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:

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.

Bob Black

Cleansed of its leftist residues, anarchy - anarchism minus Marxism - will be free to get better at being what it is.

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.

Bob Black

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment.

Bob Black

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps.

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?

Bob Black

I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance.

Bob Black

Law is any application for the official use of coercion that succeeds.

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.

Bob Black

A libertarian is just a Republican who takes drugs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bob Black

As for "decadence," that is an eminently bourgeois swear-word for people perceived to be having more fun than you are.

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.

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.

Bob Black

You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious.

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.

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.

Bob Black