Bob Black - Definition and Overview

Bob Black is an American anarchist. He is the author of The Abolition of Work and other essays, The Best Book Catalogue In The World by Bob Black, Friendly Fire and Anarchy After Leftism. He has also written numerous critiques of other anarchists, notedly Murray Bookchin.

Black is known to be disliked by many figures in the underground publishing scene, however, because of disputes between Black and publishers. One altercation (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Altercation) between him and writer Jim Hogshire resulted in Hogshire being arrested—a move that alienated Black from many anarchists, as he boasted that he had informed on Hogshire to the police leading to the latter's arrest. It is alleged that Jim Hogshire aimed an automatic-rifle at Bob Black while standing between him and the exit. According to Black's version of the events, Hogshire, a Muslim, became incensed when Black began to rail against the idea of organized religion while eating dinner at the Hogshire's home. Using Hogshire's wife as a human shield, Black maneuvered himself out of the house and escaped. Craving revenge and knowing that Hogshire had a cache of illegal drugs in his house he made an anonymous phone call to the Seattle police. Hogshire was later indicted for felony drug and weapon's charges. After news of this event became known, several radical bookstores, including Philadelphia's Wooden Shoe and Boston's Lucy Parson's Center banned all of Bob Black's books from their shelves. Loompanic's Unlimited, Black's publisher, hosted a supposed book-burning of all of Black's books in their possension.

Black's thesis in "The Abolition of Work" draws upon work by Marshall Sahlins and Richard Borshay Lee. Bob Black is a post-left anarchist. He is also holds a Law degree, and briefly worked as a criminal defense attorney as a young man. His uses his legal training in his writing which are often punctuated by extensive research, typically employed to uncover shaming details of his subject's life.

He currently resides in Albany, New York. His mailing address can be found in most (if not all) of his printed works.

Quotes

• "Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair."

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

External links

• Collection of essays by Bob Black (http://www.spunk.org/library/writers/black/)
• Another page of Bob Black's writing (http://www.zpub.com/notes/black.html)