The And then. Hello and

welcome to Behind the News, my name is Doug Henwood, the satanically mandated two

guests in two segments today.

Lee Claire Lebertge will give us a history of Western political economy from a

feline perspective and Michael Zweig talks about his new primmer on how capitalism

works and what that means for how to fight it. I love cats both generally as a

species and specifically the two I share my living quarters with.

But I never knew how prominently they'd figure in the history of culture and political economy until I read my first guest book.

Lee Claire Leiberge, a professor of English at the

Borough Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York, is just

out with Marx for Cats, a radical bestiary, published by Duke University Press.

It's a delightful yet serious book, textually and visually,

that takes us through 12 centuries of the human feline relationship,

from house cat to lion.

It's also a plea for us to rethink the human animal relationship generally,

although I'm not sure how well suited cats, sadistic carnivores par excellence are as a model.

Lee Claire Leberge. Your erudition in All Matters

cat is really impressive. How did you acquire all this knowledge? How did the project

come to be? It was one of the few books I've written that almost started as a prompt or even somewhat of a joke that became more and more real in the writing.

I'm a teacher, I'm a professor, I write a lot about art and I get artists quite often asking me to help them refine

their use of critical theoretical terms, particularly political economy.

And so I made a series of instructional videos called Marx for Cats,

...