On Bob Black

For the Postmodern Intellectual

The various political movements that have come into contact with the modern world are almost entirely composed of men attempting to defeat some invisible menace. Likewise, the utopian humanist, whose vision is as short-sighted as it is unitarian¹, fares no better. I have never encountered stranger beings on this living rock! Indeed, there are many others whose delusions run as deep as Camus’s when he observed the nihilistic universe, only to paint over its blight with human existential politics—the worst of the lot.

Yet, there is one delusion that warrants arrest, one so pervasive in modern minds that it seems almost unbelievable. It is the most extreme reaction to technocapital, yet so unconscious of it that it borders on absurdity: the new anarchist movements that analyzed themselves as “post-left” or “post-anarchism,” or whatever neologism they now favor. They claim to represent the true expression of postmodern thought into the political and its micros.

Of course, most of the intellectual and philosophical weight comes from Saul Newman. People like Bob Black and Hakim Bey cannot uphold anything greater than Newman’s work. Newman is a genuine philosopher, while the others are extreme NEETs, pedophiles, or both.

At great length, I will discuss the works of Black and Newman. I do not wish to keep you here forever, but I must still analyze this growing mental Dühringisms² that has taken hold of my fellow “young philosophers.” These anarchists dismiss the reactionary strain of postmodern nihilism as “really essentialist and extremely oppressive,”³ such reductionism, indeed.

It is now my mission to uncover what these anarchists are truly hiding in their Führerbunker.

The Abolition of Work

It is rather courteous of me to begin with the most popular work to emerge from the post-anarchist movement: The Abolition of Work by Bob Black. This piece is largely a critique of the modern capitalist work ethic. Black’s disdain extends to the Marxist veneration of work, a concept he shamelessly stole from Stirner and then distorted into something removed from its original intent. In his quest to destroy work he had to say that leisure is not even pleasure, as well. Without further ado, let us begin this deep dive into the seas of (work)anarchy.

“No one should ever work.”

Right from the first sentence, we are hit with a “should” statement. This, of course, comes from a moralist position of value—a chronic issue on the anarchist left. Why abolish capitalism? Most anarchists, even if unconsciously, make moral claims to justify their politics. One example is the condemnation of the state’s monopoly on power as inherently terrible. I still heavily doubt that today’s post-anarchists have rejected the monopoly on power framing.

Any so-called postmodernist who operates within the realm of “should” statements betrays their claim to postmodernity. The moral foundation of “should” is rooted in classical religions—Judaism or, arguably, its greatest influence, Magianism. Postmodernism sought to dismantle religious foundations entirely. To suggest otherwise is idiotic. Bataille, one of the philosophical forefathers of postmodernism, was explicit in his desire to destroy the moral compass until nothing but nihilism remained. Why? Because reality took first seat for postmodern philosophers—they cared little for religion and even less for idealism. Their goal was to uncover the world as it is, and in doing so, they discovered nihilism and the freedom it brought.

A religious man cannot comprehend this; he cannot grasp reality no matter how forcefully it is presented to him. He remains trapped in his delusions, clinging to doctrines that destroy anything real or what once was real. The modern church’s recent embrace of moral subjectivism only indicates the unreality of the “should” statement. These have always been illusions, propped up by dogma. There is no greater force guiding a “should.” You earn, and that’s it—you earned your birth, even if your free will later rejects this natalist horror. What this has shown us is that: liberal theology as revealed religion to be a void of lies, a hollow memetic that deceives even its own creators.

It seems Black fails to grasp the postmodern project. He perfectly aligns with the rest of the anarchists in their moral claims, so there is little “post-left” about him.

“Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any 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.”

I agree—but only to the extent that ending your life would also stop your suffering. If work is truly the devil and the source of all sin, then, by all means, start a death cult that starves civilization into oblivion. I won’t lie and say Bataille loved work; he found it miserable. Why? “In that comedy of splendor, mankind strove miserably to escape from misery.”

Yet, to equate work with evil is to conflate suffering with morality. For there to be evil, there must also be good—this moral binary is religious at its core. Suffering, on the other hand, is a natural process, intrinsic to this dirty reality itself. Death, the greatest suffering, also hands us the ultimate return to immanence, the state we held before our time had come.

Black’s vision of such a utopia, where laborers is free to be about and suffering is to be set back to hell itself, is more utopian than the wildest dreams of the Whigs. Even they were not so insane. Bataille himself recognized that any attempt to transcend work, even through the accursed share, requires work as a precondition. His analysis of sovereignty demonstrates that such moments of freedom are fleeting, always tethered to the realities of the machine of civilization.

“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. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.”

The same issues arise with the last part of his text. "Need" statements are not much different from "should" statements. Black should try to be more careful with his wording, but the play itself seems impossible when we consider the work that must be put into the economic machine, and the work we’ll have to do until we can’t anymore. That’s how the current socio-economic system works. People call it capitalism, but it’s more accurate to call it technocapitalism. Like technology, the system cannot stop working; it can’t take a lunch break. It moves too fast for technonomic time to allow such a pause. The economy simply cannot function if its system pauses, just as it cannot pause for humanity. It cannot hear our cries; its old godliness has transcended creatures like us. The only thing we can do to keep the world from descending into chaos is to work for it, just as it works for us.

