This interview originally appeared on the Negation podcast. This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Phil A. Neel is a communist geographer from the Pacific Northwest. He's the author of Hinterland: America's New Landscape of Class and Conflict from Reaktion in 2018 and Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory, published this year with Brill in the Historical Materialism book series. A paperback version will be published with Haymarket in 2026. He is also a regular contributor to the Field Notes section of the Brooklyn Rail. He has recently started a Substack called The Planetary Factory, which we recommend to our readers.
Tommy, Negation Editor:
Something we often ask people we interview is a basic sort of political formation question, which you helpfully touch on a bit in the book. For the benefit of our readers and our listeners, what put the communist in communist geographer, for you?
Phil Neel:
Yeah, I think that's a very distinct, generational question. In the past and previous generations, a lot of people who were getting radicalized, getting turned on to communist, socialist, anarchist politics, they were coming up within some sort of institutional atmosphere where there was like a left that existed at a mass scale. Our parents' generation, the New Left, were defined as emerging against an Old Left that had existed, right? That Old Left was also formed out of this break from the Second International socialist politics as well. That Old Left had been a new left at one point.
One of the interesting things in our period is that the systematic defeat and the world historic eclipse of the global communist movement in the later 20th century has resulted in a situation where many of us have had no institutional left to come up within. What we would refer to as this thing called “the left” is not really the same thing that used to exist at this mass scale. It's this very insular, subcultural thing that can barely even be said to exist at all.
So my sort of story of politicization of radicalization is much more classical—if you look at how people were being radicalized, not in the sixties, not even in the early 1900s, but before that, when these sort of politics were not developed very thoroughly at all, people were just being radicalized and thrust into these ideas through the conditions of their life, right? And so for me, it was really discovering a lot of this stuff in that way, in the conditions of my life.
There were some historical roots of transmission, and having access to the internet was a big thing. While many of the institutional and political dimensions of the left had collapsed, a certain continuity still existed within the cultural sphere. A lot of people would learn about politics because they would go to punk shows or they were in the underground hip-hop scene or something like that. Those sort of spaces retained this political edge and that is where people started to relearn about some of these ideas. You could get old anarcho-punk CDs, you put them in your computer and they'd have PDFs on them that you could download that were by Noam Chomsky. So there was, you know, some transmission. There were people re-engaging with these historical ideas.
But we were very much coming into it on our own, without a lot of mentorship in many cases, and being turned onto the ideas by looking around and seeing what the world was—this great distance between what the technical capacities of humanity are and the way that we actually live. That has to do with a lot of the individual life experience stuff that I talked about in Hinterland: coming from a very poor rural area that has suffered this sequence of crisis after crisis after crisis, continual out-migration, and also being caught up in the flows of history in terms of where people migrating. I look at this at the demographic level, where migration has flowed in the US, and I think “Oh, yeah, I did move from there, to there, and now I moved here…” and that experience has largely tracked with trends of in-migration, out-migration, etc.
So I would say my radicalization very much comes from that individual life experience of work and wages and crisis and all of that, and then seeking out whatever level of intellectual resources I could find.
Marine, Negation Editor:
We had a question regarding that notion of the world historic eclipse of the communist movement and this classical idea of mass politics. I'm just going to reference Hellworld a bit here. In the introduction, you speak of Camatte’s description of capital as having “domesticated” the human species, which is now subject at every imaginable level of material and psychic existence to the imperatives of valorization, much as the lives and bodies of some 30,000 pigs killed every day in Tar Heel have been fundamentally reshaped by the dictates of profit and property in every respect, from their overall life cycle down to their most minute genetic information, which is literally the intellectual property of the company.[1]
From there, there’s this idea that capitalism is no more likely to create a universal revolutionary subject than it is a domesticated one, one that even wants to perform its rituals and desires. You speak of these rituals using the metaphor of the organs of a dark god or an egregore, etc. And the counterpoint you give to this I thought was interesting because yeah, we're like staying in the realm of the domestic. You use the example of domesticated pigs which are bred for food, escape the farm,and interbreed with hogs bred for sport hunting. They then turn into razorbacks which are smarter than a pig and bigger than a wild boar and capable of destroying industrial farms, destroying suburban yards, and you say they are literally waging protracted guerrilla warfare in the classic way in the American landscape in the tactics they devise for evading capture, even as the conservation agency tries to kill a bunch of them.
