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Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory
818 pages, Hardcover
Published July 31, 2025
About the author
Phil A. Neel
4 books33 followersPhillip A. Neel is a communist geographer based in the Pacific Northwest. He is the author of Hinterland: America's New Landscape of Class and Conflict (2018), a Field Notes book published by Reaktion (London)
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 1, 2026
Ska försöka att skriva ett blogginlägg om boken längre fram så kommer kanske uppdatera denna kommentar.
Boken är ett gediget arbete och djupdyker i den globala kapitalismen, på olika platser i Kina, i Thailand och i Tanzania. Den visar på de partikulära uttrycken för den helvetesvärld kapitalismen utgör men visar samtidigt på hur de hänger ihop, vad den underliggande dynamiken är. Jag uppskattar också att han varken ser klimatkatastrofen eller "profitkvotens fallande tendens" som något deus ex machina utan istället visar på hur den förra troligen bara kommer stärka kapitalismen och hur den senare endast utgör en möjlighet för kommunistisk subjektivitet att växa fram.
Läs den.
Boken är ett gediget arbete och djupdyker i den globala kapitalismen, på olika platser i Kina, i Thailand och i Tanzania. Den visar på de partikulära uttrycken för den helvetesvärld kapitalismen utgör men visar samtidigt på hur de hänger ihop, vad den underliggande dynamiken är. Jag uppskattar också att han varken ser klimatkatastrofen eller "profitkvotens fallande tendens" som något deus ex machina utan istället visar på hur den förra troligen bara kommer stärka kapitalismen och hur den senare endast utgör en möjlighet för kommunistisk subjektivitet att växa fram.
Läs den.
August 1, 2026
What do we talk about when we talk about crisis? Do we mean polycrisis, collapse, like apocalypse, or do we mean a slow and almost imperceptible collapse into a more and more dystopian future in which human beings become the most devalued of resources and coercive control the most precious of commodities?
This is perhaps the crux of Phil Neel's fantastically rich book, a weighty tome which takes in a huge amount of data and surveys our global present in painstaking detail only to return time and again to the question: what happens next for the humans in this world which is simultaneously so full of technological wonders yet so steeped in inequality and cruelty?
I really shouldn't review this book until I've read it all, and I'm very far from having done that. I suspect that I may be reading it for the rest of my life, in some form or other. In the introduction, Neel states that "it is today rare to find those few capable or willing to truly engage with the unforgiving texts of this older style – Capital is perhaps the grandest example – which require an exertion of real effort to unbind. And yet this exertion is precisely what strengthens the mind."
In essence a potted Goodreads review is the antithesis of that mighty effort, a niblet of quick takes that sums up a great work of scholarship and passionate argument in a few paragraphs and a bunch of stars. But Neel also counsels skipping over the detailed information of economic and geographic background if so minded, so as to concentrate on the narrative portions, which in the first instance is what I'm doing.
[Incidentally, I can't agree with his condemnation of the e-book format: "woe to all who abandon the tactile in the name of the tablet, since knowledge enters through the flesh". I suggest that this is the attitude of one with a young body and strong wrists for whom sustaining a vast tome like this at bedtime, forcing open those springy bindings, might be unproblematic. But a tablet is a godsend to those with less bodily strength, as well as being so much easier to mark for note-taking and to search for interesting gobbets of text. Perhaps the mystique of the actual printed book is a relic of what Marx might call "the commodity fetish" since words are words whatever their physical medium?]
My previous read of such a book which plumbs the history and geography of a place for insights into our future and critiques of our dystopian society was Malcolm Harris's Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World [link to my Substack essay]
The decision to combine volumes of hard data on population, economy and resources with a certain evocative Gothic tone incorporating ghosts, revenants and vampiric exploitation might seem a risky one, but there is a solid precedent for such. There's no law that says a book that is essentially a work of political economy in materialist dialectic mode can't be imaginatively written, and Marx is full of phantasms and vampires too. Famously, he and collaborator Engels wrote that "a spectre is haunting Europe" and Neel is happy to incorporate such spooky turns of phrase,
An example of this is the description of the "beast of war" emerging from the womb of that capitalist industrial sector known as the "military industrial complex", nurtured by the state itself and its stoking of the "free market":
"Eventually, something breaks and the beast is again cast from the womb of the market to smear its bloody hide across the surface of the world. Worse still: the beast is semelparous, and its long, deadly passage is therefore also a sort of spawning."
