Everything about Bob Black totally explained
Bob Black (born
Robert Charles Black, Jr. on
January 4th,
1951) is an
American anarchist and
lawyer. He is the author of
The Abolition of Work and Other Essays,
Beneath the Underground,
Friendly Fire,
Anarchy After Leftism, and numerous political essays.
Literary work
Beginning in the late
1970s, Bob Black was one of the earliest people to advocate what is now called
post-left anarchy. In his vociferously confrontational writing style he's criticized many of the perceived
sacred cows of
leftist,
anarchist, and
activist thought. An unaffiliated
New Leftist in his college years, Black became dissatisfied with
authoritarian socialist ideology and after discovering
anarchism spent much of his energy analyzing authoritarian tendencies within ostensibly "anti-authoritarian" groups. In his essay "My Anarchism Problem" he writes: "To call yourself an anarchist is to invite identification with an unpredictable array of associations, an ensemble which is unlikely to mean the same thing to any two people, including any two anarchists." Though not an
anarcho-primitivist, he sometimes writes for and has strongly influenced anarcho-primitivist publications.
Some of his work from the early 1980s (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
The Abolition of Work, Black's most widely read essay, draws upon the ideas of
Charles Fourier,
William Morris,
Paul Goodman, and
Marshall Sahlins. In it he argues for the abolition of the producer- and
consumer-based society, where, as Black contends, all of life is devoted to the
production and
consumption of
commodities. Attacking
Marxist state socialism as much as market
capitalism, Black argues that the only way for humans to be free is to reclaim their time from jobs and employment, instead turning necessary subsistence tasks into free play done voluntarily - an approach referred to as "ludic". The essay argues that "no-one should ever work", because work - defined as compulsory productive activity enforced by economic or political means - is the source of most of the misery in the world. Black denounces work for its compulsion, and for the forms it takes - as subordination to a boss, as a "job" which turns a potentially enjoyable task into a meaningless chore, for the degradation imposed by systems of work-discipline, and for the large number of work-related deaths and injuries - which Black typifies as "
homicide". He views the subordination enacted in workplaces as "a mockery of freedom", and denounces as hypocrites the various theorists who support freedom while supporting work. Subordination in work, Black alleges, makes people stupid and creates fear of freedom. Because of work, people become accustomed to rigidity and regularity, and don't have the time for friendship or meaningful activity. Most workers, he states, are dissatisfied with work (as evidenced by petty deviance on the job), so that what he says should be uncontroversial; however, it's controversial only because people are too close to the work-system to see its flaws.
Play, in contrast, isn't necessarily rule-governed, and is performed voluntarily, in complete freedom, as a
gift economy. He points out that
hunter-gatherer societies are typified by play, a view he backs up with the work of
Marshall Sahlins; he recounts the rise of hierarchal societies, through which work is cumulatively imposed, so that the compulsive work of today would seem incomprehensibly oppressive even to ancients and medieval peasants. He responds to the view that "work," if not simply effort or energy, is necessary to get important but unpleasant tasks done, by claiming that first of all, most important tasks can be rendered ludic, or "salvaged" by being turned into game-like and craft-like activities, and secondly that the vast majority of work doesn't need doing at all. The latter tasks are unnecessary because they only serve functions of commerce and social control that exist only to maintain the work-system as a whole. As for what is left, he advocates Charles Fourier's approach of arranging activities so that people will want to do them. He is also skeptical but open-minded about the possibility of eliminating work through labour-saving technologies. He feels the left can't go far enough in its critiques because of its attachment to building its power on the category of
workers, which requires a valorization of work.
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
Philosophy of Social Ecology. Though he doesn't refer directly to Black's work (an omission which Black interprets as symptomatic), 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 his view this is a kind of fake-dissident consumerism which ultimately has no impact on the functioning of capitalism because it fails to recognise the realities of the present. He grounds this polemic in a social-realist critique of relativism, which he associates with lifestyle anarchism as well as
postmodernism (to which he claims it's related). Ludic approaches, he claims, lead to social indifference and egotism similar to that of capitalism. Against this approach, he advocates a variety of anarchism in which social struggles take precedence over individual actions, with the evolution of the struggle emerging dialectically as in classical Marxist theory. The unbridgeable chasm of the book's title is between individual "autonomy" - which for Bookchin is a
bourgeois illusion - and social "freedom", which implies
direct democracy, municipalism, and leftist concerns with social opportunities. In practice his agenda takes the form of a combination of elements of
anarchist communism with a support for local-government and NGO initiatives which he refers to as
Libertarian Municipalism. He claims that "lifestyle anarchism" goes against the fundamental tenets of anarchism, accusing it of being "decadent" and "petty-bourgeois" and an outgrowth of American decadence and a period of declining struggle, and speaks in nostalgic terms of "the Left that was" as, for all its flaws, vastly superior to what has come since.
