_Ath @brouillettese @nikhil_palsingh @anniemcclanahan & others.
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Texas and NC trying to eliminate tenure. Horrible, obviously. But the response can't be: "we won't be competitive anymore." Look around: 75% of the uni. workforce is precarious; tenure is a rarity. The fight needs to be a broad one--secure jobs for all.
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My "Marx for Cats" publication announcement got picked up by some rightwing blog and I woke up this morning to a rash of unsolicited, concerned emails from conservatives telling me Marxism had failed humans and it would fail cats too. One wondered: why even try?
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It's online! My reflections on the surreal 18 months ('98-'99) I worked with Andersen consultants on a fake project: to save global advertising from a predicted millennial meltdown, or Y2K. When people ask: how did you get interested in Marx & economy? Here's the answer, folks.
@DanielDenvir And Leigh Claire La Berge (@marxforcats) on the fake work of Y2K preparedness.
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The circulation of academic capital speeds up: students use AI to write the essays, professors use it to grade them. At a certain point, neither professors nor students will be necessary to complete this circle. From Uni Birmingham in the UK
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Writerly question: do epigraphs ever work? I love finding them and dropping them in my prose, but I rarely enjoy reading them.
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GRADING. For a week. And every end of semester grade-a-thon, I return to this, the 1250-word expository essay unplugged by the brilliant but not-on-twitter, Mandy Berry. Graders and gradees, it doesn't get better than this:
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Come on @DukePress, go the extra mile, make the articles of the most creative, visionary Marxist of your stable free forever. FWIW, that's the subtext of those articles, too, freedom from capitalist exchange.
Articles by Fredric Jameson, published in @DukePress journals, are freely available until 31 October.
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Between Joe Biden accusing Donald Trump of having the morals of an alley cat and JD Vance accusing AOC, Buttigieg, and Harris of being crazy childless cat ladies, I think it's fair to call this our most feline presidential election.
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Conservative paper "The Campus Fix" offers a quite fair take on "Marx for Cats" and maps the larger conceptual move from post-structuralism to interspecies scholarship in English departments. Great visuals, too!
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Marx to Engels, New Year’s Eve, 1861: ‘ I wish you in advance every happiness for the New Year. If it’s anything like the old one, I for my part, would sooner consign it to the devil’. I'm a Marxist in a lot of ways, but this year's end, especially: Let's hope '24 changes course
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So excited to be speaking in England--land of regal lions; land of late Marx--on "Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary." . 10/25 4pm Kings College (Council Room K2.29) .10/26: 12pm U Birmingham (Arts 335).10/27: 15:30 U Sheffield (Diamond LT8);
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Too bad Anna Kornbluh is no longer on this site to see all the commendations and plaudits being tossed her way on the occasion of her newest book's publication. Will try to get my paws on it as fast as finance capital can circulate--it'll be just in time, I'm sure.
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If you're interested in some of the week's most crucial political themes, like Marxism and cats, and how they intersect to produce our political present and history, let me suggest this book from @DukePress .
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I also say this as someone whose next book will be a trade book; my reasons are similar--I'm not sure how or where the space for monographs exists anymore.
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Everyone knows the true value of the humanities: to appear valueless so the university can remain non-profit so it can find novel and less-taxed ways to accumulate, esp public funds.
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The first thing I teach my 1st year students @CUNY is "The Struggle for CUNY"--link below. It was written by a senior and details what it took from students & communities to make CUNY free. For 8 years. The fiscal crisis of '75 ended it. The struggle was real and can still be.
"A 0.1 Wall Street percent tax, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, could raise $777 billion over 10 years.". The demographic breakdown of the Ivies won't change a thing, while free public college would really transform the nation.
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This is tomorrow! Jodi motivated much of my thinking about cats and comradeship and I'm thrilled to be in conversation with her and @kwissoker. @Jodi7768 RSVP for zoom link, details below. @GradCenterNews @DukePress.
Excited to announce our final talk of the semester: ."Marx for Cats".A virtual conversation with Leigh Claire La Berge and Jodi Dean.December 4th at 7:00 pm ET .RSVP: @GC_CUNY @DukePress @marxforcats
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FYI: Fredric Jameson was on Angela Davis’s dissertation committee at UCSD.
“Let’s add some more slogans or lessons. Wrest the collective from the individual. Wrest the political from moralism.”—@NicoBaumbach's memoriam on Fredric Jameson’s pedagogy.
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2 NYC police images to think about today. Left, NYPD lock arms to protect Amazon shipments and operations from their striking workers; right, police, the NYPD police commissioner and Mayor of NYC Eric Adams escort suspected heath-care assassin Luigi Mangione as he arrives in NYC.
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“What is the robbing of a bank compared with the founding of a bank?” .RIP Bertolt Brecht.
66 years ago today Bertolt Brecht died in East Berlin as the poet laureate of the German Democratic Republic. Here he is in exile in Denmark playing chess with Walter Benjamin
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The University of Austin Press will be publishing my next book, "The Road to Surfdom: Making Waves in Thought Leadership"
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Merry Marxist Xmas to all who celebrate and wish for a more free world.
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When NYU GSOC was on strike for 6 months in 2005-6, the Rutgers AAUP-AFT union members were a constant presence on our picket lines. I wish I could be with them today (and tomorrow, hasta la victoria.) Solidarity from Berlin! @ruaaup.
For the first time in the history of Rutgers University, all three faculty, grad, EOF, and postdoc unions have voted to go on strike. Monday morning, we are ON STRIKE. See you on the picket line. #RUOnStrike
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Arriving on all four paws, Nov. 3! And so glad, as always, to have worked with @DukePress.
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In the wake of "wilding," I'm waiting for elite/Ivy academics to find a new term for thingism, horizontality, total imminence, something so similar, but not the same, something next to, uncomfortably close. I know: ADJUNCT.
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Again, folks, wealthy, progressive, Democratic states are pulling the plug on public higher education in addition to the loons in charge of FL. and WVA. There goes CT.
Amid a historic budget surplus, and with Democratic control of the state house and governor: The U. of Connecticut Could Be the Next Public Flagship to Face Big Cuts
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Whelp! No more research at one @CUNY's flagship schools. This kind of austerity is unsurprising, completely unacceptable, and brought to you by the NY STATE Democratic Party. We need less lobbying and more organizing, and it's beginning to happen. @z_hu__ @PSC_CUNY @cunyonstrike.
Due to devastating cuts, research services at Queens College CUNY no longer exist. #AgainstAusterity #CareNotCuts #FixCUNY #FundCUNY #InvestInCUNY #APeoplesCUNY #Red4HigherEd.
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What would American academia look like if FACULTY went on strike as early and often as they do in the UK? This is a real question. #UCUstrike #UCstrike It's time to follow our transatlantic colleagues and our grad student colleagues.
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What critical theory didn't know it needed but does--a really wonderful and creative collection by @frantzen_mikkel, @polemologos, and from.@GoldsmithsPress. My entry is ANIMALS.
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Crumbling buildings, fired lecturers, no union contract, but watch out folks, @cuny is getting a new learning management system and an associate vice chancellor of academic innovation to match. Here we go!
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