Like most readers I had to go scurrying to the dictionary here to find that 'semelparous' means reproducing only once before death, like a salmon, rather than at several moments throughout the creature's lifetime. This in turn made for a meditation on what there is about the 'reproduction' of this monstrous beast War that makes it so. I'm still not convinced by the metaphor, but I'm grateful for the opportunity to consider it...
There are so many wonderful touches in this vast book (one habitually says "sprawling" here, but in fact Hellworld is anything but sprawling, showing all the signs of a tight control over structure and narrative). One of my favourites is the incorporation of the poetry of Xu Lizhi (1990-2014), a young Chinese poet who was obliged to work for Foxconn the notorious sweatshop of industrial manufacturing which produces (among others) Apple iPhone and who killed himself.
I've always loved this work with its gentle melancholy and its undertow of rebellious defiance against the industrial machine that was destroying the poet's soul. It is highly consonant with the tone of the rest of Neel's book, which adopts a similar defiance by means of the most lyrical narrative. Neel does well in incorporating this poetry respectfully, not as a grotesque show of morbid sensation but as a true critique of our developing hellworld seen up close.
As I stated, I'm still working my way along through this text and there's much still to discover, to grapple with, to argue with, to assimilate or reject as the case may be. But whatever else, I'm struck at all times by the text's intelligence and imaginativeness, as well as its passion. Take this declaration of intent about the nature of revolutionary politics
"communist politics must take as its practical foundation an immanent struggle within and against the hellworld of capital. It is a struggle over work, wages, and wars that also seeks to supersede each... There is no way out and there is no rapturous, final battle, no coming catastrophe that cannot be turned into fuel for the machine. There is just a bloody, slow grappling through ash and mud, inches lost, inches won. No collapse, only crisis and combat. The body of the beast must be broken open from the inside, corroded slowly as the cancer of communist measures cascades from cell to cell. Neither the social forms of commodity society nor the environment they have constructed simply dissolve. They must be intentionally dismantled and repurposed through careful experimentation. "
It is breathtakingly original of the author to compare the desired state - the communist transformation of capitalist society into a human-centred society and economy - to a cancer eating away at the body politic. It is a complete transformation of expected imagery in the service of the subversion of the typical revolutionary images of barricades and Kalashnikovs held on high. "No rapturous final battle, no coming catstrophe". It's an example of the danger posed to capitalist structures - a cancerous destruction of its organism you might say - by such starkly original thinking.
On Neel's Substack there's a chance to follow what we might call the "Hellworld Extended Universe" with essays that take in peripheral issues, perhaps outtakes, asides or later ideas that connect with the text. One of the recent ones is the history of stringed lutes, the development of the guitar, and the outsider rebellious status of guitar music (blues, rock, minstrelsy) within canonical music). Bloody wonderful.
Hellworld is unapologetically left-wing - not liberal, not libertarian, but Marxistly, communistly left-wing - throughout, and I appreciate that directness of purpose and lack of shilly-shallying about desired ends. I applaud the author's intention and objectives in this work. But I do have some caveats.
As an author developing a series of stories set in a post-apocalyptic "Kollapse", I would dispute the author's contention (heard on a recent podcast) that collapse narratives are inherently reactionary and inherently individualistic. For one thing, I don't conceive of polycris and collapse as at all unlikely. Societies, complex societies, have collapsed before though never before at a global scale. There's always a first time,
And as a scene in the recent HBO version of post-apocalytic game The Last of Us suggests, a post-apocalyptic or "post-Kollapse" condition might well bring co-operative non-hierarchical forms of society to the fore. A young man warns about the dangers of communist thought to his girlfriend, who comments deadpan: "But we are commuinists". He sees their community as a bunch of powerful individuals expressing their Ayn-Randian personality. She knows that really they are a co-operative structure moving forward on the will of their common humanity.
