Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict

by Phil A. Neel

Over the last forty years, the human landscape of the United States has been fundamentally transformed. The metamorphosis is partially visible in the ascendance of glittering, coastal hubs for finance, infotech, and the so-called creative class. But this is only the tip of an economic iceberg, the bulk of which lies in the darkness of the declining heartland or on the dimly lit fringe of sprawling cities. This is America’s hinterland, populated by towering grain threshers and hunched farmworkers, where laborers drawn from every corner of the world crowd into factories and “fulfillment centers” and where cold storage trailers are filled with fentanyl-bloated corpses when the morgues cannot contain the dead.

Urgent and unsparing, this book opens our eyes to America’s new heart of darkness. Driven by an ever-expanding socioeconomic crisis, America’s class structure is recomposing itself in new geographies of race, poverty, and production. The center has fallen. Riots ricochet from city to city led by no one in particular. Anarchists smash financial centers as a resurgent far right builds power in the countryside. Drawing on his direct experience of recent popular unrest, from the Occupy movement to the wave of riots and blockades that began in Ferguson, Missouri, Phil A. Neel provides a close-up view of this landscape in all its grim but captivating detail. Inaugurating the new Field Notes series, published in association with the Brooklyn Rail , Neel’s book tells the intimate story of a life lived within America’s hinterland.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Economics, Sociology, History, Geography, United States

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Phillip 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)

Reviews

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that meanders (massive compliment). I need more books like this. Absolutely loved it

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most interesting and hard-hitting books I have read in a long time. In four meandering chapters, Neel surveys the way that the massive inhuman supply chains of late capitalism have reshaped human geography. His focus is refreshingly turned away from wealthy, high-tech urban centers and toward what he calls the “hinterlands,” spaces dominated by the actual production and circulation of capital rather than its management and organization. Neel draws from a mix of personal experience and hard data to explain how this new terrain of struggle functions.

Most interesting, are the first and last chapters of the book. In the first, Neel presents an original and useful analysis of the far-right that is blessedly free of the sensational knee-jerk “antifascist” slogans endemic to left-wing discourse. The danger, he observes, comes not from right-Gramscians speaking on college campuses, but from insurgent “patriot” movements in the mountain west like the Oath Keepers and III%ers who have been effective at building power by intervening in rent and tax struggles in rural communities. In the fourth chapter, he examines the riot: how it is born, lives, and dies. His key insight is that successful riots of recent years have always had a “vanguard” of sorts, united by pre-political affiliations, prototypical examples being the football ultras in Ukraine and Egypt. He contrasts this with Occupy, where organizing around vague political affinities and a dogmatic adherence to direct democracy undercut the ability of the protestors to act decisively. The ultras, then, are Neel’s model for a potential left-wing counterpoint to the insurgent power-building of the far right.

Finally, Neel presents all of this with eloquence and power. Abstract theory and empirical data are interwoven with his personal experiences growing up in a working class rural community, traveling China’s industrial heartland, protesting with Occupy, being incarcerated with migrants, and more. This keeps the book grounded and lends it an authority and urgency that politically adjacent works (such as Endnotes) lack. At times, his writing does get a bit flowery (I think one should only be allowed one use of the word “incarnadine” per book), and there are moments when it feels gratuitously apocalyptic, but when it hits hard, it hits hard. Moreover, Neel’s forceful writing focuses on the universality of the working class – as capital increasingly produces “surplus populations,” humans are increasingly united by the singular experience of total dispossession and alienation - what Jacques Camatte calls the “material community of capital”. This, I think, is crucial, especially given the particularized, identarian bent of the academic and petit-bourgeois left.

Ultimately, I highly recommend this book to anyone seriously interested in revolutionary communist politics. It may not have all the answers, but for once someone is posing the right questions.

[tout · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book offers a kind of field notes on what is a global phenomenon, through travels amidst a slow development of ruins and potential rebirth of the peri-urban, suburban and rural life outside of "revitalizing" tech driven metropolises and logistical nodes. This transition in the economy (or whatever you want to call it) is defining a new kind of life, driving what it can incorporate and use toward it and pushing what can't by way of an inclusive/exclusion or what is surplus toward the edges—what Neel calls the Hinterlands. And in this change, some who are downwardly mobile are driven to defend lost and dying unities (the nation, whiteness, masculinity, etc), forming cultic mythologies to give them a place in the world again, to find meaning in their seeming uselessness. These are the conditions for a far right resurgence. However, the author argues that the real threat is not in extreme examples of their ideology, but in groups like the three percenter's ability to out organize others and to maintain "competitive control" (especially in the rural territories) by offering material support to those living in areas where there is little get by through both the local economy or state funding. Essentially, and the book doesn't explicitly focus on this argument as much, if anti-fascism primarily concerns itself with spectacular battles with celebrity fascists on the streets it will nonetheless lose the territory. For revolutionaries not to take seriously the task of actually building a world (meaning to earnestly provide for each other in an expansive way beyond a milieu, beyond friendship), is in a sense a liberal position, since it presumes a de facto normal of the state, social services, democracy, society, a center position, etc to fall back on when everything else seems to indicate a fragmentation and new era of partisanship. Revolutionaries must either orient themselves to this or they will lose.

I'm not convinced of Neel's Marxist analysis to describe this process in total though it's useful for describing much of the processes of restructuring. Capital is only one form of governing among others, and not the form of governing that informs all others, as Marxists would argue. Instead, it is those who build a life in common who can thus be called communists. History is ripe with many examples of ways in which being a Marxist has inhibited one's being a communist. In terms of this book, where this framework is most lacking is a perspective that goes beyond a negative commonality of being proletarianized. There needs to be something (rather than merely being children of the void) that binds communists together in order to build a world. It is necessary now to define a revolutionary position affirmatively as an attachment to both what is here but also to what we bring into existence.

[kathleen]

this has been on my reading list for a while after reading this phil neel interview: https://illwill.com/new-battlefields

i was rly compelled by this book, which sometimes feels animated by fury, sometimes contempt
the prose is sometimes a little excessive but i also wish more political books were like this lol, i was reminded of reading chuang

made me think about the ways in which organizing is a geographic problem

[Clara · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
based on the very intense/descriptive prose scattered throughout the book, i think Neel should write some steamy anarchist fiction, anyone else?

[Jose Roque Perez-Zetune · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Class appears to dissolve in isolation. How many people, really, do we talk to in a given day?”

oof.
central argument is essentially this. it reminds me of nyc, long island and upstate. dc, montgomery county, and frederick (f-red neck). and especially LA and the inland empire. it was only a matter of time teamster logistics organizing got hot.

Rather than attempting to pin down what, exactly, is the proper outer border of such a city, it makes more sense simply to acknowledge that the old categories of urban, suburban, and rural may simply have less explanatory power for the contemporary capitalist city than they once had. Instead, we can define clear islands of affluence, encircled by a near hinterland composed of identifable industrial-logistics expanses that gradually fade into a farther hinterland of agriculture, black markets, and (half-)abandoned fields, factories, and forests.

[Vivian]

or, hillbilly elegy for maoists.

‘People shuffled up and down the cars, each looking as if they were searching for something specific, as if they’d lost someone they knew or heard of open seats in the next car over. But really they were wandering aimlessly. There was no one to find, and nowhere better that could be reached from here. Some would stop near me, red-faced, taking swigs from dark bottles of erguotou, a dizzyingly strong liquor distilled from sorghum. They’d offer me some and try to ask questions in English: where I was from, why I was here, what America was like. America is pretty much like China, I would tell them. No, they’d shake their heads. America must be better, they said, because in America you have guns.’

broadly, two different types of marxists (or communists or whatever) write books like this. those like mike davis aim to popularize and translate left-wing positions so that they are legible to the neophyte. a dramatic writer like davis wants to make vivid the horrors of capitalism; you don’t need to read a single volume of capital to get the gist. in contrast, you would not hand time, labor, and social domination to someone unfamiliar with the marxian debates that moishe postone takes up, because that book would read like gibberish to a lay audience. marx himself fits somewhat awkwardly in between these theatrical and theoretical registers, often veering between tones within the same text. ludovico silva—let’s put him in the second camp—goes so far as to argue that marx’s aesthetics & rhetorical style are at the core of his work. in my experience, though, people in my field (literary studies) tend to be guilty of overstating just how literary marx was. ultimately, he wants you to follow his arguments; he’s not a gothic novelist.

phil neel is a gothic novelist. we open to ‘the stink of factories and endless, fertilizer-soaked fields pushed against the claustrophobic smell of food and bodies.’ a train is a ‘steel carcass’ where ‘thin windows slit in the metal like narrow wounds.’ mountains—‘occulted gods’—hint at ‘the dark blood-churn of the mantle below.’ sturgeons appear like ‘primordial sea monsters,’ statues like ‘pale corpses being lifted out of tar.’ wildfires move ‘in slow waves of ash-choked, ambient doom.’ ‘oil pipelines cut across the landscape like black scars.’ a dead body might be ‘melted to dust by swarms of insects.’ tear gas and finance alike ‘drift[] . . . like mist rising from a corpse.’ trump is ‘a golden-fleshed death god summoned by deindustrialization.’ post-08 generations of workers join the ‘grand parade of the futureless.’ the economic hinterland is a ‘vast sunken continent that met its ruin in some ancient cataclysm, populated now with broken-looking people sifting through the rubble of economies stillborn or long dead.’ ‘The Crisis . . . is a vast creature, not contained by familiar scales of time or space’ that ‘tear[s] into the flesh of economics itself.’

certainly not too academic in register, then. more than any left-wing writer, this put me in mind of an apocalyptic levi-strauss (despite neel’s glass-house sniping at ‘flowery french prose’). to be honest, i found these flourishes a little overwrought and off-putting at first, an indulgence at the risk of making the subject seem less rather than more serious. the trouble with opting to write in such a highly stylized manner as a communist is that in the last instance your text has to measure up against the metric of practical utility. more generously, the style certainly makes an empirical study more interesting to read, the book calms down after a bit, and these moments show that neel is not a dispassionate academic observer but someone for whom these abstractions are real.