That's a very long question that gives a taste of the book for our readers, the larger purpose of which is to ask: where do you find the revolutionary subject today? What do you think is taking shape?
Phil Neel
I'll answer this in two parts. The first part is this engagement with Camatte, because it touches on your first question as well. There's this guy, Jacques Camatte, he's this French ultra-leftist, and he begins as this ultra-left Marxist, then he becomes increasingly disillusioned with Marx, ironically through this deep reading of Marx's late work. He turns to this politics that becomes very formative for green, anarchy, anti-civ types in the US, which has to do with this full domestication or subsumption of life under capital, under the logic of capital, and with this idea that like that revolutionary subject has been fully domesticated, so we can't really hope in it anymore. He vaguely gestures toward the youth as this subject or force. This is after 1968 and he’s involved with a bunch of hippie politics elsewhere. He individually goes and moves to this permaculture project in rural France.
I mention this in the introduction because the reason that my own family was living in this very distant rural area at the border of Oregon and California, which I talk about in Hinterland, has to do with the US out-migration of predominantly white populations into these rural areas in this period of crisis from the 1970s onward. Part of that out-migration is the back-to-the-land movement, with all these hippie communes forming. The area that I'm from had a ton of these communes that all failed in similar ways and had a settler colonial aspect to them.
In the introduction I play with this theme of this past generation going out to the forest, not really finding anything there, and then our generation that comes after them that sees the failure of that weird politics: of retreating to a permaculture place out in some rural area, hoping in some generic humanity or younger generation as the subject of revolution. We, as that younger generation, rediscover in this thing that the older generation abandoned a Marxist fidelity to the incendiary project of communism. We reconfigure it to re-enter the world out of these romantic spaces of attempted escape that failed.
So one of the big themes in the book is there's no easy escape from our hellworld. You can't secede from it. There is no secession. There is no ability to find some realm beyond capitalism, either geographically or in some return to local community or something. Everything is subsumed under this logic of capital in some fashion down to the very air that we breathe.
Now, one of the things that I point out with the pig story with the wild hogs is something you just know if you grew up on a farm, which I think that maybe Camatte eventually learned this before he passed, because he did a lot of farm work later in his life. Initially, though, I don't actually think he knew how domestication worked in a literal sense. Domestication has to be continually reinforced and animals can very easily go feral if that if those conditions change, if those material conditions change in the hogs, and these razorbacks are an illustration of that, of how once they are out of this domesticating environment or the domesticating environment breaks down in some fashion, then the pigs are able to be basically like physically, psychologically transformed and re-feralized. But this is not a return to some original condition, it’s the invention of this new condition: they're bigger than a normal wild hog, but they're also smarter than a regular pig, etc.
The point is basically that domestication—Camatte uses these terms like total subsumption—it's not really as total as it seems, right? As long as a domesticating environment is contradictory, it's going to create these kinds of openings and these little short circuits which then generate these feral subjectivities which are the basis, the roots through which revolutionary subjectivity can take place. I elaborate on this idea of the revolutionary subject more in the book when I discuss concrete political struggles in various parts of the world. I also have an article out through Ill WillIll Will and then eventually another follow-up, through the newly launched Heatwave magazine and those will give more of a theoretical explanation of how I understand revolutionary subjectivity, the theory of the party, organization, etc.
The core thing that I draw from in part from Alain Badiou, especially from how Badiou is formulated by this guy Michael Neocosmos, who's a political philosopher who wrote this book on the question of emancipation in an African context. He really emphasizes something I think is very important and which forms the core of my understanding of revolutionary subjectivity in the book. This is the idea that a lot of people try to find some sort of given subject of the revolution. As in: “Yeah, this demographic is the revolutionary subject, because they're the most oppressed,” and so forth, whether this be a particular segment of the industrial workforce or a particular segment of the proletariat in general, because they exist under these unique conditions—maybe because they're in this mass production they know each other and they’ve developed this collective subjectivity in a more advanced way. Something like that, right? This takes these different forms throughout history. Sometimes it’s believed to be the peasantry. There's a period where people begin to think it’s the lumpenproletariat, or surplus population. This is right from the 1960s and 1970s, the theory that's taken up by Fanon, by the Black Panthers.
