“Cancel culture” and Solidarity

Episode 16 Sneak Peak

We’re looking forward to our conversation this Friday with Dan Kovalik, author of Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture. In advance of this conversation, we’re thinking about how the Left will build an unapologetic movement for equality that goes beyond performative gestures. And we’re also thinking about how to stand in solidarity with the members of our community who face discrimination and cruelty. Achieving one of these goals doesn’t mean sacrificing the other — on the contrary, it’s essential to understand how to bring people over to our side without accepting or condoning hateful rhetoric. We’re glad Dan is joining us Friday to talk this through, and we hope that you will, too.

Consider this introduction to Cancel This Book:

Cancel This Book argues that “cancellation” is oftentimes counter-productive and destructive of the very values which the “cancellers” claim to support. And indeed, we now see instances in the workplace where employers are using this spirit of “cancellation” to pit employees against each other, to exert more control over the workforce and to undermine worker and labor solidarity. 

Kovalik argues that it’s important to keep the principles and purposes of cancel culture in mind. To put it another way, there’s a meaningful difference between working to build an anti-racist or anti-misogynistic organizing environment and treating this work as the territory of company HR. Amazon’s union-busting and cost-cutting on essential pandemic supplies demonstrate that companies act to maximize profit and minimize liability, not to put the safety and comfort of their workers first. While they may sometimes make decisions to protect workers from basic threats to safety, no corporation will be leading us down the path to transformative justice.

To end the rule that these corporations have over our lives, we need to understand how to respect and support one another as we organize together. This means the opposite of compromising our values as leftists — and it also means rejecting performative acts of “cancellation” that block us from our goal instead of helping us get there. In our discussion with Dan, who makes the progressive case against cancel culture, we’re hoping to get a sense of how progressives can honor their principles and work to build a better world alongside their fellow members of mass movements. Few things are more worthwhile to think about.

Paid subscribers can tune in Friday for our video conversation with Dan Kovalik — and if you subscribe to KK&F for free, you can hear the audio Saturday, whether through Substack, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify, or many other streaming platforms. We’re grateful to you for following the show!