So it may be in the Hellworld. It could be that the Hellworld goes on to become a global dystopia, in which case its collapse is in my view an inevitability. It may be that enough of the "good cancer" of communist transformation occurs at the local scale to finally scale up and transform society at the very largest of its dimensions, though difficult to see as we survey things today.
But revolutionary optimism is a thing, and this book despite its title is essentially a sustained work of revolutionary optimism. I have hope for Neel's "good cancer" eating up the corrupt organism of capital, I really do. But I'm not gonna give up my apocalyptic imaginings for the time being.
This is perhaps the crux of Phil Neel's fantastically rich book, a weighty tome which takes in a huge amount of data and surveys our global present in painstaking detail only to return time and again to the question: what happens next for the humans in this world which is simultaneously so full of technological wonders yet so steeped in inequality and cruelty?
I really shouldn't review this book until I've read it all, and I'm very far from having done that. I suspect that I may be reading it for the rest of my life, in some form or other. In the introduction, Neel states that "it is today rare to find those few capable or willing to truly engage with the unforgiving texts of this older style – Capital is perhaps the grandest example – which require an exertion of real effort to unbind. And yet this exertion is precisely what strengthens the mind."
In essence a potted Goodreads review is the antithesis of that mighty effort, a niblet of quick takes that sums up a great work of scholarship and passionate argument in a few paragraphs and a bunch of stars. But Neel also counsels skipping over the detailed information of economic and geographic background if so minded, so as to concentrate on the narrative portions, which in the first instance is what I'm doing.
[Incidentally, I can't agree with his condemnation of the e-book format: "woe to all who abandon the tactile in the name of the tablet, since knowledge enters through the flesh". I suggest that this is the attitude of one with a young body and strong wrists for whom sustaining a vast tome like this at bedtime, forcing open those springy bindings, might be unproblematic. But a tablet is a godsend to those with less bodily strength, as well as being so much easier to mark for note-taking and to search for interesting gobbets of text. Perhaps the mystique of the actual printed book is a relic of what Marx might call "the commodity fetish" since words are words whatever their physical medium?]
My previous read of such a book which plumbs the history and geography of a place for insights into our future and critiques of our dystopian society was Malcolm Harris's Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World [link to my Substack essay]
The decision to combine volumes of hard data on population, economy and resources with a certain evocative Gothic tone incorporating ghosts, revenants and vampiric exploitation might seem a risky one, but there is a solid precedent for such. There's no law that says a book that is essentially a work of political economy in materialist dialectic mode can't be imaginatively written, and Marx is full of phantasms and vampires too. Famously, he and collaborator Engels wrote that "a spectre is haunting Europe" and Neel is happy to incorporate such spooky turns of phrase,
An example of this is the description of the "beast of war" emerging from the womb of that capitalist industrial sector known as the "military industrial complex", nurtured by the state itself and its stoking of the "free market":
"Eventually, something breaks and the beast is again cast from the womb of the market to smear its bloody hide across the surface of the world. Worse still: the beast is semelparous, and its long, deadly passage is therefore also a sort of spawning."
Like most readers I had to go scurrying to the dictionary here to find that 'semelparous' means reproducing only once before death, like a salmon, rather than at several moments throughout the creature's lifetime. This in turn made for a meditation on what there is about the 'reproduction' of this monstrous beast War that makes it so. I'm still not convinced by the metaphor, but I'm grateful for the opportunity to consider it...
There are so many wonderful touches in this vast book (one habitually says "sprawling" here, but in fact Hellworld is anything but sprawling, showing all the signs of a tight control over structure and narrative). One of my favourites is the incorporation of the poetry of Xu Lizhi (1990-2014), a young Chinese poet who was obliged to work for Foxconn the notorious sweatshop of industrial manufacturing which produces (among others) Apple iPhone and who killed himself.
