Summer Series: Field Notes

Join us for a week of conversations, performances, and readings curated by the Rail’s section editors.

In this talk

This summer, we are celebrating the sections of the Brooklyn Rail with conversations, performances, and readings curated by our editors. This 2-week YouTube video series offers a view behind the scenes with the editors, artists, and writers that make the publication.

On Monday, July 19, Field Notes editor Paul Mattick is joined by writer and communist geographer Phil Neel for a conversation on the nature of capitalist crisis in China and beyond, as well as the role of the nation-state in the continual reproduction of capitalism as a global social system pushing the human species to the brink of extinction.

Check out the other events this week devoted to our sections Artseen + ArTonic, Art Books, Books, and Music. Register below to one, some, or all of these events to receive selected materials for each episode.

Phil Neel

Writer and communist geographer Phil Neel is based in the Pacific Northwest. His dissertation Global China, Global Crisis: Falling Profitability, Rising Capital Exports and the Formation of New Territorial Industrial Complexes is based on a decade of research spanning early work in the logistics suburbs of Seattle in the US, continued through field work in the “urban villages” and factory districts of China’s Pearl River Delta, and a survey of the emergent industrial zones of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. This research involved interviews with workers across the world in English, Chinese, and Swahili, paired with an in-depth, critical quantitative analysis of data on profitability, investment, and industrial relocation in China as well as Chinese investment abroad.

In the Rail: Phil Neel

Paul Mattick

Author and theorist Paul Mattick is the Rail’s Field Notes editor. His most recent books are Theory as Critique: Essays on Capital (Haymarket Books, 2019) and Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism (Reaktion Books, 2011).

In the Rail: Paul Mattick