Bob Black


Robert Charles Black Jr. is an American author and anarchist. He is the author of the books The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, Beneath the Underground, Friendly Fire, Anarchy After Leftism, and Defacing the Currency, and numerous political essays.

Biography

Black graduated from the University of Michigan and Georgetown Law School. He later took M.A. degrees in jurisprudence and social policy from the University of California, Berkeley and criminal justice from the University at Albany, SUNY, and an LL.M in criminal law from the University at Buffalo Law School. During his undergraduate studies, he became disillusioned with the New Left of the 1970s and undertook extensive readings in anarchism, utopian socialism, council communism, and other left tendencies critical of both Marxism–Leninism and social democracy. He found some of these sources at the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, a major collection of radical, labor, socialist, and anarchist materials which is now the repository for Black's papers and correspondence. He was soon drawn to Situationist thought, egoist communism, and the anti-authoritarian analyses of John Zerzan and the Detroit magazine Fifth Estate. He produced a series of ironic political posters signed "The Last International", first in Ann Arbor, Michigan, then in San Francisco where he moved in 1978. In the Bay Area he became involved with the publishing and cultural underground, writing reviews and critiques of what he called the "marginals milieu." Since 1988 he has lived in upstate New York.
Black is best known for penning a 1985 essay, "The Abolition of Work," which has been widely reprinted and translated into at least thirteen languages. In it he argued that work is a fundamental source of domination, comparable to capitalism and the state, which should be transformed into voluntary "productive play." Black acknowledged among his inspirations the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, the British utopian socialist William Morris, the Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin, and the Situationists. The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, published by Loompanics in 1986, included, along with the title essay, some of his short Last International texts, and some essays and reviews reprinted from his column in San Francisco's Appeal to Reason, a leftist and counter-cultural tabloid published from 1980 to 1984.
Two more essay collections were later published as books, Friendly Fire and Beneath the Underground, the latter devoted to the do-it-yourself/fanzine subculture of the '80s and '90s which he called "the marginals milieu" and in which he had been heavily involved. Anarchy after Leftism is a more or less point-by-point rebuttal of Murray Bookchin's Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm, which had criticized as "lifestyle anarchism" various nontraditional tendencies in contemporary anarchism. Black's short book was succeeded—as an E-book published in 2011 at the online Anarchist Library—by Nightmares of Reason, a longer and more wide-ranging critique of Bookchin's anthropological and historical arguments, especially Bookchin's espousal of "libertarian municipalism" which Black ridiculed as "mini-statism." Black's most recent book, "Instead of Work", collects his writings about work from 1985 to 2015.
Since 2000, Black has focused on topics reflecting his education and reading in the sociology and the ethnography of law, resulting in writings often published in . His recent interests have included the anarchist implications of dispute resolution institutions in stateless primitive societies. At the 2011 annual B.A.S.T.A.R.D. anarchist conference in Berkeley, California, Black presented a workshop where he argued that, in society as it is, crime can be an anarchist method of social control, especially for people systematically neglected by the legal system. An article based on this presentation appeared in Anarchy magazine and in his 2013 book, Defacing the Currency: Selected Writings, 1992–2012.
Black has expressed an interest, which grew out of his polemics with Bookchin, in the relation of democracy to anarchism. For Bookchin, democracy—the "direct democracy" of face-to-face assemblies of citizens—is anarchism. Some contemporary anarchists agree, including the academics Cindy Milstein, David Graeber, and Peter Staudenmeier. Black, however, has always rejected the idea that democracy is anarchist. He made this argument at a presentation at the Long Haul Bookshop in 2008. In 2011, C.A.L. Press published as a pamphlet Debunking Democracy, elaborating on the speech and providing citation support. This too is reprinted in Defacing the Currency.

Writing

Some of his work from the early 1980s includes highlights his critiques of the nuclear freeze movement, the editors of Processed World, radical feminists, and right wing libertarians. Some of these essays previously appeared in "San Francisco's Appeal to Reason", a leftist and counter-cultural tabloid newspaper for which Black wrote a column.

''The Abolition of Work''

The Abolition of Work and Other Essays draws upon some ideas of the Situationist International, the utopian socialists Charles Fourier and William Morris, anarchists such as Paul Goodman, and anthropologists such as Richard Borshay Lee and Marshall Sahlins. Black criticizes work for its compulsion, and, in industrial society, for taking the form of "jobs"—the restriction of the worker to a single limited task, usually one which involves no creativity and often no skill. Black's alternative is the elimination of what William Morris called "useless toil" and the transformation of useful work into "productive play," with opportunities to participate in a variety of useful yet intrinsically enjoyable activities, as proposed by Charles Fourier. Beneath the Underground is a collection of texts relating to what Black calls the "marginals milieu"—the do-it-yourself zine subculture which flourished in the 80s and early 90s. Friendly Fire is, like Black's first book, an eclectic collection touching on many topics including the Art Strike, Nietzsche, the first Gulf War and the Dial-a-Rumor telephone project he conducted with Zack Replica.
Defacing the Currency: Selected Writings, 1992–2012 was published by Little Black Cart Press in 2013. It includes a lengthy, previously unpublished critique of Noam Chomsky, "Chomsky on the Nod." A similar collection has been published, in Russian translation, by Hylaea Books in Moscow. Black's most recent book, also from LBC Books, is Instead of Work, which collects "The Abolition of Work" and seven other previously published texts, with a lengthy new update, "Afterthoughts on the Abolition of Work." The introduction is by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling.