Is There No Exit?

Capital’s Infernal Landscape

Phil Neel’s Hellworld is an infernal geography of the present—a planetary ethnography of capitalism as an all-encompassing horror story.¹Thanks to Isobel Plowright and Joshua Pineda for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this review. His book refuses the polite empiricism of political economy and instead treats capital as a metaphysical organism, an “anti-karmic atmosphere,” as he puts it in the introduction, that binds together ecological devastation, psychic misery, and the endless reanimation of dead labor.²Phil A. Neel, Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory (Leiden: Brill, 2025), 8. Its argument unfolds as a descent into the underworld of production, written in the idiom of apocalypse but grounded in the concrete material realities of value chains enveloping the globe.

Neel begins the book with the image of “the mist”—an invisible, moral substance that saturates the earth’s surface. This mist is the residue of social production itself: the pollution of the atmosphere, the accumulation of debt, and the psychic sediment of suffering. Hellworld is not a metaphor for modernity; it is a condition produced by capitalism on a planetary scale.

The book’s early chapters use China’s industrial districts as a microscope through which to observe this totality in motion. Real estate speculation, urban enclosure, and infrastructural gigantism appear as the local manifestations of a global process: capital’s drive to incorporate every remaining fragment of the noncapitalist world. The “buildings devouring people,” as he calls the first chapter, are not aberrations but allegories of a system that feeds upon life itself.

In tracing the movement of matter—steel, sand, concrete, bodies—Neel reconstructs Marx’s critique of political economy as a kind of dark ecology. Capital, he argues, is not merely an economic system but a planetary metabolism that reorganizes Earth’s material infrastructure. By foregrounding capital’s quasi-autonomous metabolism, Neel brackets the antagonistic social relations through which Marx understood capital’s movement, relegating the dynamics of exploitation and class struggle largely to the background.

This is a logic that is self-moving, self-propelling, and godlike, operating through the bodies of human beings but ultimately discarding them. The horror of hellworld, then, is not found in spectacular cruelty but in the banality of automated domination: a self-reproducing loop of production and reproduction that turns the species into its own instrument, expelling bodies as waste.

The second half of the book ascends from theory into empirical analysis. The scenes shift from Hong Kong’s infernal bureaucracy to Thailand’s populist impasse, from the ruins of American industry to the neon ports of East Africa. Each case reveals a different face of the planetary factory: the fusion of state and capital, the circulation of bodies through global supply chains, the disintegration of developmental dreams. What appears as “China’s rise” or “Africa’s emergence”—the standard narrative of “China in Africa”—is revealed to be something of a misnomer.

I was especially struck by the chapters covering East Africa, and Tanzania in particular. Neel demonstrates that Chinese-funded megaprojects, ranging from Africa’s largest port to satellite city projects around Dar es Salaam, never actually materialized.³See also Phil A. Neel, “A Tale of Two Ports” Spectre, March 23, 2025, doi.org/10.63478/519QK1Z1. For all the promises of the Belt and Road Initiative, we instead find an archipelago of half-finished ghost cities, a trail of corruption scandals, and projects that are aborted altogether.

Rather than a monolithic Chinese state capitalism, what he shows empirically is that something like 90 percent of the firms engaged in light manufacturing and construction were privately owned. Why does this matter?

Hellworld poses a frontal challenge to Giovanni Arrighi’s argument in Adam Smith in Beijing that Chinese foreign investment presents a developmental alternative to the predation of the Western capitalist model.⁴Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London and New York: Verso, 2007). For Neel, both exist in a singular system of interconnected value chains and planetary urbanization. What appears as a developmental alternative, Neel argues, is nothing more than a mirage.

Yet the more significant disagreement concerns neither China nor development as such, but Neel’s understanding of capitalism itself. In treating capital as a self-propelling planetary logic, his account sits in unexpected proximity to the functionalism he attributes to the Dar School, sidelining the tradition’s emphasis on exploitation, class struggle, and political agency.

The Dar School Reconsidered

While in Tanzania, Neel dallies with the historians and sociologists of the Dar School in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) was a hub of radical intellectual debates in this period, hosting thinkers like Walter Rodney, Abdulrahman Babu, Giovanni Arrighi, Issa Shivji, John Saul, Samir Amin, Claude Ake, Terence Ranger, and countless others.⁵For an introduction to the Dar School, see Immanuel R. Harisch, “The Dar es Salaam Schools of History, c. 1960s–1980s,” in The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial African Historiography, ed. Thula Simpson and Harisch (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2025), 88–113; Yousuf Al-Bulushi, “Dar es Salaam on the Front Line: Red and Black Internationalisms,” Third World Thematics 8, no. 1–3 (2023): 21–37; and Leo Zeilig, A Revolutionary for Our Time: The Walter Rodney Story (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 166–94.