Yes, they propose a system fundamentally different from technocapitalism— a less workaholic form of socialism, i.e., a less Marxist version. However, I have serious doubts that this can transpire and still function properly. We cannot forget the Economic Calculation Problem or the knowledge problem, both of which are difficult to overcome in a socialist economy. But the socialist economy he’s laid out for us doesn’t seem very developed from what we've seen so far. Perhaps he will solve the socialist economic problem and save us all from nihilism!

I’d also like to return to the play function that Bob is talking about. He’ll elaborate on it later, but I think it’s worth noting that this play system doesn’t seem too distant from the concept of the "accursed share." However, as I mentioned before, for something to be accursed, there needs to be a large enough excess in the economy for such things to happen. In other words, there needs to be excess that can be spent. But in this system, Black has laid out on a silver platter, excess cannot be spent because there will be none to spend, leading to an economic devastation that can only rival death itself. People will be sent back to the coal mines to work our hearts out again.

“The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for ‘reality,’ the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously—or maybe not—all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.”

The ludic life is indeed incompatible with being formed in a capitalist reality—or an “existing reality.” If you take the irrational market of capitalism and combine it with human “playtime,” you would create the most disastrous form of inhuman humanism. The inhuman is turned human merely by the mention of a market that must exist so that humans can play. This is, of course, a rationalist bourgeois idea, as they still believed this even after capitalism had vetoed their place in the economy. From there, they moved on and conquered reality, transforming it into Simulacra and Simulation. But even reality itself cannot withstand this heat of bright humanism, as the universe will always be filled with hardship. Hardship is a core part of hard work.⁴

Despite that, why did Marx have to be a “workerist”? The reason is that of the same reason he also believed capitalism was flawed—specifically, that the capitalist economy, when it entered the exchange value relationship in the never-ending cycle of production, led to exchanges between people that were unnecessary. Things like product mystification in the exchange relation were wasteful, causing the economy to be less utilitarian than it ought to be. This is the main reason Jean Baudrillard referred to Marx's critique of the economy as petite bourgeois in nature, as it still adhered to the Calvinist goal. Marx wanted the economy to be as effective as possible, free yet as efficient as it could be, by removing exchange relations and, in doing so, ending capitalism altogether. This would complete the rationalization of the economy.

In short, Marx wanted to defeat the anarchy of production that capitalism had clung to, and he sought to bring an end to nonsense of mystification, and thus birth a moral economy. For the anarchists, however, it was much more a matter of open moral reasoning. Their idea of work was borrowed from French proto-communism, and they naturally believed that work would lead to a better human quality of life. They were hardcore humanists, concerned that the communers should work for the sake of the commune’s people, which would create a dependency cycle—a point that Stirner would critique until his deathbed.

Both Marx and the anarchists, like Black himself, believed in a humanist economy. However, unlike Marx and the classicists, Black argued that humans would be better off rejecting work entirely. In doing so, he seemed to embark on a mission of total friendly fire, without fully understanding why they placed such value on work.

“…believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.”

This single line is particularly striking to me, as it seems Black has based his whole ideology on the rejection of work and, by extension, the annihilation of pain. It’s a Christian end to all that may harm, indeed. Black, you seem to have such a fierce hatred for work because you believe in little else, but he does point out that his fellow anarchists didn’t believe in much, and he was obviously correct in that guard.

However, Marx was not a shallow man, nor was his belief.

'“Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists—except that I’m not kidding—I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work—and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs—they are strangely reluctant to say so.”

You’d say the liberals didn’t go far enough? Jump on the train, Robespierre—we’re heading for French Revolution round two to show what real liberalism is! Anyway, he’ll discuss employment later, but for now, I’ll point out that when they tried this with the Russian revolutionary army, it fell apart. They had to revert to the old mechanisms of hierarchy—the so-called “evil” idea of elitism. It’s no surprise that an anarchist of Black’s nature would despise employment.

Conservatives support right-to-work laws? Does that make all of us who value work conservatives? Marx would be ashamed! You’ve now stumbled into bourgeois socialism yourself. Instead, I suppose you’d support right-to-play laws, which your analysis so far suggests. And, as you admit in the next line, you’ve borrowed from Lafargue—stealing outright. Lafargue, a massive liberal, lived entirely off the earth without any real philosophical foundation beyond social parasitism. What else could a man of such low social standing claim as a philosophy? I doubt he could have found anything better to justify his life.

The surrealists, by contrast, weren’t kidding. They believed in their ideas as much as you do, but in a much smarter way. They sought to stop the capitalist machine and then build a communist economy after the fact. Meanwhile, all you seem to want to do is produce nothing. Black doesn’t understand why past socialist movements supported work. The surrealists supported it as a means to an end—they had some grasp of reality.

If we take your critique of the left and redirect it back at you, I’d sadly have to point out that you’re still relying on the mass of play provided by others to meet your needs. Let’s be honest—even if this were possible, someone would still need to work in the factories to supply the people who choose to paint instead of doing anything practical. The dependency cycle from the classicalists has come back to swallow you whole.

“They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They’ll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don’t care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.”

The heart of any critique lies in the fundamental aspects of work itself. You cannot analyze work without addressing wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, and profitability. These elements are central to any economic analysis. While work is just one part of the economic equation, it seems black focuses solely on this topic, ignoring the interconnected factors mentioned above. A proper economic critique requires understanding the larger system, as Bataille, Lyotard, and Marx all sought to do.

Black, however, seems unaware of this, focusing instead on an out-of-reach egoism. Marx’s critique of political economy was ultimately about how capitalists exploit the labor of the working class. Even though I do not fully agree with Marx, I do align with Austrian economists, who also addressed work. Böhm-Bawerk did so in his critique of Marx, and Hayek wrote about it in his founding documents of capitalist cybernetics.

I am going to skip a large part of this because most of it can be critiqued in the same sense the ones above were. As the foundations of his work were already rocky, it will only get worse. Most of it doesn’t understand how the economy works and why these are put in place. He tries to construct his false narrative into every part of his work, which he sees as awful because it is “forcing you.” Welcome to reality, Black. You have no free will here, as you were also planned to be born in chains. So this means I’ll only point out areas that piqued my interest.

“Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace—surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn’t have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.”

Foucault’s theories of how power works are the reason for your own downfall, as you cannot understand that power has to always exist. In a modern society, where rebellion is constantly being subverted, Foucault gave little inquiry into if they were wrong (far from it, as he was a neoliberal, as he thought power could never vanish at this point). Comparing these mechanisms to Nero is like Augustus and him. Both were authoritarian, but only one could be seen as bad. The result of power is not always bad. If this were true, we would have a large modern movement going against work itself, which hasn’t seemed to come about, as Black’s movement isn’t very large in the current day. As Foucault analyzed, if there is power, there will be rebellion, and it usually happens against some type of negative power. There isn’t a lot of rebellion in the workplace, although you could say this is the fault of not recognizing this as power. But then again, anarchistic movements that Foucault describes do not always have a full grasp of power, so that whole argument falls apart. The gig economy could be seen as a possible rebellion against the control ethic of work, but then again, they do not want to abolish work at all. Quite the opposite, actually, as they want more work opportunities open.

Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.

The official line of my state is: Authority is good, and so is freedom. They are not mutually exclusive; they work together to form a baseline of society and how it works. The opposition against authority has little to say about this, as they have no conception of how real power relations work. Without authority, there could be no freedom, and vice versa.'

“I disagree. 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.”

With my critique of Bob Black and his economic and philosophical murder at the highest degree, of course, if I had to add more to that critique itself, I would have to say this: so far, he cannot understand the economic system in any regard, with his poorly conceived critique of capitalism, as he sees that as the primary social object keeping the work cycle alive. He goes back on his word of "play" for the one problem that, insofar, work has to exist for the creation of use-values, for the collective joy of the men too starved to think. His critique collapses under scrutiny, and as he misinterprets the postmodern philosopher to justify the moral world as if work was “totalitarian and all-seeing.”

In these structures, he hopes for the grandest of life-affirmation but fails so severely to do so. I must ask the question: when does play turn back to work? When it bores us to have to do it? Inevitably everything reaches a point like that, and the natural structures of governance of the workplace, and Civilization as a whole. As Foucault said, and that Black claims in some part to be influenced by, it is almost impossible to stop the relation between a boss and the workers. A boss will always form around a workplace; the most elite of men will, as such, do it. And is that when it turns back to work? I’d think that’s what Bob believes.

So, haec censura claudus est.

1. “First, a sketch of the existing racism-antiracism contention in its commonplace or dominant form. The antiracist, or universal humanist position — when extracted from its most idiotic social-constructivist and hypocritical alt-racist expressions — amounts to a program for global genetic pooling. Cultural barriers to the Utopian vision of a unitary ‘human’ gene pool, stirred with increasing ardor into homogeneous intermixture, are deplored as atavistic obstructions to the realization of a true, common humanity.“ - Nick Land, Alternative Right(Hyper-Racism)

2. “He thus proclaims himself to be the only true philosopher of today and of the ‘foreseeable’ future. Whoever departs from him departs from truth. Many people, even before Herr Dühring, have thought something of this kind about themselves, but — except for Richard Wagner — he is probably the first who has calmly blurted it out. And the truth to which he refers is” - Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring (II. What Herr Dühring Promises)

3. https://x.com/hellothere314_/status/1819524090644123653

4. “Next is a general theory of hierarchies, of ‘order as rank-order (composition)’ (45). And, finally, a ‘diagnosis of nihilism, of the hyperbolic of desire. Against a Platonic or Christianizing move – of some final resting place to rest one’s optimistic inertial determination within a teleological and utopian order of desire beyond the world of becoming where nothing will ever be desired again;  instead, libidinal materialism offers the dynamism of unending ‘Dionysian Pessimism’: the recurrence of Freudian pleaseure/pain without end: the exuberance of energetic forces and creativity unbounded.” - S. C. Hickman, Social Ecologies(Libidinal Materialism: Nick Land’s Philosophy of Desire)