The following post is an excerpt of a review essay of Leigh Clare La Berge’s Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary, which is forthcoming in Political Theology.
Introduction
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observed in The Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”[1] In the classic Marxian tradition, ancient human beings originally lived in relatively egalitarian societies. However, social inequalities gradually developed, leading to class societies. Here, propertied elites—slave-owners, feudal lords, capitalists—exploited poor people—slaves, serfs, industrial working classes—to produce the things that human beings need to live and flourish. Poor people worked to create food, clothing, tools, and other things. They produced valuable things. Or, to put this in more abstract terms, they produced value. But the powerful classes robbed them of this value in diverse ways. As masters, they owned slaves; as kings, nobles, and statesmen, they extracted tribute and tax; as landlords, rent; as merchants and industrialists, profit; as moneylenders, interest. The powerful thus grew richer by extracting value from the poor in kind and cash, while the poor remained in misery. From time to time, the poor revolted because they did not want the rich to rob them of their produce. Class struggle ensued. Hence, the elites organized themselves into political-military institutions—the state—to protect their property. Whenever the poor rebelled, the state tried to violently crush them.
In this form of historical schema, there was little space for recognizing that animals have for millennia co-created economic value. Alive or dead, they feed us. Until very recently, humans overwhelmingly depended on them for transportation, in peace and in war. Even today, in many parts of the world, they help in rural tasks like ploughing. The pharmaceutical industry experiments on animals to create medicines for humans. As pets, animals are care workers, giving solace to lonely humans. In none of these economic spheres are animals passive tools. Like human working classes, animal workers also constantly resist and rebel.[2] In the age of the climate crisis and sixth mass extinction, we urgently need socialist theory that recognizes these animal workers as central to socio-economic production. We require theories of multispecies production and exchange, of multispecies class struggle. We must rethink socialist revolution as multispecies emancipation.
The brilliance of Leigh Claire La Berge’s book, Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary (2023), lies in bringing the Felidae family of mammals into conversation with Marxist politics. She focuses on “the Euro-American West” from the eighth century CE to the present.[3] She examines felids—domestic cats, wild cats, lions, tigers, panthers—as real animals and symbols. She reveals how felids have been central to ruling class exploitation as well as popular resistance across feudal and capitalist modes of production and exchange. Her call for an “interspecies communism”, with felids as comrades, should inspire us all.[4] Moved by that spirit, we dialogue La Berge with our own research, the initial results of which can be seen in Subaltern Studies 2.0: Being against the Capitalocene (2022).[5] One of us (Banerjee) works on Indian, British imperial, and global history. The other (Wouters) is an anthropologist of India, Bhutan, and, more broadly, the Global South. Hence, we take up La Berge’s concluding invitation for a more “global” approach to interspecies communism.[6] Our ambition is to chart out a tentative theoretical framework of multispecies production, exchange, and class struggle, rooted in global history and ethnography.
Stage I: Ancient Multispecies Demos
We believe that in the most ancient societies, humans did not think of animals as uniformly subordinated species. They may not even have recognized an absolute human-animal distinction. One of the earliest human works of art is the ca. 40,000 year old lion-man, found in a German cave. The felid and the human have merged here into an awe-inspiring continuum.[7] The seated woman of Çatalhöyük (ca. 6000 BCE), found in Anatolia (present Turkey) represents a majestic woman, accompanied by two felids. Scholars have asked: were women better-off in this ancient society than under the later state societies of the Mediterranean world? It is tempting to relate this and similar Anatolian figures to goddess-lion combinations in later religious traditions, as in the Mediterranean cult of Cybele, or the cult of Durgā in India.[8]
The Chāndogya Upaniṣad, composed in northern India around the seventh-sixth century BCE, carries a trace of this ancient multispecies equality. The sage Uddālaka Āruṇi thus explained the oneness of all beings—their foundation in a common underlying Being—to his son Śvetaketu (CU 6.9):
Now, take the bees, son. They prepare the honey by gathering nectar from a variety of trees and by reducing that nectar to a homogeneous whole. In that state the nectar from each different tree is not able to differentiate: ‘I am the nectar of that tree,’ and ‘I am the nectar of this tree.’ In exactly the same way, son, when all these creatures merge into the existent, they are not aware that: ‘We are merging into the existent.’ No matter what they are in this world—whether it is a tiger, a lion, a wolf, a boar, a worm, a moth, a gnat, or a mosquito—they all merge into that. The finest essence here—that constitutes the self of this whole world; that is the truth; that is the self (ātman). And that’s how you are, Śvetaketu.[9]
The Upaniṣads thus assert a fundamental continuum between human and felid souls. Humans can be reborn as lions and tigers.[10] In mountainous Bhutan, yaks and human herders have long reincarnated into each other’s bodies.[11] In the highlands of Northeast India and Burma, Nagas believe that in ancient times, “men and animals lived together in perfect understanding and harmony… [with] girls being “married” to tigers and lovely maidens having trees as lovers.”[12] From this vantage point of human-felid similarity, Nagas know that tigers live in democracies similar to their own. Ethnography reveals that, according to Nagas, tigers have democratic councils, conferences, and battalions. Tiger assemblies discuss what and where to hunt as well as deliberate on human affairs. Human assemblies, in turn, discuss tiger affairs.
