Red Medicine

In this episode Beatrice Adler Bolton, Callum Cant, and myself talk about the general strike: not as something consigned to history but as a tactic we need today. Specifically, we talk about how the strike emerged as a tactic, what that means about struggle today, and how the struggle against ICE in Minneapolis (and elsewhere) offers us a way to answer some of these questions.  SUPPORT: www.buymea...

Abby Kluchin & Patrick Blanchfield from the Ordinary Unhappiness podcast join for the next installment of the Anti-Self-Helpline. The Anti-Self-Helpline is where listeners write in with their experiences of political struggle so we can talk through the psychic and emotional content of those experiences.  SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicine Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington Twitter: @red_medicine...

Callum Cant and Matthew Lee rejoin the podcast as we travel around the country speaking with people about work, struggle, and the 1926 general strike. We speak with mental health workers, trade union organisers, communists and local historians across Scotland, Manchester, and the Midlands.  SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicine Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington Twitter: @red_medicine__ www.redmedi...

Callum Cant and Matthew Lee talk us through the history of the 1926 general strike in Britain. To mark the centenary and publication of their book The Future In Our Past: The General Strike 1926/2026, we talked about how workers in Britain brought the country to a standstill and engaged in open conflict with the British state. We also talked about what this moment tells us about class struggle tod...

James Schneider returns to the podcast to talk about Britains relationship to the United States of America, how this relationship is shaping the terrain of struggle in in the face of escalating imperialist aggression and the resulting economic turbulence this is causing. We also discuss his recent trip to Cuba as part of the Nuestra América Convoy.   James Schneider is a writer and political organ...

Joana Masó joins the podcast to talk about the life and work of Francesc Tosquelles. Tosquelles was a radical psychiatrist, veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and a hugely influential figure in the lives of figures such as  Frantz Fanon, Felix Guattari and Jean Oury. Joana explains how his life unfoleded and developed, from the co-operatives of Catalonia, to resisting nazi occupation in France, to...

Sasha Warren returns to the podcast to give a talk on the political economy of madness and psychiatry. In this talk he draws on his research and experience as a community mental health worker to unpack the political terrain that shapes psychiatry; arguing that it is only by acknowledging psychiatry (and mental health care more generally) as bound up in political processes that we can actually unde...

Amber Husain returns to discuss the experience of being diagnosed with anorexia after struggling to find the will to eat. She discusses the experience of diagnosis, treatment, and her reengagement with questions of food, community, and hunger that came as a result. We talk about wartime starvation experiments, psychedelic assisted therapy, and why we need a politics of pleasure that isn't about ca...

M.E. O'Brien and Max Fox joins the podcast to talk about After Accountability, an oral history of the concept of 'accountability' in movement spaces, and to respond to questions and comments submitted by listeners for the third episode of the Anti-Self-Helpline. The Anti-Self-Helpline is a new episode format where listeners write in with their experiences of political struggle so we can take serio...

Lydia and Connor join the podcast to talk about the newest issue of Notes from Below, which explores social care in Britain via the contributions and analysis of workers themselves. Both Lydia and Connor are care workers, so we discuss their experiences of work before explaining how social care is (dis)organized in Britain, some of the larger dynamics and histories shaping social care, and the rec...

Erik Baker, author of Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, returns to the podcast to talk about self-help and respond to questions and comments submitted by listeners for the second episode of the Anti-Self-Helpline. The Anti-Self-Helpline is a new episode format where listeners write in with their experiences of political struggle so we can take seriously the p...

The British state is currently imprisoning activists from the Palestine movement without trial. Many of them are engaging in a hunger strike, demanding an end to censorship, immediate bail, right to a fair trial, the de-proscription of Palestine Action, and an end to shut down the death-making work of Elbit Systems. Charlie Thomas joins the podcast to talk through these developments and reflect on...

