Red Medicine

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, supporting the Nicaraguan Revolution by helping to build their mental health infrastructure. This conversation looks at what her legacy offers us in a time of rising fascism and institutional complicity. SUPPORT AND WRITE IN: http://linktr.ee/redmedicine.xyzRamsey McGlazer lives in Oakland, California, and teaches at UC Berkeley. His first book, Old Schools, was published in 2020, and he is working on a book currently called "The Clinic and its Double," about aesthetics and radical psychiatry in Italy and Brazil. His public writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Lux Magazine, n+1, and Parapraxis, among other places. He lived in Argentina a lifetime ago and has more recently translated several books from the Spanish by Argentine writers. These include, most recently, Rita Segato's The War Against Women (published by Polity in 2025). Candela Potente is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hans Kilian and Lotte Köhler Center at Ruhr-University Bochum and the International Psychoanalytic University Berlin. She works on the epistemology of psychoanalysis, taking case studies from its transnational history, and her research has been published in the journals Penumbra, Problemi International, and TRANSIT. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a degree in Philosophy from the University of Buenos Aires. SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

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 political experiences.-Hannah Proctor is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, interested in histories and theories of radical psychiatry. She is a member of the editorial collective behind Radical Philosophy, and has been published in Jacobin, Tribune, The New Inquiry and elsewhere.Hannah Proctor is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, interested in histories and theories of radical psychiatry. She is a member of the editorial collective behind Radical Philosophy, and has been published in Jacobin, Tribune, The New Inquiry and elsewhere. Her first book Burnout published with Verso Books in 2024. -SUBMIT TO THE HELPLINE VIA ANY OF THE PODCAST SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS OR ANONYMOUSLY BY USING THIS DOCUMENT: https://linktr.ee/redmedicine.xyz SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

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 forms, we discuss what took place at this weird and intense event and what we can learn from it today.  Sasha Durakov Warren is a writer based in Minneapolis. He cofounded the group Hearing Voices Twin Cities and is the author of the fantastic book Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt which published last year with Common Notions. He runs the substack Of Unsound Mind.  Micha Frazer-Carroll is an author, journalist and editor living in London.  She was previously an editor at the magazine gal-dem and has written for publications including the Guardian, Vogue, Huck, and DAZED magazine. Micha is also the author of Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health which was published in 2023 by Pluto Press.  All samples in this episode come from the film Dialectics Of Liberation - Anatomy Of Violence (Villon films). Submit to the ANTI-SELF-HELPLINE here: https://linktr.ee/redmedicine.xyz  SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

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 University, with secondary appointments in Asian American and Diaspora Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. She has a book forthcoming with Duke University Press called Sick Work: Exhaustion, Labor, and Invisible Illness Rouzbeh Shadpey is an artist, writer, and musician. Rouzbeh has exhibited and performed at TULCA (Ireland), documenta fifteen (Germany), The Mosaic Rooms (UK), Poetry Project (New York), MUTEK (Montréal), and more. His writing appears in artistic and academic journals, including Parapraxis, Decolonial Hacker, Weird Economies, Syllabus Project, and Momus. His musical practice, under the name GOLPESAR / گلپسر , combines avant-garde electronics, guitar, spoken word, and Iranian sonics. ANTI-SELF-HELPLINE SUBMISSIONS: https://forms.gle/8npHMJmsSXjEdc8s5 JULY 10th panel information: https://www.outsavvy.com/event/28215/thinking-together-for-consolation-and-towards-liberation   SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

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-help, and the pathologisation of political consciousness. The ANTI-SELF-HELPLINE is a space to think through these experiences collectively whilst engaging critically with psychoanalysis, therapy, and histories of struggle. Send your questions, reflections, and experiences to editorial@redmedicine.xyzOr submit here: https://forms.gle/2RzafrqoqLLEav7X6You can also send messages or voice-notes to any of the podcast social media accounts.  SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

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 Assistant Professor of the History of Science in the Department of History and the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. In 2021, she cofounded The Psychosocial Foundation and is Founding Editor of Parapraxis magazine. She is the author of The Distance Cure and more recently Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century (both published by The MIT Press.)Helen Charman is a Fellow and College Teaching Officer in English at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Her writing has been published in publications such as the Guardian, The White Review, and Another Gaze. As a poet, Charman was shortlisted for the White Review Poet's Prize in 2017 and for the 2019 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment, and has published four poetry pamphlets, most recently In the Pleasure Dairy. Her first book Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood published last August.  FESTIVAL OF THE OPPRESSED TICKETS: https://revsoc21.uk/festival2025/ SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

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 last two years assisting health care assistants with a rebanding campaign. She is also a labour historian and has contributed to journals such as European History Quarterly, Labour History Review and History Workshop Journal.Tickets for Festival of the Oppressed 2025: https://revsoc21.uk/festival2025/Jess' report on workers' self management: https://autonomy.work/portfolio/worker-led-innovation/  SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

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 history relates to contemporary struggles over social reproduction and care.Abby Kluchin is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, where she coordinates the Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies program. Abby is a co-founder and Associate Director at Large of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She co-hosts the podcast Ordinary Unhappiness with Patrick.Patrick Blanchfield is a writer, an Associate Faculty Member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and co-host of Ordinary Unhappiness, a podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. He is also a contributing editor at Parapraxis magazine. SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