this style and these case studies ultimately serve to illustrate the central claims of the book: that global capitalism (‘that vast hostage situation called ‘the economy’’) discards into peripheral ‘wastelands for global production’ those surplus populations expelled from the ceaseless churn of economic development centered in the city, submitting this reserve army of low wage workers, the unemployed, and the unhoused—‘the migrant, the refugee, the slum-dweller’—to the horrifying living conditions that typify the nightmare hellscape of global capitalism for the majority of its subjects. and because this group of economic exiles tips the scales whenever erupts the fight for a life with dignity—that is, one not shackled to extraction, profit, and bloodletting (now i’ve caught it)—an emancipatory politics must take as its starting point the ‘unity of separation’ that links everyone in this underclass excluded, at various distances, from the administrative centers of the world market.

in other words, ‘the economy takes shape in space. . . . there are factories and warehouses and ports and rail yards out there somewhere, they take up space, they tend to cluster and sprawl in certain patterns and certain locations, and the people who work in them also live somewhere.’

neel maps these human dump sites of the ‘far’ hinterlands in rural nevada and along the oregon/california border (where he’s from) and ‘near’ hinterlands in the first-ring suburbs where the displaced poor have been shunted in seattle and ferguson, missouri, though the scope of his analysis extends far beyond those places (the sections about shenzhen and houston are especially interesting). the global economy’s simultaneous disavowal of and dependence on these cordoned-off places makes them of much greater political importance than you might imagine, given that ‘the very core of urban space . . . has become the blindingly singular focus of politics.’ more effective insurrections, neel suggests, have drawn the frequently depoliticized people from the economic ‘hinterland’ into the metropole, as ‘those excluded from the urban core and thrown out into that hinterland beyond suddenly flood back into it.’ but the hinterlands aren’t just nowhere, either. they are often essential for the global flow of goods and capital, even if the people are treated by capital as waste.

in nevada, neel notes the threat of militant far-right groups that manage local support systems akin to a perverse dual power strategy in devastated areas. right-wing groups ‘organize in the vacuum left by the collapse of local economies,’ filling in the gaps of failing or nonexistent local social services/infrastructure (while opposing attempts to broaden the tax base). the frighteningly large crossover between far-right groups like the oath keepers or the three percenters and law enforcement enables this dual power approach, while fostering the rise of a right-libertarian ‘land politics.’ in the oregon mountains of the next chapter, sub-poverty-wage seasonal contract fire-fighting and ever diminishing forest service work opportunities belie a similar absence of real state support or industry (or disaster relief), supplemented with black market activity (as often for smuggled consumer goods as for opiates). in the abandoned far hinterlands, then, ‘competitive control’ over social reproduction matters much more than the ideological coalitions that tend to follow.

in the near hinterlands, the combined and uneven development of the ‘global city’ and the ‘logistics city’ within the same major metropoles (e.g., seattle) conditions the reversal of class trends in urban cores and suburbs. sprawling ever outward, logistics infrastructure comes to usurp all other industries than service. just-so stories about modern information economies or creative economies elide the actually determinate factors, in seattle’s case its geographical position as a convenient node in the global supply chain & its residual military tech. ‘the old categories of urban, suburban, and rural may simply have less explanatory power for the contemporary capitalist city than they once had. Instead, we can define clear islands of affluence, encircled by a near hinterland composed of identifiable industrial-logistics expanses that gradually fade into a farther hinterland of agriculture, black markets, and (half-)abandoned fields, factories, and forests.’

the final chapter, on ferguson as a model of suburban insurrection/counterinsurgency in the new ‘global era of riots,’ traces how networks of ngos, activist groups, and local governments tried to function as soft ‘ancillaries of the police.’ but advantages (and constraints) attach to the near hinterland’s suburban terrain of struggle: ‘The other features that extended the riots in Ferguson were largely artifacts of the area’s own affluent past: the lack of surveillance, its decentralization, the ease with which rioters could move between street, forest, and fenced-in yard. Quite unlike the narrow street-and-alley geography of the urban riot, this suburban unrest had an enormous amount of space within which to operate—the main constraint was not the police or the physical obstruction of traffic and buildings, but instead the long, flat distance between decentralized targets.’ if the suburbs have been reshaped, though, deputized white supremacist radicals of the exurbs emerge to support the administrative capitalist class of the urban core. alongside competitive control, then, organizing needs to understand the new geography of this ‘latent civil war.’ (there's more to this argument that this review nicely teases out.)

ultimately, wars of attrition consistently quell sequences of insurrection, especially in cities where movements like occupy become the dog who caught the car, seizing buildings with no material connection to the circulatory struggles made possible in the hinterlands. as someone skeptical of marxist/anarchist eschatology, i found refreshing neel’s candor about the intense experience of disappointment in these moments: ‘The return to normalcy is never really a return to anything—recognition of this fact is the only way you can escape the emotional ruin of these “recoveries.”’ further, his attention as a geographer not just to industrial bases but to natural/ecological contingencies & even geological history made this a nicely concrete empirical complement to the more abstract theoretical stuff that tends to trend (e.g. søren mau, beverley best, even at times jamie merchant’s book in the same series). and the tone matches the bleak scene he draws, substance for the stylistic surplus. neel asks: ‘Can a new communist politics emerge from capitalist sprawl?’ that strikes me as a question worth asking.