The whole point that I make in these later chapters in the book is there is no structurally given subject of revolution. The subject of revolution is a subject, right? It's a subjective force, which means it has to be created through intentional human activity in certain spaces of probability that are open structurally. But there is no given subject that's produced sheerly by the development of the productive forces, sheerly by the accelerationist inertia of capitalism itself. A revolutionary subject is always a political subject in the sense that it must be politically constructed. The theory of how you politically construct a form of revolutionary subjectivity is traditionally encompassed in the theory of the communist party. That was a core idea of what a revolutionary subject was. We're suffering from the collapse of that. This eclipse of the communist movement is the collapse of this revolutionary party force that existed and may be degenerated now, but certainly existed at the historical scale.
Marine
I know you talk a bit in the book, I believe when you discuss Hong Kong, about how the class struggle organs there were totally servile to the morass of civil society organizations and the riots when they came seem to come from nowhere. Which raises the question, especially in relation to this politically constructed subjectivity: what should communists be getting up to in the “boring” years? I mean, in my time organizing, I've definitely seen the same trap for class struggle, but what should we be doing about it now?
Phil Neel
I would say there are two different aspects to it. One is when things are happening, like the Hong Kong example, but the other is also in the interim. I borrow this idea from Badiou that there are these political events that occur—he just calls them events—and they completely restructure the political coordinates of the situation. It’s very hard to describe exactly what constitutes an event and what doesn't quite hit that level, but it's sort of something that we all know in our own way. Like everyone knows that after 2020 in the US, things are different, right? Something has changed with our political coordinates. It's clear that something happened. But if you tried to pin down exactly what that was, it would be very difficult. And Hong Kong, of course, is exactly the same. Everything is different after 2019 in Hong Kong, right? Everything is different. So there's this question of what to do in the midst of these events, but also of what to do in the interim between these kinds of events.
The basic idea is that, especially in the midst of these kinds of events, most political forces orient themselves in a backwards fashion. What I mean by that is that they treat politics as a discursive affair, discursive meaning that they think that what you do to engage in politics is that you go and communicate your position to people, you convince them rationally or through good advertising, but you convince them in this discursive space that you are correct or that you offer the best way forward or that you're really on their side. Then from that point on you gain adherence to your political program, so you advertise that program and people join into it based on agreement or disagreement. It's a discursive process. It's a discussion. Think of the classic old style “leftist selling a newspaper on the street who wants to argue with you about things.”
So I say in the book and elsewhere that this is exactly the opposite of how politics works. Political consciousness follows from political action and not the other way around. In the Hong Kong chapter, I demonstrate how this worked with an example: not from the left, but from the right, from these far-right localists. There's this very strong civil society atmosphere in Hong Kong. There's a lot of focus on non-violence, peaceful, legal protests, and for many, many years, there were almost no windows broken at protests.
But then starting in 2014, evolving in 2016, and then especially taking off in 2019, people start to break windows, basically. In 2014, there's this big conflict where somebody breaks the windows of LegCo and it's a huge controversy. They break the windows at this government building, creating a huge controversy which is condemned by all the leading Democrat figures. It's also fairly popular among the young and you see these sort of tactics that emerge more and more over the subsequent years, taking full force in 2019. There are these things called the Fishball Riots, years earlier, which are similar, but these tactics really take full force in 2019 when they have full mass support, and that's when you see outright conflicts with police.
One of the reasons in 2019 that these localists, these right-wing forces, were able to take such a central position is because they were the ones who smashed that first window. It became known that they're the ones who are associated with these tactics, which basically demonstrates their bravery and that they are the real ones fighting for the interests of Hong Kong, which resonates with people and becomes this mass tactical knowledge. It disperses across the population such that these sort of things become more common, but then also it means that the political package of right-wing localism is then appended to what I call the sigils of the movement, these symbols that arise like the yellow helmet, the white and black “revolution of our times” flags, t-shirts, etc. All of that visual and tactical language, right? These symbols have this right-wing politics then appended to them.