I've always loved this work with its gentle melancholy and its undertow of rebellious defiance against the industrial machine that was destroying the poet's soul. It is highly consonant with the tone of the rest of Neel's book, which adopts a similar defiance by means of the most lyrical narrative. Neel does well in incorporating this poetry respectfully, not as a grotesque show of morbid sensation but as a true critique of our developing hellworld seen up close.
As I stated, I'm still working my way along through this text and there's much still to discover, to grapple with, to argue with, to assimilate or reject as the case may be. But whatever else, I'm struck at all times by the text's intelligence and imaginativeness, as well as its passion. Take this declaration of intent about the nature of revolutionary politics
"communist politics must take as its practical foundation an immanent struggle within and against the hellworld of capital. It is a struggle over work, wages, and wars that also seeks to supersede each... There is no way out and there is no rapturous, final battle, no coming catastrophe that cannot be turned into fuel for the machine. There is just a bloody, slow grappling through ash and mud, inches lost, inches won. No collapse, only crisis and combat. The body of the beast must be broken open from the inside, corroded slowly as the cancer of communist measures cascades from cell to cell. Neither the social forms of commodity society nor the environment they have constructed simply dissolve. They must be intentionally dismantled and repurposed through careful experimentation. "
It is breathtakingly original of the author to compare the desired state - the communist transformation of capitalist society into a human-centred society and economy - to a cancer eating away at the body politic. It is a complete transformation of expected imagery in the service of the subversion of the typical revolutionary images of barricades and Kalashnikovs held on high. "No rapturous final battle, no coming catstrophe". It's an example of the danger posed to capitalist structures - a cancerous destruction of its organism you might say - by such starkly original thinking.
On Neel's Substack there's a chance to follow what we might call the "Hellworld Extended Universe" with essays that take in peripheral issues, perhaps outtakes, asides or later ideas that connect with the text. One of the recent ones is the history of stringed lutes, the development of the guitar, and the outsider rebellious status of guitar music (blues, rock, minstrelsy) within canonical music). Bloody wonderful.
Hellworld is unapologetically left-wing - not liberal, not libertarian, but Marxistly, communistly left-wing - throughout, and I appreciate that directness of purpose and lack of shilly-shallying about desired ends. I applaud the author's intention and objectives in this work. But I do have some caveats.
As an author developing a series of stories set in a post-apocalyptic "Kollapse", I would dispute the author's contention (heard on a recent podcast) that collapse narratives are inherently reactionary and inherently individualistic. For one thing, I don't conceive of polycris and collapse as at all unlikely. Societies, complex societies, have collapsed before though never before at a global scale. There's always a first time,
And as a scene in the recent HBO version of post-apocalytic game The Last of Us suggests, a post-apocalyptic or "post-Kollapse" condition might well bring co-operative non-hierarchical forms of society to the fore. A young man warns about the dangers of communist thought to his girlfriend, who comments deadpan: "But we are commuinists". He sees their community as a bunch of powerful individuals expressing their Ayn-Randian personality. She knows that really they are a co-operative structure moving forward on the will of their common humanity.
So it may be in the Hellworld. It could be that the Hellworld goes on to become a global dystopia, in which case its collapse is in my view an inevitability. It may be that enough of the "good cancer" of communist transformation occurs at the local scale to finally scale up and transform society at the very largest of its dimensions, though difficult to see as we survey things today.
But revolutionary optimism is a thing, and this book despite its title is essentially a sustained work of revolutionary optimism. I have hope for Neel's "good cancer" eating up the corrupt organism of capital, I really do. But I'm not gonna give up my apocalyptic imaginings for the time being.
July 20, 2026
Like the planetary factory, sprawling and uneven. All the ingredients are here, much to chew on.
July 21, 2026
Really brilliant tome full of information and horror novel-ish prose. Focuses heavily on China.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews