Traversing the Inferno
Reading Phil Neel's Hellworld (part 1)
Autumn turns to winter, a large tome haunts my bedside: Hellworld.
I received a copy of Phil Neel’s newest book a few months ago. I tested my luck with a colleague who edits the Historical Materialism Book Series and he was kind enough to send me one for free (books in this series retail at €200.00.)
Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory, to give it its full title, has been sat at my bedside atop another long book (Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. I: The Structure of Everyday Life by Fernand Braudel) that I’ve not started reading yet. Both of them castigating me in silence.
Attending Neel’s panel at the Historical Materialism conference at SOAS in London compelled me to expedite the process and begin reading it immediately. Neel’s was the only panel I was able to attend throughout the whole conference (due to work commitments) and it was packed. Some combination of the content of the discussion, the clarity of Phil’s presentation style, and the atmosphere in the room spurred me into opening the book as soon as I could.
I’ll return to this in future posts, but the ambition of the book – to map the current configuration of the capitalist mode of production at a planetary scale – and the use of a horrific literary mode makes it the kind of book you and your comrades check-in with each other about, asking to see if the other has started it yet.
But rather than limit my engagement to these private exchanges, I thought I would use the Red Medicine Substack to track, structure and share my reading. In doing so, I would like to invite others to engage with the text and (hopefully) make all of our readings richer as a result.
So, this will be the first in an ongoing series of posts about Hellworld. These posts will reflect on the book as I read it (I will not be reading ahead) and use Neel’s work to inform and guide a broader inquiry relating to work I am doing in relation to Red Medicine. It will be my first time using Substack in this way, so I hope that listeners/readers will find it interesting and useful.
Who is Phil Neel and what is Hellworld?
Phil A. Neel is a communist geographer from the Pacific Northwest of US-America and the author of two books, his first Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict published with the Field Notes imprint at Reaktion Books in 2018. The imprint grows out of the Field Notes section of the The Brooklyn Rail.
Field Notes is home to several books beloved by a certain type of communist reader, usually but not always, based in the USA. I am not based in the USA, but some of my favorites in the series include Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline by Jamie Merchant, Smart Machines and Service Work Automation in an Age of Stagnation by Jason E. Smith1. I’m also excited to read States of Incarceration by Zhandarka Kurti and Jarrod Shanahan, having read the latter’s excellent book about Riker’s Island.
This imprint is adjacent to what is often (and sometimes disparagingly) referred to as the ‘ultra-left.’ The ultra-left describes a leftwing political tendency that is committed to the self-organization of the proletariat, an immediate transformation of the collective administration of production, and critiques of the Bolsheviks and Lenin. It includes groups such as the Situationist International and Socialisme ou Barbarie, publications such as Endnotes and historical figures relating to Communization Theory2 and Council Communism. The Field Notes series editor is Paul Mattick Jr, son of Paul Mattick Sr. Mattick Senior is an intellectual lodestar for council communism and the ultra-left.
The Los Angeles Review of Books described Neel’s first book as a manifesto for the ultra-left, and whilst I would be curious to know what he makes of this assessment, it gives us one way of contextualizing his work.3
Ultra-left or not, Neel is somewhat of a cult hero in certain circles on the left. This status partly owes to his method of research. When asked about his approach in an interview published by Brooklyn Rail, he answered,
“One thing about communist geography that I really emphasize is reviving the classic geographic field survey—which basically just means going out and actually looking at the places you’re researching and talking to the people who live and work there, getting a sense of the “vibe,” for lack of a better word, and then combining this with the abstract analysis of datasets and scholarly literature to create a coherent narrative.”4
The level of commitment demonstrated by Neel in his work is more than impressive. He goes to places, works tough jobs, and learns the languages required to be able to speak to people in those places. Usually, when someone puts their money where there mouth is in such a way, they tend to provide a much more grounded account of what they are trying to write and why.
It is one thing to opine about Chineses factories while ensconced within an elite university nestled in the imperial core, conversely, it is unhelpful to bat away criticism of your field work by exclaiming ‘you weren’t there man!’ It is a wholly different (and much better) thing to take seriously the precept that it is the workers in these industries that provide essential insights as to the changes composition of production and class struggle.
But Neel is also aware of the need to combine this field work with theoretical and empirical work too. From his presentation at the Historical Materialism conference, Neel seems genuinely invested in open engagement with his work and accepting of insights from those with critical disagreements and on-the-ground insights.
Hellworld contains sections on different “territorial industrial complexes”5 including China, Tanzania, Thailand and Sudan (visiting all but Sudan himself as I understand it.) Neel would be quick to point out that this approach is “a class position, not the product of some personal ingenuity” and that his first book Hinterland is “a kind of collaborative text, formulated out of a whole horde of experiences and stories, of which my own are only a part.”6
In my own small way I hope writing posts about the book helps to contribute to the collaborative nature of the best aspects of communist political education practices (free, distant from the university context, and open to all.)
Why Hellworld?