Stage II: Tribute-Collecting State and Multispecies Value-Extraction
Gradually, however, some societies began to lose this framework of multispecies community. As communities fought against each other for scarce resources, a class of leaders emerged within some communities. They presented themselves as predators who fed on their enemy communities, robbed them of their possessions. In northern India, the Vedic texts bear witness to this transition. The Atharvaveda, composed in the early first millennium BCE, thus prays for a local chief, who is on way to becoming a monarch (AV4.22):
Supreme art thou, beneath thee are thy rivals, and all, O King, who were thine adversaries. Sole lord and leader and allied with Indra, bring, conqueror, thy foemen’s goods and treasures. Consume, with lion aspect (siṃhapratīko), all their hamlets, with tiger aspect (vyāghrapratīko), drive away thy foemen. Sole lord and leader and allied with Indra, seize, conqueror, thine enemies’ possessions.[13]
Once community leaders started preying on other communities, it was only a step away from preying on their own communities. The Aitareya Brāhmaṇa (northern India, ca. 10th-8th c. BCE) makes the logic explicit. The king was to be the tiger, the apex predator. Hence, a tiger skin was to be spread on the royal throne for his anointing:
The tiger is the lordly power of the wild animals, the Rājanya is the lordly power (kṣatraṃ rājanyaḥ); thus he makes the lordly power prosper with the lordly power (AB 8.6).[14]
Across the next three millennia, Indian ruling classes would draw on the power of felids, particularly of tigers and lions, to present themselves as apex predators in society. Hence, the common word, in Sanskrit and various Indian vernaculars, for the royal throne is the siṃhāsana, the lion-seat.[15] The ancient Indian ruler Aśoka (third century BCE) famously used lions to represent the ideology of his empire.[16]
Naga stories offer us another detailed trajectory of this human separation, and subsequent subjugation, of the felids. They recount how tekhu (tiger, but also other large felids), themia (man), and ruopfü (spirit) were sons of the same mother, with the tiger being the first-born.[17] The spirit and the human connived to exile the tiger to the jungle so that they could inherit their mother’s property, including “clear spaces”, i.e., the non-jungle. According to another story, the human-felid separation emerged through competition over prey. Men sent a village cat to inform the tiger: ““After all, you are my brother; when you kill a deer, please put a leg on the wall for me,”, but the cat muddled the message and said, “when you kill a deer put it on the wall for the man,” and the tiger, thinking that a whole deer was meant, was angry and hated the man.”[18] Nagas further recall how human greed also led to the withdrawal of spirits into another world.[19]
Thus, for Nagas, the invention of private property contributed to the great divide between humans and felids, and indeed also humans and spirits. If Rousseau, Marx, or Engels had known these Naga traditions, they would have realized that the emergence of private property and the drive for accumulation leads not just to class and gender divisions and hierarchies, but also to species separation and subordination. It was human drive to accumulate property that led to their separation from felids, that tore asunder human kinship with nonhuman animals.
