Here Be Monsters: How to Fight Capitalism Instead of Each Other

A clear and engaging history of how left radicalism went wrong and how it can become what it must be again.

Here Be Monsters speaks to a left that has forgotten its history, its potential, and its power.

Gramsci spoke of a time of monsters or morbid symptoms. In the ancient world, monsters were not enemies, but rather divine warnings, symptoms of a world out of balance. Here Be Monsters meets these monsters and listens to what they have to tell us.

Interweaving personal stories with engaging histories of political thought and the meanings of monsters, Rhyd Wildermuth reveals the roots of current identity conflicts and political contradictions in feminism, anti-racist theory, Marxism, Frankfurt School theorists, and the many other leftist attempts to put the world back into balance.

The left has always been the province of dreamers and visionaries, or as Ursula K. Le Guin named them, “realists of a larger reality.” Here Be Monsters is an urgent and deeply engaging narrative to help us remember that reality once more.

Rhyd Wildermuth is a druid, theorist, publisher, former union organizer and street activist, and the author of Being Pagan: A Guide to Re-Enchant Your Life, All That is Sacred is Profaned: A Pagan Guide to Marxism, and Witches in a Crumbling Empire. Born in Appalachia and forged on the streets of Seattle, he now lives in the Ardennes and writes the popular Substack, From the Forests of Arduinna.