In Hinterland, I talk about this in a similar register when I talk about this aspect of military theory called competitive control, and the idea that in these civil war scenarios, people are generally not taking sides based on their political beliefs, based on some sort of pre-existing discursive process through which they came to political awareness and say, for example, “yeah, I really like Hezbollah.” What's happening is that organizations such as Hezbollah are moving into an area and providing services, such as acting as defense against Israeli aggression, in a fashion that makes people think they are a stable, competent force. They also seem to be on the side of the people, in some fashion. In this Hezbollah example, they're doing that at the expense of the older communist parties which used to dominate all of southern Lebanon. They had these villages you would enter and there'd be a picture of Marx and Lenin on either side of the gate, and that all gets wiped away via this game of competitive control where a different force demonstrates that it is more competent, more stable, more capable of doing the things that people need to be protected by providing services, etc.
Marine
That is a very illustrative example with Hezbollah. I often think they're in an interesting situation because it almost feels like they're stuck in that position, of just governing a nation. They're not really about destroying Israel—it's about providing the same services that got them into power in the first place. I’d often thought Hamas had used this tactic similarly for decades, and it had worked pretty well.
I did want to ask because I noticed you talk a bit about Gaza near the end of the book as a harbinger of what's going to come for us all. In the horror movie words, you say, “We feel like something bad is going to happen to us. We feel like something bad has happened. It hasn't reached us yet but it's on its way.”[2] But I was surprised to see little mention of any of the resistance actions in the past couple years, from the student encampments to the global logistics disruption actions for BDS, and even just Palestinian resistance groups like Hamas. When I think of the visual and tactical language of the past couple of years, I think of the red triangle, or even just the water jug student protesters used to hit a cop. How much of that was on your mind while writing that part of the book?
Phil Neel
The majority of the writing of the book was done by the time that the current war started, so it's obviously informed by older regional politics, and I really don't talk that much about politics in that region of the world in the book. I do mention in that final chapter, in the context mostly of sub-Saharan Africa, the role of Israeli firms and the role of the Gulf States in that situation. So that is all appraised in that final chapter, which was written as I was finalizing the book. It’s very grim because I wrote that introduction which lists all these death numbers from all the wars, and I kept having to go back every time I edit it. I keep having to go fucking update it and raise the number. I was doing that again and again and again and not just for the Israel example, but also for the Ukrainian war and what’s been going on in Yemen and elsewhere. So the ongoing nature of this is really the reason why none of that stuff is discussed.
There’s also this other memetic thing that gets distributed. There's this pivot in the politics of a lot of places locally around Gaza and around the entire issue. There's these mass protests in the U.S., but in most places they did not reach the same intensity as 2020, and they didn't have quite the same political edge to them. I think one of the reasons for that is just that it's a geographically distant thing, so it's a little bit harder to manifest the same force. Anti-war movements in general have this problem. The BDS movement has been going on for a long time and it's had very, very minimal results in my opinion. It's really been something that's been taken up in relation to institutional forces, with people wanting to get their universities to change purchase contracts, etc., and you see a lot of localized victories, but not anything like the scale of political activity like the Anti-Apartheid Movement back in the day. [BDS] has not been as successful and there are a bunch of material reasons for that. People like to pretend that it's been more successful than it has, but it certainly has not reached the same scale as the Anti-Apartheid Movement. There are obviously these very big reasons for this, given the role of Israel within a kind of US-German-European narrative of world politics, and it’s this issue that you can't discuss.
I would say that the thing where the ongoing movement around Gaza has been most distinct in the US has actually been on the other side of things, as this really extreme expression of repressive force. It has really scared people into not having Palestine-related stuff on their social media if they’re going to travel overseas and come back to the US—and there has also been an intensive targeting of prominent activists in the movement. In broader terms we can also say that it suffered under the same thing that many other political movements suffer from, which I describe in Hinterland and in Hellworld: this hesitance to directly attack any actual flows of power, and I'm talking about economic flows of power. You had these encampments at universities that barely shut down the university in most cases. They didn't really do much. They generally didn't storm administrative buildings. That isn’t some wild example, since this is stuff that other political movements have done in the past, again and again, particular student movements. Some of them maybe try to occupy some places that were the most advanced portion, like Humboldt around where I went to school (not at Humboldt State which it was back then, too expensive—I went to College of the Redwoods for a while, which is the community college south of there) but they were a forward edge of the movement, tactically.