predictably, as an overeducated urban beneficiary of the processes of exclusion and exploitation that he describes, i was frustrated by neel’s intermittent hostility to any perceived ‘identitarian’ politics in the name of a kind of class-first-class-only approach. this frustrated me in part because he himself makes a convincing argument that the normative ‘urban subject’ of contemporary politics depends on excluded populations it disavows (mimicking the dependence/disavowal that marks capital’s relation to the same groups). in other words, processes of identity formation are politically determinate. these processes set limits that can’t be overcome through half-baked exhortations to prioritize connection over difference but rather require the same working-through as the geographical problems of political organizing that neel outlines. as another reviewer points out, many of neel’s key examples of insurrection centrally involve race, but they are frequently assimilated here into general anticapitalist protest. occasionally neel usefully corrects assumptions about the racial makeup of various rural populations & poverty rates, but his dismissive invocations of the ‘identitarian’ left made it seem as if in his mind only white liberals could possibly care. there’s no engagement with the rich work done on the relation between race and class outside of these dismissals. such unreconstructed criticisms of left ‘identitarianism’ just feel like empty cliches, at best. (he's slightly better on the question in this interview.)

which returns us to the question of audience. is neel in the first or second camp? hard to say. he has the dramatic flair of a mike davis type, but sometimes it’s hard to imagine what the uninitiated or the unconverted would glean from his internecine swipes. maybe more than tailoring the work to an audience, his style demonstrates his lived relation to this stuff (not to sound like a metropolitan elite venerating lived experience). the hinterlands are not an abstract theoretical construct but a real place with real people, neel among them. so both form and content won me over by the end. sometimes it’s just nice to read something written by, as this reviewer puts it, ‘a literal communist.’

this book taught me the word ‘semelparous.’

[KC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hinterland is a good, not-all-that-popular non-fiction book, lent to me by a friend, that covers some really interesting ground in its slim 175 pages. Phil Neel’s book technically argues a point, that point being that the “hinterland” (a colloquial term for the sprawl beyond nodes of economic activity) will prove to be vital in the inevitable anticapitalist revolution. (It does not take long to realize Neel identifies as a staunch communist.) The roadmap Neel uses to frame and justify this point, though, is, for me, the selling point of the book: It’s a meandering mix of a travelogue/personal memoir; a journalistic exposé on suburban and rural right-wing political/cultural movements; an academic essay submitted to departments of geography, sociology, or history; what I began to refer to as “mic drop” indictments of the modern left; and a call to action. (These last two are in a sense one and the same.) It is pleasantly scattered, in a way that allows the reader to learn bits and pieces about far-right movements in the rural U.S., labor conditions of firefighters in California, and the role of China in the American economic journey, but never in a way that completely loses sight of his overall thesis.

Being as circuitous as it is, Neel flexes several intellectual and literary muscles in this short book. One of those muscles is that of the poet—one that I’m conflicted about in this context. Hinterland is essentially part lyric essay, shoving postmodern commentary sounding like

“... tear into the flesh of economics itself, digging under the upward trending charts of profitability, global development, and the ‘information economy’ to reach, finally, the hard, blood-soaked bone of that other, longer crisis that seemed now both to predate and to outlive our collapsing economy altogether”

right next to modern numbers-based Claims And Justification about urban displacement or the frightening police state of Ferguson, Mississippi. Part of my conflict is that he IS a good writer: These passages can be quite arresting, and, actually, I love lyric essays. Operating under the assumption that this book could convert some readers to Neel’s political camp, however, I tend to think these poetics distract from what I’d consider a more effective “A means B because C” justification of his approach to revolution. Perhaps this stems from an unnecessary mental divider between poetic writing and academic narrativization. Perhaps there is an important element of Charisma in Writing at work here—accomplished through flowery prose and useful in inspiring hope for change—as one of the many things this book could be characterized as is a “manifesto.” It’s an array of pros and cons, but at the end of the day it makes for an interesting piece of literature that scratches many itches, whether that be a good idea or not.

My only other hangup is that, being in part a human and economic geography exposé, Neel could benefit from including some maps, diagrams, or other spatial representations of his ideas. This would simply help ground his theory and make it more directly applicable to The Real World for his readers leaning toward the left brain.

Hinterland is altogether a good read with some enlightening facts and figures and inspiring prose. While many other worthwhile (what I call “issue-oriented”) non-fiction books stare at specific systems of inequality in late capitalism, Neel’s book is a laudable attempt to stare a little closer at the horizon, to get a better picture of one communist’s conception of the shape of things to come and the road to get there. I’m glad I read it, as it has helped spark a recent non-fiction kick that may more fully radicalize me and toss me into the beautiful and unforgiving fire that is a more active fight for a better world.

Oh also, extra points to Phil Neel for using the phrase “evolutionary meat grinder” more than once in the final chapter.

[Hrsh Chbr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good, for someone who really wants to center class over race Neel really only mentions uprisings with a large racial component as past events to give us some inspiration as we move forward.

[lille rev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Herregud

[Carole · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a whole book! Particularly eye-opening was the description of the counties so rural that they could not provide a deputy off-hours and advised people dealing with domestic abuse situations to move to other places. The argument that these areas of the country are particularly vulnerable to the power being taken over by extremists because extreme groups step in to provide those services is particularly strong.

This book did seem scattered, and it felt like Neel could have written more clearly edited books on every topic referenced here—the way that rural areas are decimated over time and the black markets that spring up there, the migration of rural people into urban areas and the process of becoming part of those places, and the urban organization of modern cities with an analysis of industrialized areas and demographic spread. The urgency carried this book beyond the scattered scope, but it feels like someone writing for the first time about issues, probably because I came into this knowing Neel is not from academia. He does not have the attitude that liberals should come in and change rural areas, which comes up when people from universities start this kind of analysis. Instead his writing sits on the edge of the coming revolution, looking over the groups that have succeeded elsewhere, at the rumblings of unrest in America. He doesn’t have a prescriptive solution, but he offers clues to what we might start to look for, which is in its own more honest way much more helpful.

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

While Neel drawing attention to and analyzing the conditions of the "hinterland" of the U.S. is necessary and welcome, this book suffers significant flaws. There is a general lack of theoretical or structural coherence, though the figurative language throughout does make a strong impression.

Class is the only lens used to evaluate the material and subjective conditions discussed, yet in a fairly old-school Marxist fashion, where local or communal struggles are dismissed and international revolution based on class held to be the only real solution. Intersectionality is denigrated or ignored, race is subordinated to class, issues such as patriarchy or heteronormativity make no appearance at all. This leads to numerous problematic assertions throughout the book.

This is made all the more ironic by the fact that Neel focuses solely on class, yet all the examples he draws on as promising hints for the future of unrest (Ferguson, Baltimore, Charlotte, Baton Rouge, etc.) were responses to anti-Black state violence. This glaring contradiction at the heart of his argument is never addressed or resolved.

Finally, as one who has lived in the "near hinterland" and in discussing this book with someone from the "far hinterland," I feel Neel paints an overly kind picture of the political views of many of those areas' inhabitants.

[Alex Ripley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Possibly the least satisfying book I've ever read. Neel purports to offer something fresh and innovative: a rigorous, narrative-driven Marxist analysis of Middle America's sad decline. He does not deliver, however, and instead fills 174 miserable pages with personal tales of woe, cherry-picked statistics, and thinly veiled incitements to violence. But, as if his ideas were not half-baked enough to sink the book on their own (they are), his writing is what truly deals the coup de grace. It is apocalyptically bad. It is lazy and decadent, the victim of massive, wandering sentences (some knocking on the door of half a page) and poor editing. I was drawn to "Hinterland" because I care deeply about the plight of people in rural places and want to know how to fix them. Neel begins with a good concept and an interesting premise, but quickly falls down in his execution of this premise. Avoid at all costs.

[Dante · Rating 4 out of 5]

heavy, catastrophic insight. a well founded, perhaps somewhat misdirected, pessimism articulated through burning prose. I don't agree with much of the outer edges of his analysis, but share agreement with it's foundation.

[Avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding prose, very interesting strategic considerations considering this is a geography book

[Kai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Neel is rescuing landscape writing in geography from its otherwise largely conservative past and contemporary descent into irrelevance

[Dan McCarthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

First heard about this book from an interview with the author on the podcast Antifada (ep. 136 3/17/21)

I had to sit with this book in my head for a while before I could put any thoughts onto paper. Here’s my impression:

Hinterland is a depressingly beautiful book. A combination of personal memoir and a sharp look at the world falling apart around us.

Neel takes his experiences in the rural United States and China and uses them to paint a picture of the ‘hinterland’: the rural areas left behind by capital as the economy globalizes and population coalesces in cities. These areas are dilapidated ruins; home to the unemployed and the working poor, drowning in drugs and crime as people get desperate. It’s an angle of class conflict not often discussed in the marxist works I’ve read so far, and a divide in our country ignored at one’s risk.


These are the areas, which used to be termed the periphery, aren’t “global cities”. These are subdivided between “near hinterland” - suburban and close to global centers of capital but serve a certain productive function - or the “far hinterland” - rural areas where some subsistence economy exists but have been largely deindustrialized. This latter division includes places like Appalachia and Detroit (where demolitions outpace construction).

