In Chapter 7, I suggest that a Marxist conception of the unconscious can offer new insights into racial dynamics about class exploitation. I ask: How did the Cold War shape the concept of the unconscious, so that Marxist ideology and New Left psychoanalytic theory were kept at odds? I insert Soviet Marxism into conversations regarding the epistemology of psychoanalysis. I put Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic theory in dialogue not only with queer theory but also with a socialist film made in the Soviet Union about Romanian Roma, The Fiddlers.

Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean) has always connected Aboriginal and Māori relatives with each other and with our greater Pacific whanau (family). Anglo invasion and subsequent settlement throughout Oceania has ostensibly brought with it greater Indigenous mobilities that has created stronger inter-relating and intimacies between Aboriginal people, Māori and our relatives in other Pacific locations. From these intimacies, new formations grow locally, across land masses and waterways, providing unique expressions of global Indigeneity at individual, familial and community levels. Aboriginal and Māori Indigenous relationality extends to non-human and no-longer-physical kin. This author’s journey to learning she is Māori involved all of the abovementioned types of relationalities and raises questions about agency of ancestors, spirit and place.

In Chapter 2, I look at early Soviet Marxism as an epistemological framework that produced a productivist understanding of bodies and sexual attraction. Communist figures in socialism were neither individual territories of freedom, nor subjectivities who fought against the conformism of an established ideology. Marxist films present a productivist body that is not individualistic, but the unfinished product of a dialectical process to achieve communism. To begin the process of analyzing the erasure of eastern European Marxism, I explore the gradual disappearance of the productivist Soviet body during “the thaw,” with a focus on socialist Romania. While, in the 1950s, Romanian socialism followed a Soviet politics of sexuality, I show that during the 1960s Romanian socialism reflected a western European trend to naturalize conservative norms about marriage and abortion. I analyze the 1964 Romanian film The District of Gaiety and argue that conservative tropes of sexuality altered the project of Marxist sexuality

The chapter argues that while the purpose of this book is to discuss Keynes’s ideas, these make better sense in the context of his life and times. Both the life and the times were extraordinary, and despite Keynes’s individual brilliance, there is a strong case for seeing him as a product of and spokesperson for his class and nation. Keynes’s thinking was shaped during a period of remarkable social and economic upheaval. From an age of apparent stability and complacent British imperial hegemony, he lived through two world wars, the descent into the Great Depression and times of sharpened class struggles. A liberal economics based on enlightened self-interest in which, by assumption, neither states nor unemployment existed made sense neither as theory nor ideology, and Keynes became the most prominent of many economists trying to articulate a more realistic theory, a theory which would better describe capitalism but also better defend it. By the end of this period, Keynes had become both the world’s most famous economist and a leading player in the negotiations to shape the post-WWII order – now a world where the US had displaced Britain as the dominant power. The chapter’s content highlights how Keynes’s life (1883–1946) spanned this extraordinary age. It is divided chronologically into four parts, from 1883 to 1914, to 1929, to 1939 and to 1946, marking vital stages in Keynes’s intellectual and political career.

Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is a notoriously difficult book, which this chapter tries to explain as simply as possible. Keynes could be a great stylist and the General Theory’s many quotable passages have enhanced its appeal. Elsewhere, however, Keynes’s prose is dense and the arguments highly technical and convoluted. In contrast to other great works of political economy like Smith’s Wealth of Nations or Marx’s Capital, the General Theory was never meant to be understood by non-specialists. The difficulties of comprehension appear to be confirmed in the way the General Theory has been subject to widely different interpretations, as a radical departure or a mild amendment of the orthodoxy he was criticising. The chapter argues for something in between. The General Theory provides a substantial critique of standard economics but it does this by engaging with the mainstream on its own terms, and this qualifies claims of Keynes’s radicalism. The chapter provides a very brief overview and commentary on the overall argument of the book and its conceptual priorities. It is then organised around sections on savings and consumption, on money and the rate of interest, and on investment and employment, introducing a general discussion of how this leads to Keynes’s vision of the prospect of ‘unemployment equilibrium’ and the possibility of state intervention to ameliorate this. A final substantive section discusses dynamic change, cycles and long-term tendencies, into which it suggests the General Theory provides important but subsidiary insights.