Neel rightly identifies the Dar School as “one of the most important centers for communist thought in the twentieth century.”⁶Neel, Hellworld, 63. This was the moment of Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa villagization project in Tanzania, which was hotly debated across UDSM’s political science, economics, and history departments.⁷For a fascinating recounting of these debates, see the three volumes of Issa G. Shivji, Saida Yahya-Othman and Ng’wanza Kamata, Development as Rebellion: Julius Nyerere—A Biography (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2020). The best recent history of Ujamaa is Priya Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

The Marxists of the Dar School rejected Nyerere’s “African socialism” as nothing more than a petty bourgeois strategy of self-reliance. The Marxist wing of dependency theory—folks like Amin or the Tanzanian economist Justinian Rweyemamu in the economics department—argued that Nyerere’s program ignored the fact that African countries existed in the context of a capitalist world system, structured by their location in a relationship of extraction.⁸Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974 [1970]); Samir Amin, Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973). Rweyemamu’s critique was a bit more nuanced than Amin’s, who was an unabashed critic of Nyerere. Rweyemamu, meanwhile, was more sympathetic to Nyerere’s project. His argument was that this politics could only succeed if it were to directly confront Tanzania’s structural dependence on the capitalist world economy. See his Underdevelopment and Industrialization in Tanzania: A Study of Perverse Capitalist Industrial Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Some of the highest profile debates in this period are collected in Yash Tandon, ed., University of Dar es Salaam Debate on Class, State & Imperialism (Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1982).

The typical story then points to a radical wing including the sociologist Issa Shivji, but also the Marxist students like Karim Hirji who contributed to the journal Cheche, the Swahili word for Iskra.⁹For a recollection of student militancy in this period, see Karim P. Hirji, Growing Up with Tanzania: Memories, Musings and Maths (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2014). This wing was sufficiently large and internally diverse that both Shivji and Hirji would have likely bristled at being placed in the same camp at the time. Despite sharing a broad orientation, the Cheche group stressed revolutionary political practice and student–worker alliances, whereas Shivji focused on the Tanzanian state’s class character.¹⁰Karim P. Hirji, ed., Cheche: Reminiscences of a Radical Magazine (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2010); Issa G. Shivji, Tanzania: The Silent Class Struggle (Stockholm: Zenit, 1970); Issa G. Shivji, Class Struggles in Tanzania (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976).

They nevertheless formed a broad current with shared commitments even if they were not a perfectly unified tendency. So, for example, against the import substitution industrialization proposed by the dependency theorists, the radicals rejected technocratic fixes and instead advocated class struggle, as we might expect. Shivji famously characterized the problem as one of a bureaucratic bourgeoisie, which was notably resistant to any economic transformation: “In so far as the economy remains structurally linked with the capitalist world and within the world capitalist system, the ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’ is a dependent bourgeoisie—dependent on the international bourgeoisie … [It] is incapable of restructuring the internal society and thereby disengaging from the world capitalist system.”¹¹Shivji, Class Struggles in Tanzania, 85.

Rather than treating socialism as the outcome of enlightened state planning, the Dar School’s radical wing argued that it could only be won through the independent political organization of workers and peasants themselves. Their emphasis on class struggle was therefore not merely rhetorical but strategic: the Tanzanian state, dominated by a bureaucratic bourgeoisie, could not be relied upon to overcome the social relations that reproduced exploitation.

Instead, figures such as Shivji insisted that genuine socialist transformation depended on building class consciousness, expanding popular organization, and sharpening conflicts between labor and capital rather than suppressing them in the name of national unity. The task was not to perfect the developmental state but to democratize the struggle over production itself, making workers and peasants the agents, rather than the objects, of socialist transformation.

Obviously, my brief account collapses all sorts of internal differences into a single position. But it is crucial to emphasize that a politics of class struggle was at the heart of the Dar debates. Neel’s objection, however, is not simply to developmentalism but to the industrial imaginary that united even many of its Marxist critics.

From this perspective, the Dar School’s debates remained organized around the horizon of industrialization, differing over how development should proceed rather than questioning its underlying logic. Broadly, he argues, none of these positions constituted an alternative to modernization theory: “Even the most radical of the Marxian critiques from this era ultimately lay on a basic continuum with the very theories of modernization that they were critiquing.”¹²Neel, Hellworld, 643.

Both modernization theory and its critics, he insists, operated within the prevailing institutions of the ruling class.¹³Neel, Hellworld, 650. This was not a critique of political economy, in other words; it was political economy itself, operating within the terms of a bourgeois framework. Pointing to the influence of Arrighi, Amin, and Immanuel Wallerstein, he suggests that even more radical proponents of developmentalism “produced a far more robust theory of industrial modernization than that of modernization theorists like [W. W.] Rostow or [W. Arthur] Lewis.”¹⁴Neel, Hellworld, 656.

Or as Neel puts it quite bluntly, “this constituted a revival of modernization theory’s foundational thesis in a new guise.”¹⁵Neel, Hellworld, 658. But there was no possibility of achieving full industrialization, which almost immediately gives way to deindustrialization and the proliferation of jobs in the tertiary sector—or more likely, the lack thereof. I will return to the lack of jobs in a moment to say something about the account of informal employment in the book.

Yet this critique requires that the Dar School be treated primarily as a debate over competing models of development. That framing obscures the extent to which its radical wing shifted the analytical focus from developmental trajectories to class struggle itself. More broadly, it reflects the same methodological move that structures Hellworld as a whole: capitalism appears chiefly as an autonomous, planetary logic of transformation rather than as a contradictory social relation constituted through exploitation and political conflict.

But first, I wanted to pose a question about Neel’s whole cloth dismissal of what he describes as African dependency theory. Later in the book, he swaps out Latin American dependency theory’s liberal iteration with the Marxist alternative—namely, Ruy Mauro Marini’s theory of sub-imperialism.¹⁶Ruy Mauro Marini, The Dialectics of Dependency (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022).

So why not do the same in the African context? The radicals around Shivji to some extent, but especially around Cheche, advocated a class struggle alternative—certainly not a technocratic fix or anything approximating Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI). But this politics is left to the side, with the bulk of Neel’s analysis trained on the liberal political economy of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and ISI.