In response, Black published
Anarchy After Leftism which later became an important post-left work. 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). Black accuses Bookchin of moralism, which in post-left anarchism, refers to the imposition of abstract categories on reality in ways which twist and repress desires (as distinct from "ethics", which is an ethos of living similar to
Friedrich Nietzsche's call for an ethic "beyond good and evil"), and of "puritanism", a variant of this. He attacks Bookchin for his
Stalinist origins, and his failure to renounce his own past affiliations with what he himself had denounced as "lifestylist" themes (such as the slogans of
May 1968). He claims that the categories of "lifestyle anarchism" and "individualist anarchism" are
straw-men. He alleges that Bookchin adopts a "
work ethic", and that his favored themes, such as the denunciation of
Yuppies, actually repeat themes in mass consumer culture, and that he fails to analyze the social basis of capitalist "selfishness"; instead, Black calls for an enlightened "selfishness" which is simultaneously social, as in
Max Stirner's
work.
Bookchin, Black claims, has misunderstood the critique of work as asocial, when in fact it proposes non-compulsive social relations. He argues that Bookchin believes labour to be essential to humans, and thus is opposed to the abolition of work. And he takes him to case for ignoring Black's own writings on work, for idealizing technology, and for misunderstanding the history of work.
He denounces Bookchin's alleged failure to form links with the leftist groups he now praises, and for denouncing others for failings (such as not having a mass audience, and receiving favourable reviews from "yuppie" magazines) of which he's himself guilty. He accuses Bookchin of self-contradiction, such as calling the same people "bourgeois" and "lumpen", or "individualist" and "fascist". He alleges that Bookchin's "social freedom" is "metaphorical" and has no real content of freedom. He criticizes Bookchin's appropriation of the anarchist tradition, arguing against his dismissal of authors such as Stirner and
Paul Goodman, rebuking Bookchin for implicitly identifying such authors with anarcho-capitalism, and defending what he calls an "epistemic break" made by the likes of Stirner and Nietzsche. He alleges that the post-left "disdain for theory" is simply Bookchin's way of saying they ignore his own theories. He offers a detailed response to Bookchin's accusation of an association of eco-anarchism with fascism via a supposed common root in German romanticism, critizising both the derivation of the link (which he terms "
McCarthyist") and the portrayal of
romanticism itself, suggesting that Bookchin's sources such as
Mikhail Bakunin are no more politically correct than those he denounces, and accusing him of echoing fascist rhetoric and propaganda. He provides evidence to dispute Bookchin's association of "terrorism" with individualist rather than social anarchism. He points to carnivalesque aspects of the
Spanish Revolution to undermine Bookchin's dualism.
Black then rehearses the post-left critique of organization, drawing on his knowledge of anarchist history in an attempt to
rebut Bookchin's accusation that anti-organizationalism is based in ignorance. He claims among other things that direct democracy is impossible in urban settings, that it degenerates into bureaucracy, and that organizationalist anarchists such as the
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo sold out to state power. He argues that Bookchin isn't an anarchist at all, but rather, a "municipal statist" or "city-statist" committed to local government by a local state - smattering his discussion with further point-by-point objections (for instance, over whether
New York is an "organic community" given the alleged high crime-rate and whether confederated municipalities are compatible with
direct democracy). He also takes up Bookchin's opposition to
relativism, arguing that this is confirmed by science, especially anthropology - proceeding to produce evidence that Bookchin's work has received hostile reviews in social-science journals, thus attacking his scientific credentials, and to denounce dialectics as unscientific. He then argues point-by-point with Bookchin's criticisms of primitivism, debating issues such as life-expectancy statistics and alleged ecological destruction by hunter-gatherers. And he concludes with a clarion-call for an anarchist paradigm-shift based on post-left themes, celebrating this as the "anarchy after leftism" of the title.
Bookchin never replied to Black's critiques, which he continued in such essays as "Withered Anarchism," "An American in Paris," and "Murray Bookchin and the Witch-Doctors." Bookchin later repudiated anarchism in favor of a form of direct democracy he calls "communalism"
Controversy concerning the Church of the SubGenius
On one occasion, a member of the
Church of the SubGenius, John Hagen-Brenner, sent Black an "improvised explosive device consisting of an audio cassette holder wired with four cadium-type batteries, four flashbulbs, and five firecrackers"
(External Link
), 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 didn't go off."
(External Link) Black turned the device in to the police. Black believes that the device was sent to him because of criticism he'd made of the Church, and he's 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.
Further Information
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