Bob Black - Biography

Biography

Black graduated from the University of Michigan and Georgetown Law School, and later took M.A. degrees in criminal justice from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany and in criminal law from the SUNY Buffalo School of Law. During his college days (1969-1973) 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 Situationism, 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 the “marginals’ milieu”. Since 1988 he has lived in upstate New York.

Black is best known for a 1985 essay, "The Abolition of Work," which has been widely reprinted and translated into at least thirteen languages (most recently, Urdu). 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 (Autonomedia, 1992) and Beneath the Underground (Feral House, 1994), 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. Black's most recent hard-copy book is "Anarchy after Leftism" (C.A.L. Press, 1996), a more or less point-by-point rebuttal of Murray Bookchin, "Social Anarchism: An Unbridgable Chasm" (A.K. Press, 1996), which had criticized as "lifestyle anarchism" various nontraditional tendencies in contemporary anarchism. Black's short book ("about an even shorter book," as he put it) was succeeded—as an E-book published in 20l1 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."

In the last decade, Black has focused on topics reflecting his education and reading in the sociology and the ethnography of law, resulting in writings often published in "Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed." His recent interests have included the anarchist implications of dispute resolution institutions in stateless primitive societies (arguing that mediation, arbitration, etc., cannot feasibly be annexed to the U.S. criminal justice system, because they presuppose anarchism and a relative social equality not found in state/class 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 disserved by the legal system. An article based on this presentation is forthcoming in Anarchy magazine.

Black's other recent interest, which grew out of his polemics with Bookchin, is 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 has always rejected the idea that democracy (direct or representative) is anarchist. He made this argument at a presentation at the Long Haul Bookshop (in Berkeley) in 2008. In 2011, C.A.L. Press published as a pamphlet "Debunking Democracy," elaborating on the speech and providing citation support.