Red Medicine

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 recent upswing in worker militancy across the sector. 

SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicine
Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington
Twitter: @red_medicine__
www.redmedicine.substack.com/

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 psychic and emotional content of political experiences.
 
Erik's essay How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shitty Life: https://www.thedriftmag.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-my-shitty-life/
 
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 Editor. His first book Make Your Own Job published with Harvard University Press in January 2025.
 

SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicine
Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington
Twitter: @red_medicine__
www.redmedicine.substack.com/

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 his own experience of being incarcerated for his work in the Palestine solidarity movement. We talk about the increasing waves of repression coming from the government in recent years as well as what we need to learn, as a movement, from experiences of incarceration and criminalisation. 
 
PRISONERS FOR PALESTINE LINK: https://prisonersforpalestine.org/
 
Charlie Thomas is a researcher, trade unionist, and a member of Workers For a Free Palestine. 

SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicine
Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington
Twitter: @red_medicine__
www.redmedicine.substack.com/

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 and zionist ideology. This conversation draws on two of Jake's recent essays ('Elements of Anti-Semitism' and 'Idée Fixe' both published in Parapraxis Magazine) and references a short course he recently ran with the Psychosocial Foundation titled Zionism as an Antisemitism.
 
Jake Romm is a writer and human rights lawyer based in Brooklyn. He is associate editor of Protean Magazine and the US Representative for the Hind Rajab Foundation. His writing has appeared in The Nation, the Brooklyn Rail, The Baffler, Parapraxis and elsewhere.

SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicine
Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington
Twitter: @red_medicine__
www.redmedicine.substack.com/