Many Nagas, however, regretted this separation and felt guilty about subordinating the tigers. When a Naga hunter killed a tiger, he would declare ““the gods have killed a tiger in the jungle” and never “I have killed a tiger,”’, while village priests would proclaim a genna, day of abstention from work, “on account of the death of an elder brother.”[20] It was taboo to eat the meat of a tiger, leopard, and other larger cats, for they were affirmed “as closely akin to man and to eat them would be almost cannibalism.”[21] Nagas resorted to elaborate ritual safeguards to protect themselves from the angry spirits of tigers that they had killed.[22]
Other Nagas, however, were less apologetic. Instead, they accumulated prestige by killing their animal kin. Among the Angami Naga, a man who had killed a tiger was entitled to nail the tiger’s skin on his shield. Among the Sema, the hunter could wear “a boar’s tusk collar”. Among the Rengma and Lotha Nagas, the hunter could wear “a distinctive cloth.”[23] As in northern India, so in Northeastern India, kingship emerged by appropriating the power of dead tigers. Konyak Naga anghs or kings clad themselves in cloaks “covered with large printed tigers.”[24]
La Berge shows that medieval European kings and aristocrats also presented themselves as predators. After conquering England in 1066, William of Normandy asserted
I…caused the death of thousands by starvation and war, especially in Yorkshire…In a mad fury I descended on the English of the north like a raging lion, and ordered that their homes and crops and all their equipment and furnishings should be burnt at once and their great flocks and herds of sheep and cattle slaughtered everywhere.[25]
La Berge describes how European kings and nobles were referred to as lions in celebratory biographies; were painted together with lions; had lions on their coats of arms. Here was exploitation pure and simple, without the slightest fig-leaf or mystification. The state appeared as organized plunder, as hunting of humans and nonhumans.
But where there is exploitation, there must also be resistance. Ancient Indian texts often used felids to imagine resistance. The Kathāsaritsāgara (Kashmir, ca. 1063-82 CE) described how a lion was rapidly killing animals in a forest. Hence, “all the animals, deer and all, met and deliberated together”, and petitioned the lion to end his indiscriminate killing. The animals would daily send one amongst themselves to be the lion’s meal. When a hare’s turn came, he was able to kill the lion by tricking him to jump into a well.[26] Should we see here a narrative about the transition from indiscriminate ruling class predation to a form of systematic tribute-extraction? More importantly, should we see here a narrative of class struggle—democratic deliberation, followed by resistance of the oppressed against the ruling classes—cast in multispecies terms?
Felids do not appear only as oppressors; they can also side with the oppressed. In the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (southern India, ca. 10th c. CE), the god Viṣṇu appeared as a man-lion to kill a tyrant demon king.[27] In several first and second millennium CE texts, in Sanskrit and Indian vernaculars, a lion helps the goddess Durgā to kill another demon king.[28] In these narratives, kingship, or the human state in general, is exposed as demonic in form. Ultimately, all these texts reflect on felids to support tyrannicide.
Read the remaining review in Political Theology soon.
[1] Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 35.
[2] Hribal, Animal Planet.
[3] La Berge, Marx for Cats, 338.
[4] Ibid., 236, 257.
[5] Banerjee and Wouters, Subaltern Studies 2.0.
[6] La Berge, Marx for Cats, 338.
[7] Ulmer Museum, Lion Man.
[8] Saini, The Patriarchs.
[9] Olivelle, The Early Upaniṣads, 253.
[10] E.g. Kauṣītaki Upaniṣad, 1.2, in Ibid., 327.
[11] Wouters, “Relatedness.”
[12] Ao, The Ao-Naga Oral Tradition, 65-66.
[13] Griffith, trans. “Atharvaveda”, 405. For the original Vedic text, TITUS Texts: Atharva-Veda-Samhita (Saunaka): Frame (uni-frankfurt.de), accessed 28.4.24.
[14] Keith trans. “Aitareya Brāhmaṇa”, 322. For the original Vedic text, TITUS Texts: Rg-Veda: Aitareya-Brahmana: Frame (uni-frankfurt.de), accessed 28.4.24.
[15] Mayer, “The King’s Two Thrones.”
[16] Olivelle, Ashoka.
[17] Heneise, “The Naga Tiger-man.”
[18] Hutton, Angami Nagas, 262.
[19] Kire, Cobbled Path.
[20] Hutton, “Leopard-Men in the Naga Hills”, 41.
[21] Hutton, Sema Nagas, 90.
[22] Ibid., 77, 246; Hutton, Angami Nagas, 182.
[23] Hutton, Angami Nagas, 159.
[24] William Archer, “Manuscript Notes, 1946-1948.’
[25] La Berge, Marx for Cats, 35.
[26] Tawney, trans. Kathāsaritsāgara,vol. 2, 33.
[27] Tagare, trans. Bhāgavata Purāṇa.
[28] Sarkar, Heroic Shaktism.
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