But despite that outlier, for some reason you didn't actually see it gravitate toward even the level of radical tactical interventions that we had seen only a few years earlier in 2020, and it didn't shut down cities in the same way. Even when activities actually had the numbers—in many cities you had marches that were just as big as some of the biggest marches in 2020, Chicago had that enormous one—they were generally just marches. That was what prevented it from taking on this truly evental character. Events have to be much more incendiary, much more disruptive in order to register that way, and again, I think there's a lot of reasons that we can debate about why exactly this has been the case. One of the reasons was probably just that it was soon after 2020 and many people were still suffering from repression from that. But then the other reason I think of is that classic problem of anti-war movements at a distance—they always have these difficulties.
Tommy
We've gotten into a lot of the finer-grain details of the book, which is good, and a lot of these subjects are ones that I know Negation readers are going to appreciate, since we have a lot of Badiouian or Badiou-familiar listeners interested in political subjectivity—though maybe fewer who know Neocosmos. That was a great recommendation.
I wanted to ask if you would give a little bit of a broader idea of what the project of Hellworld is, for those who might not have heard the buzz or seen anything about the book yet. I know a lot of our listeners are already quite excited about the book, but I was hoping to give you a chance to lay out your vision for the project. It's a very expansive book, very detailed, very stylistically deliberate. So perhaps you could talk a little bit about the project more generally.
Phil Neel
It's one of those things that is a little bit difficult to encapsulate. It was this funny thing where I kept talking to my friend Nick Chavez, who co-authored a piece with me called “Forest and Factory” a while back. He's a communist engineer and we had a lot of conversations as I was editing. I would mention how I talk about this in the book and I talk about that in the book, and he was like, “What is this book about? That's maybe too many things.”
But I think that's a good illustration of what the book is. It's this image of the global economy of capital as this planetary system, as what I call a sociospheric system in the second chapter, and it explores the changing structure of production at this global scale. I would say that's the core thing. That means a nitty gritty explanation of where is moving from what, and some large-scale histories of development of the implantation of industrial infrastructures into the crust of the earth. It also becomes a discussion about the formation of a planetary productive subjectivity within the collective worker, and how that productive subjectivity—this collective knowledge about science, about how to produce things, about artisanal production, and also a very abstract understanding of the natural world—how that relates to revolutionary subjectivity, the fomentation of this subjective force for the overturning of that present sociospheric system and the creation of a new one at the planetary scale, based on communist principles. So that's the broad view of what the book is about.
The basis of the book is this long agonizing process of research and writing that I've been conducting for ten to fifteen years all over the world, doing research that I talk about in Hinterland in the Pacific Northwest about Pacific Rim manufacturing complexes and changing class and industrial geographies within the US. I went to China and to other parts of Asia—a chapter on Thailand in the book—later going to East Africa, namely Tanzania, and doing on-the-ground research in industrial districts, learning the languages in at least China and Tanzania; I don't speak Thai. But learning the languages, talking to people in these places, doing inquiries into factory districts, going and just familiarizing myself with local cultural trends, etc, etc. Those are all things that are narrated pretty straightforwardly in the book. I talked about doing field work in Tanzania and the literary process of how I was doing some of it and interacting with local people to do it and asking questions about factories. I was specifically looking at Chinese factories operating in East Africa.
So the book compiles this enormous quantity of research, and that involves not only the traditional field studies of economic geography, like going through factory districts, but also involves firsthand accounts and involvement, or at least proximate involvement in some cases, in these major kinds of political upheavals as well. Think of 2020 in the US, earlier stuff in the US, I was in Thailand right after the Red Shirts movement in 2010 and then in Hong Kong 2014 and 2019, so I talk about face to face engagements with activists in the Hong Kong civil society scene, etc. So it's a very global project, in this very literal sense.
Tommy
I had a question written out about the process of researching this book, because you don’t have to read the book for long to notice the amount of travel and work—work in many senses of the word—that went into the book. I found myself wondering: at what point did the book become a deliberate project? You're putting yourself in situations where you're documenting these large-scale, totality-wide processes from specific vantage points, but you're also actively engaging in production processes and processes of struggle.
