Bob Black

Bob Black (born Robert Charles Black, Jr. on January 4, 1951) is an American anarchist and lawyer. He is the author of The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, Beneath the Underground, Friendly Fire, Anarchy After Leftism, and numerous political essays.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Bob Black was one of the earliest people to advocate what is now called post-left anarchy. In his vociferously confrontational writing style he has criticized many of the perceived sacred cows of leftist, anarchist, and activist thought. An unaffiliated New Leftist in his college years, Black became dissatisfied with authoritarian socialist ideology and after discovering anarchism spent much of his energy analyzing authoritarian tendencies within ostensibly "anti-authoritarian" groups. In his essay "My Anarchism Problem" he writes: "To call yourself an anarchist is to invite identification with an unpredictable array of associations, an ensemble which is unlikely to mean the same thing to any two people, including any two anarchists." Though not an anarcho-primitivist, he sometimes writes for and has strongly influenced anarcho-primitivist publications.

Some of his work from the early 1980s (anthologized in The Abolition of Work and Other Essays) highlights his critiques of the nuclear freeze movement ("Anti-Nuclear Terror"), the editors of Processed World ("Circle A Deceit: A Review of Processed World"), "radical feminists" ("Feminism as Fascism"), and Libertarians ("The Libertarian As Conservative"). Later books, also essay collections, were "Friendly Fire" (1992) and "Beneath the Underground" (1994).

In the last 15 years, years, Black has concentrated on the critique of several contemporary anarchist ideologues and tendencies from the standpoint of post-left anarchism -- an expression introduced in his book "Anarchy after Leftism" 1997). The book was a rejoinder to Murray Bookchin's "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm" (1996). In November 2010, "Nightmares of Reason," his longest book, was posted online at the Anarchist Library and elsewhere. This is a more wide-ranging critique of the work of Murray Bookchin as a whole.

In 1996 Bob Black wrote a letter to the Seattle police[ http://www.seesharppress.com/black.html] claiming that Jim Hogshire was manufacturing opium in his apartment. According to Black, Hogshire assaulted him and pointed a rifle at him. Since the letter became public, Black has been denounced by many activists including Ward Churchill.