Bob Black

For other people named Robert Black, see Robert Black (disambiguation).

Robert Charles Black, Jr.
Bob Black seated at the Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed booth, attending the 2011 Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair.
Born	(1951-01-04) January 4, 1951
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Post-left anarchy
Main interests	refusal of work, post-industrial society, Hunter-gatherer societies, History of anarchism
Notable ideas	The abolition of work, play

Bob Black (born Robert Charles Black, Jr. on January 4, 1951) is an American anarchist. He is the author of The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, Beneath the Underground, Friendly Fire, Anarchy After Leftism, and numerous political essays.

Writing

Some of his work from the early 1980s includes (anthologized in The Abolition of Work and Other Essays) highlights his critiques of the nuclear freeze movement ("Anti-Nuclear Terror"), the editors of Processed World ("Circle A Deceit: A Review of Processed World"), radical feminists ("Feminism as Fascism"), and Libertarians ("The Libertarian As Conservative").

The Abolition of Work

"To demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical albeit contract-consecrated subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism at its worst ... Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade."

— Bob Black, The Libertarian As Conservative, 1984

The Abolition of Work, draws upon some ideas of the Situationist International, the utopian socialists Charles Fourier and William Morris, anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin and 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 confinement 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.

Controversies

Church of the SubGenius controversy

According to two accounts by Black, he received a bomb in the mail at his street address on November 22, 1989. Black claimed it was a member of the Church of the SubGenius, John Hagen-Brenner, who sent him an "improvised explosive device consisting of an audio cassette holder wired with four cadmium-type batteries, four flashbulbs, and five firecrackers", as described in the charging document filed in Federal District Court. According to Black, he thought the package looked suspicious, then on impulse "threw it against the wall. There was a flash (the flashcubes) and a puff of smoke, but the firecrackers did not go off." Black turned the device in to the police. Black believes that the device was sent to him because of criticism he had made of the Church, and he has repeatedly brought up the incident in his writings concerning the Church. Ivan Stang and other members of the Church have denied any involvement in this incident, and no one else was charged. One of Black's texts was reposted and dismissed on the SubGenius mailing-list.

Anarchy After Leftism, and the Bookchin controversy

Beginning in 1997, Black became involved in a debate sparked by the work of anarchist and founder of the Institute for Social Ecology Murray Bookchin, an outspoken critic of the post-left anarchist tendency. Bookchin wrote and published Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm, labeling post-left anarchists and others as "lifestyle anarchists" — thus following up a theme developed in his Philosophy of Social Ecology. Though he does not refer directly to Black's work, Bookchin clearly has Black's rejection of work as an implicit target when he criticises authors such as John Zerzan and Dave Watson, whom he controversially labels part of the same tendency.

For Bookchin, "lifestyle anarchism" is individualistic and childish. "Lifestyle anarchists" demand "anarchy now", imagining they can create a new society through individual lifestyle changes.

In response, Black published Anarchy After Leftism. The text is a combination of point-by-point, almost legalistic dissection of Bookchin's argument, with bitter theoretical polemic, and even personal insult against Bookchin (whom he refers to as "the Dean" throughout).

Bookchin never replied to Black's critiques, which Black continued in such essays as "Withered Anarchism," "An American in Paris," and "Murray Bookchin and the Witch-Doctors."

See also

• Marshall Sahlins
• Richard Borshay Lee

External links

• "Bob Black". Spunk Library.
• The entire text of Bob Black’s 1986 collection The Abolition of Work and Other Essays at Inspiracy
• The Abolition of Work
• Gerry Reith archive at Inspiracy
• Future Nexus
• Listen Anarchist! a critique by Chaz Bufe