Listen now to Workers’ Inquiry, a podcast about work, struggle and revolution by Notes from Below.

At Notes from Below, we think that workers’ are best placed to understand their own jobs. When we understand how our work is organised, we gain an insight into how our political struggles are shaped by our everyday conditions of work and life. And when we can understand that, we can make better plans.

That’s why we launched our journal back in 2018. We thought the Left had a problem. It had lost contact with the daily reality of exploitation that keeps the capitalist mode of production ticking over. We wanted to accelerate the class struggle in Britain, and we thought we could help do that by starting a publication for and by workers.

Six years later, we’ve published more than four hundred articles by hundreds of different people, many of them writing for publication for the first time. We’ve racked up over a quarter of a million readers, and in 2023 we started publishing in print. With the support of our subscribers, we have distributed thousands of issues for free in workplaces and on picket lines. We’ve published cleaners, nurses, teachers, lecturers, bar staff, train drivers, posties, shelf stackers, game designers, chefs and workers in call centres, farms and warehouses. We’ve finally started to generate a real concrete understanding of what it means to be a worker in Britain today, and what the struggle looks like on the ground.

But lots of us struggle to find the time or energy to read. We have to commute hours each way to work; we have to care for children, relatives, and each other; we have to do the shopping and the washing up. That’s why we’ve started this podcast. It won’t replace the journal, but it will compliment it, and give you an easy way into the articles we publish. Whenever you have time to listen, we have ideas to share.

The format is going to be simple. We’re going to talk to people who have written for Notes From Below. They’ll share their experience of work, their analysis of their workplace, and how they think we can build our collective Sometimes we will change the episodes up a bit and invite other editors or guests on to zoom out a bit, and discuss something wider. It could be a moment in working class history, a struggle that’s going on right now, or some of the ideas and theories that guide our movement.

In our first episode, Contradictions in Care we spoke to Lyra & Connor, two ex-care workers who speak about their experience in the industry, covering deindustrialisation, disability, migration & strikes.

In our second episode Cooking up a Storm, we chatted with Eric, a chef from London, about hospitality work, organising strategies, and gentrification.

For episode three, The Political Leap, we spoke to Sai Englert about political organisation. We talk about revolutions, parties, and the looming combination of crisis and opportunity.

In episode four, We The Surplus, we heard from Jonas Marvin about the history of sickness in Britain since the mid-20th century, and what health communism has to teach us about the class struggle today.

For our fifth episode, Close the Door Behind You, we spoke with Nick Francis about his time working as a bouncer. We go over the experience of the work, the possibilities for coalitions in the hospitality industry, and the stories we tell ourselves to make work bearable.

In episode six, Mine Women, we talk to Karin, a Swedish ex-miner who worked in the largest iron ore mine in Europe. She tells us about the experience of Gruvkvinnor [Mine Women], a self-organised group of blue collar women working in production roles.

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If you want, you can help by listening, giving it a five star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, make that happen, and by sharing our first episodes with your mates on social media.