But the question remains: why write about Hellworld and why in relation to the work I do on Red Medicine?
Practically speaking, there are a few reasons:
Firstly, the book is currently very expensive to buy. Despite Neel’s encouragement to read the book in print (“woe to all who abandon the tactile in the name of the tablet, since knowledge enters through the flesh”7), very few of my comrades have €200 to spare. I’m sure its relatively easy to pirate one, but reading an 800 page PDF is heavy going. For this reason, I think it makes sense to relay some of what is in the book (for free) to encourage people to read the book and to buy a cheaper paperback version, when they become available via Haymarket books in a year-or-so.
Secondly, the book is relatively long compared to most people’s reading habits. So, an additional motivation is that regular (and broadly accessible) posts about the book might encourage some people to read a book that they would otherwise find too challenging. I should note that Neel is also expanding on ideas in the book himself, on his substack. I will be reading these too and using them to inform my own reading.
Thirdly, these posts will allow me to deepen my own reading. I keep notes for everything that I read (for the podcast or otherwise) but I rarely do anything with them other than to record an interview. Having recently been on the Death Panel podcast as a guest (and not an interviewer) I realize how useful it is to turn notes into more thorough texts as a means to consolidate my understanding of any given topic.
Speaking more intellectually then, how does Hellworld relate to the work I do on Red Medicine?
Red Medicine (as with my Death Panel comrades and many other Health Communists) seeks to analyze health and illness as constituted by a series of processes, institutions and social relations within the capitalist organization of life. Specifically, I try and make sense of illness and embodied states as conditioned by dynamics such as the one between ‘worker’ and ‘surplus’ populations, as well as within the broader processes of exploitation, reproduction and discipling of labour.
I am interested in how capitalist exploitation is expressed in collective and embodied forms of pain and illness, whether that be disablement caused by work, types of madness experienced within the specific psycho-social matrix of capital, forms of pathologization that fracture the working class, or the changing forms of social murder that rob the proletariat of life. My assessment is that Hellworld is also concerned with many of these questions.
Hellworld is also concerned with how different territories operate within a planetary system. And whilst episodes of Red Medicine often focus on nationally or regionally specific developments, I am increasingly trying to develop my own analysis within a planetary (or world systems) analysis. I’d like to better understand how state capacity sits within a global state-system.
When we enter the clinic, we are likely met with workers who may have migrated from different parts of the world, commodities that have been produced across international value chains, and forms of financial and market dominance unbeholden to any single nation-state. For these reasons, and more, it is important to grasp the capitalist system in its global totality.
Finally, whilst hellworld (the term, not the title) describes a material arrangement of production, circulation, and consumption, it also describes the subjective dimensions of living through the horrors of capital. These horrors are the terror of the overshoot conjunction, of the drift towards new forms of repression and of the propensity of the system to destroy human life, such as with the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
For me then, hellworld also describes the experience of living and struggling now, which is a question that (if only implicitly) animates the work on Red Medicine.
As this series of posts develops, I hope the reading continues to answer this question and provide (convincing) answers as to why a book like this can beneficially augment my Red Medicine research. I also hope that the posts elicit emails, conversations, and responses about Hellworld from the people who follow Red Medicine. Who knows, maybe I will also try and line up an interview with Neel on the podcast.
Let a hundred posts bloom
The book is around 800 pages, split into two parts, made up of 12 chapters in total, chapters vary in size. I’ll be aiming to write at least one post for each chapter, but may write more for some of the longer chapters.
The posts will tend towards summary overviews, rather than exegesis, with the intention of inviting a broader engagement with the book. I want these posts to be clear and easy to read; the book is long, complex, and clarifying in ways that (as of yet) I don’t think I will be, so I will not be trying to rival it on those metrics. I will be thinking of these posts as mini-reviews of each chapter that can provide a jumping off point for discussions or group reading.
I will try and keep the posts punctual, but I apologize in advance for any long-gaps caused by a busy schedule or a particularly challenging section of the book. There are sections of the book which are far-outside my existing knowledge base, which will provide both a limitation of my reading and an invitation to draw on a larger community of readers to engage with the work. That being said, why bother reading a book if you know everything that’s going to be inside of it ahead of time?
Finally, if you’re also reading Hellworld and have thoughts, please send them to me at: editorial at redmedicine dot xyz. I would love to hear from you, to hear what you think of different sections of the book, and to talk with you about what might appear in forthcoming posts. I would also be more than happy to host guest posts from comrades, if they make editorial sense.
With all that said; see you in hell.
I’m in correspondence with Jason and Jamie about coming on the podcast soon.
Communization theory has been referenced in Red Medicine episodes, such as the episode with M.E. O’Brien, in relation to the communization of care.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/wageless-life/
https://brooklynrail.org/2023/11/field-notes/Phil-Neel-with-Komite/
ibid
https://brooklynrail.org/2018/04/field-notes/PHIL-NEEL-with-Paul-Mattick/
Hellworld, page XIX