Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory

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Published Sep 2025

Phil Neel

Author: Phil Neel
Hellworld examines the megastructures of global capitalism, asking how revolutionary subjectivity might emerge within and against capital’s domesticating force. Central to this inquiry is the planetary factory: the global value chains connecting disparate industrial territories, the rise of China, the fragmentation of global trade, and, above all, the simultaneous deagrarianisation and deindustrialisation of labor. These structural shifts are linked to subjective forces, exploring how social divisions shape resistance. Through an analysis of uprisings in Hong Kong, Thailand, Sudan, and beyond, Hellworld considers whether this system—inescapable as it seems—can, perhaps, be destroyed.

Biographical Note

Phil A. Neel is a communist geographer from the Pacific Northwest. He is the author of Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict (Reaktion, 2018) and is a regular contributor to the Field Notes section of The Brooklyn Rail.

Readership

This book is particularly relevant to readers interested in recent political uprisings, as well as scholars in economic geography, Marxist geography, urban geography, labor studies, development studies, and Global China studies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Figures and Tables
Note on Languages
Reading Guide

Introduction: Descent
1 The Substance of Sin
2 The Smell of Money
3 Succession
4 Secession
5 The Horde
6 Ploutonion

Part 1

Buildings Devouring People
1 The Great Enclosure
2 Village in the City
3 The Great Trade Collapse
4 Hinterland and Metropole
5 Mutilation

Crust of the Earth
1 Technology as Ideology
2 Mass
3 Malthus of the Machine
4 Technics
5 Alien Agency

Speak of Blood
1 The Last Graveyard
2 The Carnival
3 The Body of the Economy
4 Total Social Capital
5 Geographic Industrialisation
6 Supply Chain Struggles
7 Overcapacity
8 Beneath Eroding Exports
9 The New Flesh

Circle of Madness
1 Arcanum
2 Disintegration
3 Blood of the Beast
4 The Fable of the Parasite
5 Labour in Capital
6 The Teutonic Castle
7 Structure and Subject
8 Lamentation

The Hammer and Sickle Are Sleeping
1 The Society of Mutual Destruction
2 Yelling into a Microphone
3 Idyll
4 Exit
5 Mould on Glass
6 The Industrial Party
7 The Rebranding of the Sweatshop
8 Be Angry, Be Mad, and Live Your Life Well

Part 2

Hell Money
1 When There’s Blood in the Streets …
2 … Buy Property
3 Hostile Brothers
4 Competition as Crisis
5 Crowns of Gold and Green
6 Beachhead
7 Business as Usual

Under the Neon Sun
1 Rawls in Hong Kong
2 With Peace and Love
3 The City-State
4 Excess and Extant
5 Parties of Action
6 Be Water
7 Civil Society Strikes Back
8 Burn With Us
9 Necropolis
10 Anteparty

The Great God Development
1 Temple in the Grains
2 The Evil Here
3 Steam and Sail
4 The Global Grid of Iron
5 The American System
6 The Trust
7 Bringing the War Home
8 Labour in Capital
9 Internationalisation and Hegemonic Decay
10 Developmentalisms
11 Socialism with German Characteristics
12 Co-prosperity
13 Development Dances to the Drums of War
14 Desert Power
15 The Vanguard of Development
16 The Dictatorship of Capital
17 Blood on the Plains

Absolute Democracy with the King as Head of State
1 Field and Frontier
2 Chao Praya Utopia
3 Country Encircles City
4 The Aborted Miracle
5 Economic Warfare
6 Thaksinomics
7 The Rift
8 Red Tide
9 Party Building
10 Party Breaking
11 Neither Red Nor Yellow
12 New Generations

10 Dice in the Sand
1 Urban Fragments
2 The Mirage
3 Islands of Industry
4 The Pulse

11 The Diffraction of Africa
1 The Dar es Salaam School
2 The State Debate
3 Development and Dependency
4 Globalisation
5 Proletarianisation without Industrialisation
6 The Value Basis of Premature Deindustrialisation
7 Sub-imperialism and Industrial Involution
8 The City below and the City above

12 Hill of Ash
1 Polycrisis
2 Eternal Granary
3 Every Town a Bakersfield
4 A Place to Fall Apart
5 All the Gold in California
6 Are the Good Times Really Over?
7 The Wild Side of Life

Bibliography
Index