Bob Black
Bob Black
Robert Charles "Bob" Black, Jr.is an American anarchist. He is the author of the books The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, Beneath the Underground, Friendly Fire, Anarchy After Leftism, Defacing the Currency, and numerous political essays...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth4 January 1951
CountryUnited States of America
jobs mean order
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.
work typical slave
A [typical] worker is a part-time slave.
stupid thinking people
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.
play might ifs
Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced.
world misery source
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world.
work stupid chance
You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous.
early front game leave might morning somewhere
We might get there at 9:30 in the morning for a 1 o'clock game and then leave somewhere between 7 and 8 that night. We like to be right in front of Farley Hall, if we get there early enough.
lessons
The lessons that are going to come out of this thing are significant, but a lot of them are going to be contextual,
anomaly considered north whether
It has to be considered whether this (looting) was an anomaly or if this is what we could see in another North American city.
abolish amount cut departure except free hand happen insofar kinds massively matter multitude pleasing possible present remains replace requires rid serves simply transform useful useless variety work worse yield
It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes, except that they happen to yield useful end-products.
fifth gonna
I know it's our year. We're gonna take the fifth ring.
confidence fast kids swim year
We're going to take this one year at a time. Our kids have a lot of confidence that they can swim fast when they have to.
stupid television chance
You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.
people degrees doe
[Libertarians] don't denounce what the state does, they just object to who's doing it. This is why the people most victimized by the state display the least interest in libertarianism. Those on the receiving end of coercion don't quibble over their coercers' credentials. If you can't pay or don't want to, you don't much care if your deprivation is called larceny or taxation or restitution or rent. If you like to control your own time, you distinguish employment from enslavement only in degree and duration.