Was there any difficulty to manage your role as someone documenting these processes versus being a participant in these processes? Because there’s always this two-brained thing that I think many communists have: “I am in the struggle, but I am also trying to analyze the struggle to make sense of what's happening to me and what's happening to other workers,” and so on and so forth. So I was wondering how you managed being a participant while being, and this is maybe too vulgar a word, but a documentarian of those experiences.
Phil Neel
It's a really good question. I think I had the benefit of actually not thinking that I was writing a book. I was doing a bunch of very specific localized research for specific lesser projects or shorter projects. And then I would be just thrown into a situation—like I was living in Seattle when 2020 happened, and obviously I went and joined in. The same thing for Occupy back in 2011 and the same thing for the earlier iterations of Black Lives Matter protests in the mid-2010s. Then I was very serendipitously in Hong Kong in both 2014 and 2019. I think maybe the only case where I went somewhere because something was happening—and I was very young and I didn't really understand, I was just vaguely interested in the region and politics—was after the red shirt movement in Thailand. I'd read about it and I had been wanting to travel and I went there to try to get engaged with it and work on this organic farm. But it was not possible to get engaged with politics in a very direct sense at that time because the country was under martial law, among other reasons.
But other than that example, I had more specific reasons I was in places, whether for work or for other research related stuff. One of the benefits of being thrown into politics in this way, just through our experience of work and dependence on the wage and such, is that it breaks down barriers, breaks this two-minded thing of “I'm researching this and I'm participating in it.” Like for example, this article I have out in Field Notes in the Brooklyn Rail about hamburgers, it's about me working in this logistics complex in Tacoma, outside the Port of Tacoma. I didn't get a job there to research it. I got a job there because I really, really needed money and I wasn't going to make rent. So I had to be there working. And in that situation, I'm just thinking, wow, this is a great example of the logic of capital, or something like that. So then I'm taking these notes because it makes those jobs a lot less boring for me.
So a fun thing I can do while in a job is take little notes, write little stories, etc. But I'm just in the situation—I have to be there. And a lot of this stuff is like that. At times, I'm doing research for my dissertation, thinking I might do more academic work (which I did not end up doing). I say at the very beginning of the book that I'm not even sure that the book was written by me, that it may be the other way around—I'm sort of produced through this book. The author emerges through the book as well as through the process of the construction of the book. When I started I was trying to write a shorter book, but then I sat down and I realized that a lot of these ideas that I was locking together just had to exist at this scale—at the length of the book, but also the scale of this planetary system interweaving this objective and the structural forces, etc. I'm very grateful for the publisher and for the Historical Materialism series for taking it on, because a book of this length is basically unpublishable in the market. So that's why, for listeners who are curious, if you go online and try to buy it right now, it costs like $244 or something. That's because that's the library edition. They do that first, and then a year later they do the actual retail edition. So people have it, because the PDF is floating around, but getting a physical copy is prohibitively expensive right now. But don't worry, that's not the actual price of the book. It'll be out through the Haymarket paperback sometime next year as well.
Tommy
Yeah, one of the things I love about Historical Materialism is their commitment to publishing complete bricks. It's great for any revolutionary, because you have a nice heavy object lying around (as well as a good book, ideally).
You write in the book that it feels very much that in some ways the book is perhaps writing itself, and that it's also the sum of many parts, not just your own contribution. There's another part in the reading guide where you make a related sentiment that I wanted to ask about. You write that, “learning is itself a collaborative form of suffering, the margins are meant to be written in, this black ink is meant to be colored over in bright highlights and vigorously underlined. These words are half of the dialogue awaiting their counterpart.”[3]
So this brings up a question I like to ask all political writers: what, to your mind, is the effect that you would hope the book to have? If you got to have some say in what the other half of the dialogue with the book looks like, how do you imagine that? Very rarely is it so explicitly acknowledged (as you do in the reading guide) that there is a dialogical quality to books that try to speak to, to use the academic keyword, the conjuncture. I was curious about what impact you would like the book to have, or maybe to put things a little bit less dramatically, how do you see this book potentially speaking to other communists?