The chapter discusses Keynes’s philosophy. Probably more than any major economist since Marx, Keynes thought deeply about political and philosophical issues. He was a sophisticated thinker, close intellectually as well as personally to several leading philosophers of the age. He was particularly strongly influenced by Moore, and wrote one major work, the Treatise on Probability, which operates at the intersection of mathematics, logic and philosophy. There is controversy about the influence of this early work, and of Keynes’s philosophical thought in general, but there are important connections between his philosophy and his mature economics. It is argued that Keynes never develops an entirely coherent overall philosophy. This undermines grander claims for a ‘Keynesian economic system’ and for the generality of the General Theory. Keynes develops profound insights, around intuition, organic unity, time and uncertainty, which he does not always follow through, and makes philosophically provocative statements from whose implications he pulls back. An apparently individualist idealism and questions about the basis of knowledge might, if pushed to their (il)logical conclusions, appear radically incompatible with a genuinely critical political economy. More positively, however, these ambiguities enable the adoption or appropriation of Keynes’s insights in a way that a more rigorously internally consistent system might preclude. In particular, Keynes is right that individuals act in the face of real uncertainties and that this has important economic implications.

Chapter 1 argues that we would benefit from viewing England’s traditional upper class not as an aberration of contemporary forms of capital accumulation or an anachronism to our comprehension of power, politics and identity. Instead we can re-examine the origins of English agrarian capitalism, not as an incomplete capitalism because it arose under the auspices of a hereditary aristocracy but a far more prodigious and pristine form of capitalism. England witnessed a more developed form of capitalism, whose pre-modern symbolism, far from stymying capital accumulation, exaggerated economic inequalities and social distinctions. Once this framework is in place, the chapter builds an argument to suggest that kinship idioms of inheritance and descent feed not only England’s relationship to capital but also come to forge a vision of ‘society’ as well as the foundation for our language of class. Whenever class and capital are mentioned, kinship thinking follows close behind. This is illustrated through an examination of Eurosceptic laments on the demise of national identity written by, largely, upper-class men (b. post-1945) at the turn of the millennium. It is observed that these narratives of national decline form part of a genre of writing on English national identity crisis unified by the tendency to tell the story of national decline through the kinship idiom of father–son. This idiom holds one key to understanding the imbrication of upper-class sensibilities with the crisis of national identity in which we find ourselves.

High US inequality has supported having a strong-man government that appears to be above the law. Policies supprting increasing inequality and lack of support for a healthy early life will likely worsen our health. World Wars have worked in the past but may not be effective today. The challenge is creating awareness of the predicament to build people power

Keynes was intensely political. He was an activist, a populariser of economic ideas, an influential Treasury official and seldom for long out of touch with the British prime minister of the day. Economics was never a neutral scientific endeavour, and it makes sense to understand his economics in the light of his political views. Keynes wants to develop a more realistic theory, but even his most abstract work is oriented to providing a better guide to policy. Keynes wrote in the ‘advice to princes’ tradition, offering a better guide for rulers of the existing system. As usual with Keynes, there are ambiguities and his political stance is contested, but it is argued that although Keynes says some different things, he fairly consistently occupies a space bounded on the one hand by a conservatism drawn particularly from Edmund Burke and on the other by British liberalism. The first two sections of the chapter discuss these two influences. The third section discusses alternative claims that Keynes was a socialist, arguing that while there were radical aspects to his thought, Keynes is better understood as a pro-capitalist not a socialist thinker. As the fourth and final section continues, Keynes brings in the state, but in a quite consistently liberal way in that he still conceives the requisite level of state intervention as being minimal, albeit while raising the perceived necessary minimum. A specifically British, but also more broadly a national rather than international or global, orientation also informs and limits Keynes’s political economy.