It's from these areas we see the unrest bubbling up into our collective consciousness. The Bundy occupation of government offices, the rise of militia's, the Ferguson riots - all occurring in these hinterlands. As is the rising levels of diseases of dispair - opioid abuse, suicide, alcoholism - and other health issues leading to lower life expectancies. In these spaces people are isolated and depressed and lack the social safety nets to help. The only jobs are either environmentally destructive extractive processes or nonproductive work. (warehouses, prisons, slowly disappearing service jobs)

"Underneath that surface appearance of stability, such spaces today signify a proletariat unified only in its separation. The economic ascent that made the suburbs into sites of working class upward mobility has disappeared, replaced now with slow collapse. Today's normal thus inhabits the landscape of the past haphazardly. Poverty seems to disappear behind the picket fence. Class appears to dissolve in isolation. How many people, really do we talk to in a given day? We talk to co-workers, customers, maybe crowds, depending on the job. Maybe it's one of those social positions a teacher, a counselor, something in which you can at least lie to yourself for a while and say you're making some sort of impact, that you're at least able to connect with people. But those lies come harder when you've had some fragment of truly communal closeness, only to be thrown back into the world as it is the material community of capital, where even our basic emotional connections are somehow mediated by that hostage situation we call the economy. It doesn't really matter if it's a riot, an occupation, or maybe just something preserved under the extreme circumstances of imprisonment and poverty. You can feel yourself losing it. After work, you go straight home to smoke some weed and watch a movie, or maybe you see a handful of friends who somehow still feel distant, cycling through the bar or the club desperately to try to force that feeling back, as if it were a kind of narrow chemical deficiency instead of an expansive social devastation. You get home somehow in the darkness, the dull orange glow of those factories and warehouses backlighting the horizon."

These are the symptoms of a collapsing imperial capitalistic system. It has always relied on the deindustrialization of regions of extraction and the concentration of wealth into a smaller number of people. It's just now there's no longer anything left in the Global South that hasn't been privatized, and now the imperial center is eating itself.


Neel doesn't give any easy fixes to halting or reversing the march into our dystopian neo feudal future, prescriptions I would have welcomed now that everyday there's a new court ruling or mass shooting, but it does shed light on what we all feel and see around us.

Since reading it, this book has come up in a number of other podcast interviews with political science academics discussing hinterlandization.
It's certainly not a happy book and doesn't leave you with positive outlook of our current system, but Neel does have some hope when discussing the socialist left and the new generations.

"But as millions of Beatles-loving, Trump-and-Hillary-voting, homeowning baby boomers die off, their particular anti-communist brain-rot dies with them. The generational divide here really does drive down to the most basic level: around the same time that the U.S. had finally imprisoned the same share of its population as the USSR under the height of the gulag system, I remember a baby boomer explaining to me that the most important difference between capitalism and "communism" was that under capitalism the government can't just spy on you, kick down your door, and search your property. A few years later, of course, the government was kicking down my door and searching my property, all because I was identified out of a picture-book of "known anarchists," based on intel gathered by thorough surveillance of my house, local protests and online social networks. For these people, the urn cannot approach quickly enough."

We've grown up without the Cold War and the us vs them anticommunism, we're living through the corruption of our democratic systems and the expansion of our surveillance state. For the first time in decades there is rising working class power that can be built on.

"Personally, I don't understand the compulsion to mine history for words that might describe what's to come. The fact is that the approaching flood has no name. Any title it might take is presently lost in the noise of its gestation, maybe just beginning to be spoken in a language that we can hardly recognize. There will be no Commune because this isn't Paris in 1871. There will be no Dual Power because this isn't Russia in 1917. There will be no Autonomy because this isn't Italy in 1977. I'm writing this in 2017, and I don't know what's coming, even though I know something is rolling toward us in the darkness, and the world can end in more ways than one. Its presence is hinted at somewhere deep inside the evolutionary meat grinder of riot repeating riot, all echoing ad infinitum through the Year of our Lord 2016, when the anthem returned to its origin, and the corpse flowers bloomed all at once as Louisiana was turned to water, and no one knew why. I don't call people comrade; I just call them friend. Because whatever's coming has no name, and anyone who says they hear it is a liar. All I hear are guns cocking over trap snares unrolling to infinity."

[Jo Sabath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erudite and quick-moving, if perhaps slightly grumpy (though justified in being so).

Points at some important trends, and thinks effectively about ways to overcome some of our current challenges. Intersperses analytically sharp insight into the hollowing out of rural America and its former centers of industry with effective and well written narrative passages. I think it’s a little “of its time” (2017) with regard to its preoccupations with “hipsterism,” “identity politics, etc, but I’d be eager to see what Neal has done since.

Flagged some sections I’ll be eager to revisit. Section on “logistics cities” very good, as was the analysis of blm/forest service as rent extraction in rural areas. I think theres some interesting convergent action potential with popular stewardship on public land, though I’m not sure Neal would agree.

[Durakov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part of me wishes I'd read this with a group (and I might push for this one day). There were so many sharp points and jabs made and textures defined that offer themselves to sustained reflection in a period following social upheaval. This is part partisan geography, part economic analysis, part political agitation, and part moving ecological poetry on converging slow apocalypses. This book's mode of analysis is doubly acidic to contemporary activist formations, first on account of a penetrating critique of their self-assured myopia and urban chauvinism, and second because Hinterland's diagnosis of the problem is so much wider, clearer, and more immediately felt and understood precisely because Neel could not care less about paying tribute to any present-day shibboleths.

Hinterland moves in the best tradition of communist partisan literature that demands of theory dynamic sets of tools for dispelling illusions, for drawing up maps, and outlining tactical lines in the sand that can be brushed away too when the time comes.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unexpected Macklemore cameo in chapter four

[Gram · Rating 4 out of 5]

I sometimes forget about the power of description and this book is a great reminder of it.

[Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

There’s a lot wrong and and lot right with this book. Written very beautifully.

[Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings about this one. The first chapters of this, the intro and discussion of the "far hinterland", are quite arid but offer some insights. We learn about the ideologies of independence predominating among these places, torn between employment in federal jobs, "productive" industries such as mining, logging and agriculture, industries that depend upon both (like retail), and straight unemployment. Struggles here are "land-based", focus on rents, and are relatively isolated from any kind of mass politics due to their isolation from the primary circuits of capital. Neel makes some claims about how the far right is able to expand in these places due to their service provision work in the absence of the state, but I would like to see some stronger data on this because I have heard claims of the opposite. In this part his punching bags are "urban liberals" and "leftists", who he seems to often conflate because both care too much about race (so he thinks). The left is derided as "weak" but his analysis of why this is so is weaker (it is barely even present). The old lines about how "the left" does not care about white poverty, and that white poverty is getting worse, are rehearsed (the latter true, the former false. It is odd to see this book make these claims about the US left when it came out after the Bernie campaign with its clear class based appeals but weaker analysis on race). There is also some discussion of wildland firefighting, which as someone who thinks a lot about climate I found worthwhile though it is only really an occupation in the West.

The next bit about "near hinterlands" and US economic geography is more interesting, with insights on the ongoing inversion of cities from impoverished downtowns with wealthy suburbs (as in the immediate postwar period) to wealthier downtowns populated by a disproportionately white "creative class" with more diverse and poorer suburbs outside. These suburbs and peri-urban zones include a "near hinterland" of manufacturing and logistics sites. Outside of them are the far hinterlands of unemployment, black markets, government jobs and extractive zones. Some newly developing cities where capital is flowing in (like Houston, TX) have no center but instead a multitude of them as capital accretes around a variety of new sites. These forms are reproduced between regions: "brain hubs" of higher education and high tech industries forming on the coasts (ironically thanks in part to their positions as interchange zones for international trade), "sunbelts" of "logistics cities", and slowly evacuating "rust belt" cities where employment predominates and constant demolition makes the city into a nearly "rural" space (Detroit is the prime example used here).

Then the book mainly shifts into discussions of resistance. For Neel, the riot seems to be the only really promising and interesting form of this. The analysis of Ferguson as a precursor site of what's to come (diverse but poor suburb, subjected to extractive police practices to keep its government afloat; and with a sequence of riots that used the unique geography of the suburbs to its advantage, facing the dual attacks of militarized police and Black bourgeoisie and NGOs calling for "dialogue") is fascinating. The later praise of "ultras" (apolitical actors committed only to accelerating street fights) as a force to be used in service of revolutionary goals is difficult to get on board with. Neel acknowledges near the end of the book that riots are not all we need to make a revolution (and he talks a bit about community building and mutual aid projects by the IWW and the Panthers), but you could be forgiven for thinking he believes the opposite. I think he implicitly conflates the temporary thrills of these actions with genuine political efficacy and centers violence too much. I have yet to read a thinker on the left today who seems to adequately bridge the gap between moralistic condemnation of insurrectionary violence (while downplaying the material contradictions that produce it) and hedonistic celebration of it (with a rejection of its nuanced moral implications and a failure to explain how it translates into a long term positive political project).

This is also a super bleak book. On the one hand it's kind of affirming to read something that's not afraid to admit shit's totally fucked, and there are some excellent passages in here. On the other hand Neel's sense of alienation, almost approaching nihilism, is too absolute and seems to drag everything down under it. Not only are his generation's economic prospects bleak, but in his images, so are things like the sun in Missouri and Lake Superior when frozen. Everything sucks. I've had shit moods so I think I pretty much get it, but sometimes this book reminds me of how shit moods can result in both profound insights but also make you sound ridiculous when your emotions become unmoored from their deeper causes and fly off in random directions. For every beautiful sentence there is at least one more (or two more) that just sound like a college student who had a bad trip. The last sentence of the book is "all I hear are guns cocking over trap snares unrolling to infinity". Well, ok.

The autobiographical stuff here is often a good touch. Neel has been through a lot of shit. Some powerful bits are a guy who was in a "work release" incaceration program with him who later admitted he missed the program because of how lonely and boring his post release life was, and Neel's account of how the horizons of Occupy gradually narrowed until the police swept away a lot of the camps. I thought the part in the beginning of the book describing people on a train in China crowding around a glowing cellphone playing Rihanna in the dark was a bit corny and shoe horned into too obvious of a metaphor though.

I think Neel wants to do something like what Marx did in Capital Vol 1, which is a deeply Dantescan book. But his analysis is not as deep (few could ever beat Marx, but as I have suggested this book is stream of consciousness and sometimes sloppy), the targets of his ire are scattershot, and the political methods he advocates are blunt instruments and profoundly limited. Still a worthwhile provocation, especially if you got the book for free or from a library loan.