Phil Neel
I'll organize my thoughts a little bit here somewhat chaotically and jump around a bit because there's a couple of things that this touches on. One thing is, there are a lot of books, right? And when we read a book and it's very transformative, we remember that it makes some argument or makes some particular claim—but when you go back to try to quote it, you actually can't find a specific quotation that makes the claim that you know that the book makes. And you realize that the claim is sort of an emergent effect of all these little arguments and that you get this effect when you're reading the book correctly, but many books don’t have a clean structures where it's like “in this book I contribute to the literature by adding this argument in response to this wrong argument and this partially wrong argument.” I was just going through a bunch of books here for this thing that I was writing. I was just going through Jairus Banaji's Theory as History, which is another Historical Materialism series book, because I remember him writing some things about modes of production. I was like, yeah, I want to quote that. But then it's exactly one of those books where it was a hugely transformative book for me and yet I can't find the part of the book where he says the thing I thought he said. The point being that I want the book to have that sort of effect on people. I see it as having a lot of repetitive structures that are built into it to reinforce a certain larger argument that isn't necessarily stated in this clear, traditional fashion in the introduction.
One other way that I described it to people as I was working on it is that I was thinking of the text as sort of a transformation text, that has an almost mystical function, even like a sutra. It's making a philosophical argument derived from a particular historical confluence, and it's talking about that confluence, but the book itself, as this ritual-like object, has another mystical communication that appears in the act of reading, in the act of self-transformation through engaging with the text, through annotating it, through repeating sections, through reading it out loud sometimes. So there are a bunch of metaphorical, allegorical structures sprinkled throughout the book which are much more common in fiction and religious writing.
In that sense, it approaches argumentation in this very different way; at the same time, it does make very concrete arguments relative to certain positions on the nature of imperialism, the global economy, etc. But a lot of the communication is intended to operate on basically what I would think of as a mystical register, as this transformation text. Engaging with it is not just supposed to convince you of a different position. It's also supposed to induce a different process of thinking, different ways of thinking in going through this mutual suffering, right? I had to suffer through writing it and now you have to suffer through reading it. This very, very long, intricate text, and it's written in a way that I think that a lot of people actually just find very annoying.
Tommy
It was very intense read because within the first, fifty, sixty pages, it gets quite gruesome, but at the same time there's something original and meditative about it, because there are so many other books (many of them which I like) that try to capture the totality of everything that's wrong with the world with a simple argument. They ask “What's the one issue? Is it alienation? Is it exploitation, domination? How can we put all of the problems under one umbrella?” Whereas Hellworld, as I've read it so far, is much more attuned to the idea that to get a cross-section of the totality as it exists right now, you just need to sit with all the things it's doing, and you need to do that again, and you need to do that again, and you need to do that for 800 pages to see all the variations involved and to understand the rhythm of its consistencies as well. So while I think the actual details of the book are chilling in many respects, you bring the reader along in a way that makes it feel like we have to collectively experience what's happening in the totality again and again in order to really grasp it. To pitch the book a bit more to our listeners: it's not all suffering, or rather, it's a better way of having to experience suffering, because we all have to experience it at some point.
Within Hellworld, you make reference to this language that is becoming more ubiquitous among communist readers of Marx, of capitalism as an automatic subject. You refer to capital’s demiurgic qualities as well, using esoteric language about an alternative being that's animated by our activity. You see this language in various forms of literature of capital as an automatic subject, as something that's perpetuating its own unity and patterns. What is it about that imagery that you think is so central to understanding what's going on in extremely different sites of production? And to loop this back to an earlier question, how does that idea of capitalism as an automatic subject relate to the prospect of revolutionary subjectivity?
Phil Neel
Yeah, if there was one concept that on its own encapsulates a lot of what the book is doing, it is this one. I introduce the concept at the very beginning of the book and then I go back to it when discussing theories of crisis at the very end of the book, because the idea of capital as an automatic subject is related to this particular view of crisis as catastrophe. The reason that I'm engaging with Camatte and this idea of total subsumption and drawing on all these themes is because this has become this much more popular, much more general way of understanding capital as such among Marxists. This is a very, very prominent strain in contemporary Marxist thought.
