Our Dumb Beasts: The Rise of the Bourgeoisie and Its Appropriation of Cats, 1800–1900

Wildcats: Wildcatters in which a style of accumulation called “wildcat banking,” is used to displace and exterminate both indigenous nations and lynx, bobcats, and cougars as the fractious United States expands west; and in which Southern plantation owners employ the “cat-hawl” to torture their slaves and maintain their power; Marx analyzes the American Civil War in a series of letters to his uncle, Lion Phillips.

Domestic Cats, Communal and Servile: Cats in which the reader becomes acquainted with the many cat and animal advocates of the Paris Commune, from Louise Michel to Élisée Reclus as well as with the radical German émigré scene at London’s Red Lion pub, the site at which Marx and Friedrich Engels convened in exile; Marx’s and Marxist critiques of animal rights advocates as “bourgeois” emerge alongside increasing pleas to protect the “rights of dumb beasts,” if not the impoverished workers of industrial capitalism