Bob Black quotes

Bob Black is an American anarchist writer and social critic, known for his essays challenging modern work and authority. His most famous work, "The Abolition of Work," questions the necessity and purpose of traditional employment in society. He has been influential in alternative political thought and the anti-work movement. Here are 75 of his quotes:

Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced. (Bob Black)
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. View quote
Bob Black
Cleansed of its leftist residues, anarchy - anarchism minus Marxism - will be free to get better at being what it is. View quote
Bob Black
We are so close to the world of work that we can't see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. View quote
Bob Black
Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. View quote
Bob Black
The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps. View quote
Bob Black
I'm the out-of-court jester who won't settle, I up the vigilante, I'm a law unto myself but break it anyway! I made a forced landing on the Moebius Strip and now I want to know, which side are you on? View quote
Bob Black
I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. View quote
Bob Black
Law is any application for the official use of coercion that succeeds. View quote
Bob Black
In truth the anarchists who assume the name have done nothing to challenge the state, not with windy unread jargon-filled writings, but with the contagious example of another way to relate to other people. Anarchists as they conduct the anarchism business are the best refutation of anarchist pretensions. View quote
Bob Black
Although it is by definition a union-oriented ideology, there is no perceptible syndicalist presence in any union. A syndicalist is more likely to be a professor than a proletarian, more likely to be a folk singer than a factory worker. Organizers on principle, syndicalists are disunited and factionalized. Remarkably, this dullest of all anarchisms attracts some of the most irrational and hysterical adherents. Only a rather small minority of North American anarchists are syndicalists. Syndicalism will persist, if at all, as a campus-based cult in increasing isolation from the main currents of anarchism. (Bob Black)
A libertarian is just a Republican who takes drugs. View quote
Bob Black
I think my basic viewpoint is that everything the left and right say about each other is true. And the reason it's true is because they have so much in common. View quote
Bob Black
I was never a member of For Ourselves, the San Francisco Bay Area pro-situationist group which wrote and self-published The Right to Be Greedy in 1974. The principal author was Bruce Gardner, who has long since dropped out of sight. View quote
Bob Black
If your language lacks poetry and paradox, it's unequal to the task of accounting for actuality. Otherwise anything radically new is literally unspeakable. View quote
Bob Black
There are libertarians who try to retrieve libertarianism from the Libertarian Party just as there are Christians who try to reclaim Christianity from Christendom and communists (I've tried to myself) who try to save communism from the Communist parties and states. They (and I) meant well but we lost. View quote
Bob Black
My target is what most libertarians have in common - with each other, and with their ostensible enemies. Libertarians serve the state all the better because they declaim against it. At bottom, they want what it wants. But you can't want what the state wants without wanting the state, for what the state wants is the conditions in which it flourishes. View quote
Bob Black
There is no need at present to produce new definitions of anarchism - it would be hard to improve on those long since devised by various eminent dead foreigners. Nor need we linger over the familiar hyphenated anarchisms, communist- and individualist- and so forth; the textbooks cover all that. More to the point is why we are no closer to anarchy today than were Godwin and Proudhon and Kropotkin and Goldman in their times. View quote
Bob Black
As for "decadence," that is an eminently bourgeois swear-word for people perceived to be having more fun than you are. View quote
Bob Black
People aren't as stupid as the politicians think. More and more of us are laughing off our 'civic duty' to vote, rejecting the role of compulsory constituent. View quote
Bob Black
Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them. (Bob Black)
Basically, revolutionaries never go far enough, and if they're not going to go far enough, they should stop upsetting people. Or killing them, for that matter. View quote
Bob Black
You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious. View quote
Bob Black
An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play. The participants potentiate each other's pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. View quote
Bob Black
Some people giving orders and others obeying them: this is the essence of servitude. Of course, as Hospers smugly observes, "one can at least change jobs," but you can't avoid having a job - just as under statism one can at least change nationalities but you can't avoid subjection to one nation-state or another. But freedom means more than the right to change masters. View quote
Bob Black