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 Editor. His first book Make Your Own Job published with Harvard University Press in January.  SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Emily Callaci unpacks the history and legacy of Wages for Housework, the feminist movement that demanded payment for the unpaid work of women required to sustain capitalism. She discusses five women at the centre of this movement: Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod. Emily Callaci is a historian and writer, currently Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Street Archives and City Life and Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise.  SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Ellen Clifford contextualizes the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill – often referred to as the assisted dying or assisted suicide bill – within the long history of eugenic politics and welfare reform.Ellen Clifford is a disabled activist and writer. She is on the National Steering Group for Disabled People Against Cuts and is the author of The War on Disabled People: Capitalism, Welfare and the Making of a Human Catastrophe. SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Peter Apps and Anna Stec discuss the Grenfell Tower fire, placing the incident in a longer political history of deregulation and privatisation as well as the ongoing dangers caused by the toxic nature of the fire. Peter Apps is a journalist who has covered the housing sector for Inside Housing and other publications for over 10 years. He has reported extensively on the Grenfell Tower fire, authoring a book on the topic titled Show Me The Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen. Anna Stec is Professor of Fire Chemistry and Toxicity at the University of Central Lancashire and has published extensively on the topic. Anna was also an expert witness the Grenfell Tower Enquiry.  SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Callum Cant joins the podcast to explain 'workers inquiry', a form of research that places the working class as its centre and protagonist. He explains how it differs from other forms of theoretical work and why its so essential for building a militant working class. Callum Cant is a Senior Lecturer in Management at Essex Business School, he is the author of Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy and the co-author of Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI, with James Muldoon and Mark Graham. He is an editor at the publication Notes from Below and the host of the forthcoming Notes from Below Podcast.  SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

If access to care is so expensive, why are care workers so poorly paid? Historically, feminist discourses have looked at how ideology structures how we understand and value care work. However, in this discussion Alyssa Battistoni makes the argument that we need to update and develop these arguments, to provide a better answer to this question.  Alyssa Battistoni is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College. She is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019), with Kate Aronoff, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos. Her next book is called Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, and will be published with Princeton University Press in spring 2025. Her writing has appeared in publications such as New Left Review, The Nation, Dissent, n+1, Boston Review, and Jacobin. Her most recently published article, and the topic of this discussion, is titled Ideology at Work? Rethinking Reproduction, and appeared in American Political Science Review earlier this year.  SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

John Pring documents the history of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), specifically how this department has inflicted 30 years of violence and austerity on sick and disabled people in Britain. John Pring is founder and editor of the news agency Disability News Service. He is co-creator of the Deaths by Welfare timeline, and co-editor and specialist advisor on the award-winning Museum of Austerity project. He has written for mainstream publications including the Guardian, Observer, Daily Mirror and Private Eye, and was associate producer on the award-winning Dispatches documentary, The Truth About Disability Benefits. He is the author of Longcare Survivors: The Biography of a Care Scandal.  Earlier this year, Pluto Press published his most recent book, The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence. SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

George Severs provides a history of HIV/AIDS in England, paying close attention to the various political and social formations that emerged to address the harms of the virus, which were compounded by institutional homophobia and state abandonment. Dr George Severs is a historian of HIV/AIDS, sexual violence and sexual health in modern Britain. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland where he is working on a history of sexual health and race. He is the author of Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England.  SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Nihal El Aasar discusses her recent essay, titled Left-wing Melancholia, which has been published as part of Parapraxis Magazine's Palestine issue. In the essay Nihal explores the responses to the ongoing genocide in Gaza from people in other Arab countries. In her words “there have been certain weighted expectations for the Arab masses to react more strongly and urgently to this genocide. Some have heeded the call; some have tried and failed.” She draws on the work of people like Ghassan Kanafani, Nouri Gana, and friend of the podcast Hannah Proctor, to explore the relationship between counterrevolution in Egypt, US Imperialism, and Palestinian liberation through the lens of Arab political subjectivity. Nihal El Aasar is an Egyptian researcher living in London. Her writing has been published by outlets such as Protean, Africa Is A Country, ArtReview, and elsewhere. Her essay can be found here: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/leftwing-melancholia  SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Youbin Kang and John Ferretti discuss the compounding issues of austerity, policing, and propaganda on the New York City subway system. Specifically, they explore the way incidents of harm and violence are taken up as part of a cycle of media panics and carceral crackdowns. Youbin's recent essay All Aboard the Moral Panic, published in n+1 magazine, and John's experiences of workplace organising provide the basis for the discussion. Youbin Kang is a writer and Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. John Ferretti is a NYC Subway train conductor and a proud member of TWU Local 100, NYC's Subway and Bus workers' union. John is also a co-founder of the Local 100 Fightback Coalition – a rank-and-file Coalition of NYC Transit workers that is made up of both Revolutionary Socialists and Progressive Democrats in our union which was founded in September of 2018.  SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Helen Charman describes some of the many political and historical struggles over the meaning and status of motherhood, by way of thinkers such as Denise Riley and Jacqueline Rose, as well as figures such as Margaret Thatcher and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Helen Charman is a Fellow and College Teaching Officer in English at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Her critical writing has been published in the Guardian, The White Review, Another Gaze, and The Stinging Fly among others. As a poet, Charman was shortlisted for the White Review Poet's Prize in 2017 and for the 2019 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment, and has published four poetry pamphlets, most recently In the Pleasure Dairy. Charman volunteers as a birth companion in Glasgow. SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Richard Seymour analyses the global far-right, asking how movements across the world have managed to capitalize on the resentment produced by the capitalist system to generate a form of violent rebellion that leaves that same system fully in-tact. Richard Seymour is a writer and broadcaster from Northern Ireland and the author of numerous books about politics including Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics and The Twittering Machine. His writing appears in the The New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, Prospect, Jacobin, and innumerable other places including his own Patreon. He is an editor at Salvage magazine. His most recent book Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization,  publishes this month with Verso Books. SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicineSoundtrack by Mark PilkingtonTwitter: @red_medicine__www.redmedicine.substack.com/