But also, I think, in the general populace, people who wouldn't see themselves as having some sort of radical political commitment actually do express many of these same views in alternate language. You see this in portrayals of what the economy is or what technology is. One of the examples I use in the book is this idea from a geologist named Haff, who puts forward this idea of what he calls the technosphere: that there's this global geospheric system composed of technology, that it has this supervening force over humans, and that it has its own form of minimal agency, which basically aims for increased entropy, increased energy use, and mass movement. And this is actually an expression of that same logic, right? There's this total, global thing, this totality, and it has its own logic, and that logic is a supervening force on humans. We see this all the time with cultural portrayals of machines taking over. We see it with discourse on AI stuff. We see it with just this very pedestrian view of like, yeah, the AI is going to take over and then it's going to tell us all what to do, man. Or in that fucking show Westworld where they go out of the little park and they go to the real world and the real world is also controlled by a computer, right? You see it again and again in popular culture and it's expressing the same thing.
So if we see it both expressed in this kind of Marxian current and at the pop level, that means—and this is very drawn from reading a lot of Žižek when I was younger—it's ideology! A centerpiece of contemporary ideology seems to be this mythos of a total subject that is controlling our lives in some fashion through technology and through productive forces. They're through these very arcane mechanisms: the intricate circuitry of a semiconductor through the inscrutable movements of packages through a logistics center, right? These are the images that come up. And it's this thing that humans, individual humans in particular, but even humans that of the collective level perhaps, don't seem to be able to understand. It’s this ideological image.
And so I illustrate that ideological image more thoroughly. I draw from a bunch of cosmic horror stuff to do that. I had a whole reading stack of all the cosmic horror I could find that wasn't Lovecraft, because I'd already read Lovecraft. I read exhaustively, all this horror stuff. I'm drawing from Thomas Ligotti and from Algernon Blackwood. I'm drawing from those themes in order to construct this image of capital as totality, of the social logic of capitalism as a totalizing system. But then I'm also going back to Capital, to Marx’s critique of political economy, in order to point out, contra Camatte, to show that even if capital has this totalizing quality, the very nature of totality is itself contradictory and that contradictory quality—the existence of those conflicts embedded in the basic laws of motion of capital—means that capital is always incomplete. It's never going to fully domesticate. That doesn’t mean that this leaves some human remainder underneath. It doesn't. It actually does fully restructure people, all the way down, fully restructure the environment, all the way down. But it does so in a contradictory fashion, an internally contradictory fashion, which generates short circuits through which these subjective forces can arise, because fundamentally it is not an evil dark god sitting above us, even though that's how it portrays itself to us. That myth is part of how power is upheld. That's the ideological function of it. That's why it is the centerpiece of ideology.
The reality underneath this image is that capital’s existence as an automatic subject is an emergent property of social relations, which also means that by intervening in these social dynamics, intervening in the way that the social metabolism operates in these technical systems as integrated in a multi-species mesh, intervening via the construction of concrete forms of political power that have a communist character, that all destroys these dynamics, these laws of motion of our hell word, which break down under that subjective force. That’s what the book goes up to describing, this subjectivity formation—but because subjectivity formation is conjunctural, and because there really isn't a communist party to speak of, the global communist movement doesn't have an organized historical shape yet. It has in the past and it will again. We can't quite speak of exactly what that will look like, though I do that in some of the recent writing I mentioned above, like the Ill Will article.
The idea in Hellworld is basically breaking down that concept of this totalizing demiurgic figure and how it appears to us. If it was truly totalizing, then the only way that it seems like capitalism could end (to a lot of people) is through an automatically generated catastrophe, either through capitalism having some automatic final crisis that it itself generates which then generates a subjective force, or that capital hits some sort of extrinsic limit in its ability to produce what Jason Moore calls like new natures through its reconfiguration of the social metabolism, through that technical nexus through which human society engages with the non-human world. This would imply that at some point, capital is going to hit peak oil, it's going to hit peak nature— it can't make use of these extrinsic factors efficiently enough, and that will then induce this collapse. And so I draw from Marxian theories of crisis to argue against this catastrophist view of crisis, and argue instead for this more rigorous idea of crises of social reproduction as formulated by figures like Mattick, Grossman, and Uno. But the book is addressing basically this same idea: asking how this kind of world might end.
Notes
- Phil A. Neel, Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory (Leiden: Brill, 2025): 9–10.
- Phil A. Neel, Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory (Leiden: Brill, 2025): 696.
- Phil A. Neel, Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory (Leiden: Brill, 2025): xix.