Red Medicine

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. 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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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.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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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.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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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. 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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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. 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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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.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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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. 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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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 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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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. 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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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.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/