Bob Black Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

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

Bob Black
Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced. This is axiomatic.

Bob Black
No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost all the evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive.

Bob Black
I look for the sources of domination and misery that are so deep down that they apply to the system and the apply to its supposed opposition also. … 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
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
Please allow me to introduce myself …
I am Black the Knife, I am secretly famous, I have designer genes. I'm on a macropsychotic diet, I'm anarchorexic, I underwent paleolithium treatment, I'm the 6-Pac-Man! I not only know Who Wrote the Book of Love, I edited out the mushy parts!

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

Bob Black
Murray Rothbard thinks egalitarianism is a revolt against nature, but his day is 24 hours long, just like everybody else's. If you spend most of your waking life taking orders or kissing ass, if you get habituated to hierarchy, you will become passive-aggressive, sado-masochistic, servile and stupefied, and you will carry that load into every aspect of the balance of your life. Incapable of living a life of liberty, you'll settle for one of its ideological representations, like libertarianism. You can't treat values like workers, hiring and firing them at will and assigning each a place in an imposed division of labor. The taste for freedom and pleasure can't be compartmentalized.

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
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
What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their airconditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? 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
Most libertarians think of themselves as in some sense egoists. If they believe in rights, they believe these rights belong to them as individuals. If not, they nonetheless look to themselves and others as so many individuals possessed of power to be reckoned with. Either way, they assume that the opposite of egoism is altruism. The altruists, Christian or Maoist, agree. A cozy accomodation; and, I submit, a suspicious one. What if this antagonistic intedependence, this reciprocal reliance reflects and conceals an accord? Could egoism be altruism's loyal opposition?

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
My (unfriendly) approach to modern society is to regard it as an integrated totality. Silly doctrinaire theories which regard the state as a parasitic excrescence on society cannot explain its centuries-long persistence, its ongoing encroachment upon what was previously market terrain, or its acceptance by the overwhelming majority of people including its demonstrable victims.

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 tell everyone not to do what I say! I'm behind the odd-ball, my ancestor was Putdown Man! Judge Crater freed me on my own recognizance, I ask: What would Harpo say?
For me, know ain't nothing but no misspelled, and all cretins are liars. I go-for-baroque, I'm a lowlife hierarch, I picked the Locke and entered the Avant-Garden of Eden. I got Spartacus to take the rap for me! I'm the heavyweight Light-Bringer, 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
A libertarian is just a Republican who takes drugs.

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
Unlike side issues like unemployment, unions, and minimum-wage laws, the subject of work itself is almost entirely absent from libertarian literature. Most of what little there is consists of Randite rantings against parasites, barely distinguishable from the invective inflicted on dissidents by the Soviet press....

Bob Black
Without even entering into the question of the world economy's ultimate dictation within narrow limits of everybody's productive activity, it's apparent that the source of the greatest direct duress experienced by the ordinary adult is not the state but rather the business that employs him. Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.

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
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
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
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