Fuck the Police Means We Don’t Act like Cops to Each Other #3

This zine is a series of essays challenging the repeated arguments in favour of cancel culture: that is doesn’t exist, that it’s about justice, that it’s our only effective strategy for taking abuse seriously, that it’s an important tool for marginalized people. The essays explore different elements of cancel culture and of the questions cancel culture claims to answer. Overall it makes the argument that cancel culture is absolutely at odds with an ethics of abolitionism, that is an ineffective tool for ending abuse, that it actually creates new forms of abuse, and that it is ultimately bad for the goal of a creating the broad based movement of workers needed to pose a threat to capitalism and change things. Who should define accountability? How do we create cultures of consent? What does it mean to ‘believe survivors’? Who is to blame and where should we direct our anger? How can we move toward a world where no one is disposable and everyone is treated as a full complex human being? Why is cancel culture a problem for the Left? These and many more questions are explored in the pages of this zine.