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are really three books here. The first two thread throughout the first few chapters and the third really only appears in full in the last chapter. I would characterize them thusly: 1) a marxist geography-cum-memoir of rural fringes of capital accumulation and disposession. 2) a critique of "liberal"/activist indentiarianism as fundamentally bourgeois, and 3) an account in the final chapter, some of which was previously published elsewhere, of Ferguson and Baltimore as paradigmatic of the future of insurrectionary uprisings against the geography of such forms of spatialized disposession. Following this schema, "books" 1 and 3 are valuable and insightful. Neel is a fantastic writer, and there is a lot to think about here. But the account of racial capitalism here is weak, and the critique of liberal antiracism's hypocrisy frequently verges into Angela Nagle-style right wing talking points uncritically - see page 36, for instance, wherein Neel seems to more or less endorse the right-wing antisemitic meme that Soros and other jewish billionares are bankrolling the entire Left.

[Holly S · Rating 3 out of 5]

That moment when a juggalo screams “faggot” at the police. Neel is prescient, and I agree with most of his general outlook, especially his conception of the historical party and it’s relation to the riot. I have a real problem with a lot of his thoughts regarding race in the States tho. The sentiment that, as a result of affirmative action programs, poor whites should actually reject notions of equality among their non white fellow workers more than they already do seems particularly wrong to me. And I really didn’t like that little aside in which Neel explains he doesn’t like the term “people of color” because he believes it is meant to trick him into saying “colored people”. If you can look past some weird and bad stuff like that there is a lot of value in this as a predictive meditation on what we can all feel is coming, throw away the bad and take the good with you.

[Graeme · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a decent book buried in here (brief as it is). Neel's geographical argument about near and far hinterlands is useful--as is his application of the notion of competitive control. There are other phenomena that he refers to but doesn't fully unpack, which can make the book frustratingly dense in places and can read more as laziness than concision (to that end, the publisher's decisions about end note citation style and index add to the frustration).

The writing is at its best when he doesn't try so hard.

[Matei · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author is a literal communist.

[Quinn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great, great book. After the uprisings across the country sparked by the murders of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor but on behalf of everyone murdered by police before and after, this is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the dynamics of the riots, the occupations by protestors, the soft repression co-optation of the movement by liberal NGO, media, and elected officials. The book is short and very readable, with memoir scattered throughout the exposition of political and economic circumstances, and its all written in a beautiful style. It provides a broad overview of the trends in social organization that see the gentrification and inaccessibility of city centers in the past associated with poverty, the outward trend of poverty towards suburbs, and the slow but total immiseration of what was previously small towns, the countryside, and rural industry. This overview is framed by explorations of the economic and geographical origins of the growing far-right, as well as of the popular uprisings that indicate the possibility of a better world down a long, hard road. The analyses of the Ferguson, Baltimore, and Baton Rouge uprisings are absolutely prescient in seeing these events as indications of the form unrest and popular movements would take on a larger scale as the global economic crisis deepens. These American events and circumstances are tied to a global rearrangement of social life away from the model of city vs country towards something else that opens up new possibilities of repression and new possibilities of resistance. Read it! It's not long or hard!

[Gabby Akers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give this 6/5 if I could--it's incredible.

The author, with beautiful prose, paints a grim picture of a rust covered "hinterland" that continues to expand as the Long Crisis unfolds. This hinterland, beginning in the suburbs of large metropoles along the coasts of the US where capital is mostly intensely concentrated and extending through the exurbs and into the economically devastated rural areas of the country, contains a large surplus population and has come to resemble a sort of semi-periphery outside the walls of the imperial core in the cities they extend from. This group of downwardly mobile middle class, elderly, migrants, and workers made obsolete by the whims of finance capital grow more and more in debt due to rising rents and corruption in their communities--Liberalism has failed them and can offer no solutions.

This new proletariat, the author argues, will be on the forefront of the coming unrest: as the strain on the contradictions of capitalism continues to build and the immiseration of those in the hinterland grows their will be a breaking point where they announce: "this can be tolerated no longer." The far right are already mobilizing in these communities and offering real, practical solutions to their problems while continuing to build power by doing so, but all is not lost, as the author notes, people will follow power generally regardless of politics, and perhaps there is an opportunity here for communists to build power of our own in these areas.

[waztrel · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic. beautifully written. would be worth reading even if the political analysis was off-base. marxist analysis drawing on neel's experiences as an anarchist at Occupy + Ferguson, background as a poor/working-class white American. effectively conveys how the scale and nature of capitalist production has changed. many valuable observations on the decentralized nature of production, the inversion of urban-suburban poverty and wealth in the 21st century, the animus of social movements and riots. lots packed into a short and concise book which is exactly how i like it.

disagree with some of his assumptions, namely his views on bureaucracy which i think are a bit too reliant on Graeber's (non)understanding of capitalist administration + the identity politics.
SEE another reviewer, Scott (1-star lmao), who wrote: "This is made all the more ironic by the fact that Neel focuses solely on class, yet all the examples he draws on as promising hints for the future of unrest (Ferguson, Baltimore, Charlotte, Baton Rouge, etc.) were responses to anti-Black state violence. This glaring contradiction at the heart of his argument is never addressed or resolved.)"

but yeah well worth reading imo. despite my disagreements, i think neel has hit on something essential in our tactical and strategic understanding of class struggle in north america.

5 stars because i appreciate a book as bitter as i am