This chapter introduces a materialist conception of queer theory and explains why it is needed in the field. It presents a brief introduction to the literature and explains the broader goals of the project. This first chapter has a separate section where it introduces the key concepts of the book and explains their use in social science. In the following section, it offers a detailed presentation of the material in the book and its organization chapter by chapter. Finally, it clarifies the use of its archive.

This chapter examines social media’s possibilities for dissent and action, locally and globally. It considers social media users as encultured subjects whose use of sites can afford significant support for identity and collective action. In addition, the chapter approaches the use of ‘fun’ on social media as a means of resistance. Finally, and importantly, the chapter focuses on the concept of ‘imagining otherwise’ where Indigenous social media users, can contemplate a reality that shaped by online activism and executed offline through movements that continue to augment our history, our existence and our future aspirations.

Dr. Bailey sets the tone for this text as a filing the gap in social work education and education across the helping professions in that it creates text that demonstrates sound and innovative application of decolonial lenses, anti-oppressive lenses, and empowerment practice in clinical supervision and social work leadership. Dr. Bailey urges the reader to understand that the process of decolonization within the helping professions is a process across systems, environments, and over time toward liberation.

The introduction describes the structure and rationale of the book. It argues that Keynes should be seen as neither villain nor hero and that while the left should appropriate his ideas with caution, he provides insights at a level of concreteness which Marx’s analysis largely ignored and which were concerned with issues of the modern world which Marx could not have foreseen. A critical Marxist engagement can simultaneously increase the power of Keynes’s insight and enrich Marxism. The introduction describes how, to understand Keynes, whose work is liberally invoked but seldom read, the book first puts Keynes in context, explaining his biography and the extraordinary times in which he lived, his philosophy and his politics. The book describes Keynes’s developing critique of ‘the classics’, of mainstream economics as he found it, and summarises the General Theory. It shows how Keynes provides an enduringly valuable critique of orthodoxy but vital insights rather than a genuinely general theory. The book then develops a Marxist appropriation of Keynes’s insights. It argues that Marxist analysis of unemployment, of money and interest, and of the role of the state can be enriched through such a critical engagement. The book addresses Keynesianism after Keynes, critically reviewing the practices that came to be known as ‘Keynesianism’ and different theoretical traditions that have claimed his legacy. It considers the crisis of the 1970s, the subsequent anti-Keynesian turn, the economic and ecological crises of the twenty-first century, and the prospects of returning to Keynes and Keynesianism.

Chapter 3 examines the politician Rory Stewart’s memoir, The Marches (2017), narrating his walks across the borderlands of England and Scotland with his late father. A memoir that seamlessly mixes a father–son relationship with a political tract for the future of Anglo-Scottish, British–European relations, The Marches morphs into a melancholic search for the proper burial of the imperial world of Stewart’s father and ancestors. The chapter argues that Rory Stewart’s mercurial social and political identity can be traced back to both the imperial history of Britain and its manifestation in his father’s imperial career. On the one hand Stewart appears everything the son of a colonial officer in the twenty-first century should be – Eton, Oxbridge, the Foreign Office, diplomat, Iraqi governor and Conservative MP – while, on the other, he is unable to ground or channel these statuses in a productive and politically expedient or permissible way. As such, the chapter examines how a form of imperial melancholia hangs over Stewart’s identity and concludes that his affirmation of pragmatism as a political virtue is more a reflection of the lingering afterglow of British imperial decline than it is a coherent political ideology.

Governments command tax revenue to provide services. The US government’s revenue is lower than that in Western European nations. The latter provide services such as universal healthcare, paid parental leave, and free education. A large portion of the US government’s revenue supports the military, which comprises almost half of the world’s total military expenditures. The richest 400 American families pay the lowest tax rate today, in sharp contrast to their paying the highest share in the 1950s. The federal government borrows to pay for services rather than resort to taxing the rich. Americans seem more accepting of not redistributing wealth than Western Europeans. Policies not supported by the elite are unlikely to become law. Poorer people are less likely to vote in the US. Since the 1950s, US states with the most liberal policies have had better mortality trends than conservative states. Americans prefer medical care spending over public health and social spending. Neoliberalism has increased economic inequality and produced a rightward political shift. Reparations can improve racial inequalities