I went on the Death Panel podcast to talk about the past, present, and future of the NHS. Death Panel is a podcast about the political economy of health, hosted by Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, Phil Rocco, and Jules Gill-Peterson SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicine Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington Twitter: @red_medicine__ www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Jake Romm joins the podcast to explain why anti-semitism and zionism have more in common than separates them. In this conversation we discuss the work of mid-century thinkers such as Jean Paul Sartre, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, as well recent scholarship from Nadia Abu El-Haj and the writing of Palestinian political prisoners, to better understand the many consistencies between anti-semitic a...

We talk about Wes Streeting. Who is he, what are his politics, and what does it mean for health policy in Britain?    Jonas Marvin is a writer and researcher based in Stoke-on-Trent. He is the author of a forthcoming book, The Breaking of the English Working Class (Spring 2026, Verso), cohost of Life of the Party podcast, and blogs at Marx’s Dream Journal.   Ruth Pearce is a Lecturer in Community...

Lily Scherlis joins the podcast to talk about her recent essay Experiences in Groups, which was published in the most recent issue of n+1 magazine and documents her experience of attending a Group Relations conference in the English countryside. Group relations refers to an offshoot of psychoanalytic theory and practice which applies the ideas of Wilfred Bion, to understand group dynamics and orga...

Candela Potente and Ramsey McGlazer join to discuss the life and work of Marie Langer; a psychoanalyst who grew up in Red Vienna and fled fascism after fighting in the Spanish Civil War. After fleeing to Argentina she co-founded the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, before being forced to leave the country under the threat of anti-communist death squads. She then found herself in Mexico, suppo...

Hannah Proctor, author of Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat, returns to the podcast to talk through questions and comments submitted by listeners for the first episode of the Anti-Self-Helpline. The Anti-Self-Helpline is a new episode format where listeners write in with their experiences of political struggle so we can take seriously the psychic and emotional content of politi...

Micha Frazer-Carroll and Sasha Warren are back on the podcast to discuss the Dialectics of Liberation Congress: a conference that brought together the likes of R. D. Laing, David Cooper, Kwame Ture (FKA Stokely Carmichael), Herbert Marcuse, Allen Ginsburg, CLR James, Angela Davis, Carolee Schneemann, and many more in London, 1967. The congress attempted to theorize and resist violence in all its f...

Emily Lim Rogers and Rouzbeh Shadpey join the podcast to talk about the history of chronic fatigue under capitalism. We explore the way in which medical knowledge reflects and enacts the need for capitalist society to monitor, measure and discipline workers before situating conditions like ME/CFS within these dynamics.     Emily Lim Rogers is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke...

The ANTI-SELF-HELPLINE is a place to share and make sense of our experiences of political struggle. Political struggle is hard; yet there are very few resources for thinking through the emotional and psychic dimensions of these experiences. Those of us who want to radically change the world are often exposed to the depoliticizing tendencies of mainstream therapy, the disciplining functions of self...

Hannah Zeavin and Helen Charman return to the podcast to discuss the history of technology, media and mothering throughout the 20th century. We discuss the role media and technology play in the labor process of mothering, how media often becomes a site of panic and pathology, and what this all tells us about the relationship between the state and the so-called private household. Hannah Zeavin is A...

Jess Thorne returns to the podcast to discuss workers' self-management – from the Lucas Plan of the 1970s to Yugoslavian workers' councils. She explains how workers have challenged the idea that innovation only happens thanks to top-down management structures and asks what worker autonomy offers in the face of current political problems. Jess Thorne is a trade union organiser who has spent the las...

The hosts of Ordinary Unhappiness join the podcast to discuss D. W. Winnicott; one of the most influential figures in the history of psychoanalysis in Britain. They explain how Winnicott's work was shaped by the traumatizing effects of World War 2, debates between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, and the place of mothers in the construction of the British welfare state. We also discuss how this histo...

Erik Baker returns to the podcast to demystify the entrepreneurial work ethic – from depression era spiritualism to contemporary pop-psychology via struggles over the meaning of work throughout the twentieth century.   Erik Baker is Lecturer on the History of Science at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, n+1, The Baffler, Jewish Currents, and The Drift, where he is Senior Ed...