Bob Black

Robert Charles Black Jr. (born 1951) is an American anarchist author and former lawyer whose essay The Abolition of Work (1985) circulated widely in the early counter-economic and zine cultures of the 1980s and 1990s and remains a touchstone of post-left anarchist thought. He has published several collections of essays and pamphlets developing themes of play, refusal, and critique of the left.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, he earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan, a master's from Georgetown, and a JD from Georgetown University Law Center, though he did not practice law for long. He moved through Marxist, Situationist, and anarchist milieus before settling into a sustained polemical career writing for zines, samizdat newsletters, and small radical presses.

The Abolition of Work argues that productive labor as organized under industrial capitalism and state socialism alike is the source of most of the misery in the world, and proposes its replacement with self-directed "productive play." His other books include Beneath the Underground (1994), Friendly Fire (1992), Anarchy after Leftism (1997), and Defacing the Currency (2012).

He became known for combative public feuds with figures including Murray Bookchin, the Processed World collective, and the Loompanics publisher Mike Hoy, generating decades of pamphlet warfare that became case studies for scholars of contemporary anarchism. He has lived for years in upstate New York, working sporadically as a paralegal and continuing to publish.

The name Bob is a familiar form of Robert, from the Germanic Hrodebert meaning "bright fame." Carried by a writer who has spent his life publishing in the unfashionable margins of American radical thought, it suits him with a certain self-aware understatement.