(3) BOB BLACK –

THE ABOLITION OF WORK (1985)

Anarchism as political zen.

Or how I learned to stop working and love the slack.

I’m joking and serious – a personal mantra or zen koan I picked up from this very writer (in this very book), somewhat like the other (para)phrase I picked up from him, I make my own rules and break them anyway. (“I’m a law unto myself but break it anyway!”)

I sometimes note that I have a soft spot for anarchism. Bob Black is the reason why.

Which I guess would mean it is more accurate for me to note I have a soft spot for an anarchist (albeit there are one or two others) because Bob Black is an anarchist like no other – an idiosyncratic ideology indeed.

So of course most other anarchists hate him – and he hates them right back. He evokes something of the spirit of Camille Paglia as my preceding entry in that way, except with anarchists in his case as opposed to feminists in hers. Although mind you Black wrote an essay – including in this book as per its full title, The Abolition of Work and Other Essays – skewering feminism as much as he skewered anarchism elsewhere. There’s not much he won’t skewer – it’s one barbed shish kebab after another for Bob.

Black also shares Paglia’s virtuosity as a prose-poet provocateur par excellence and aficionado of aphorism – an enduring influence on my own aphoristic quest for quips and koans. As the man himself said – “If your language lacks poetry and paradox, it’s unequal to the task of accounting for actuality”

Bob Black is why I see anarchism as a form of political zen. Unworkable in practice, except perhaps for rare masters and remote monasteries which achieve enlightenment, but good for questioning the basic assumptions by which we live and maybe – just maybe – learning to live better, or at least clearer.

And the most basic assumption Black sets out to despise and destroy – his bête noire, his idée fixe, and his raison d’être all rolled up into one magnum opus – is work.

“No one should ever work”.

Finally a political manifesto I can get behind! And certainly one that seared itself deep in my psyche when I read it – although it helped that I read it in the depths of the most bullsh*t job I had, and that it spoke to me in a way that no one else did.

Even my brainwashed co-workers, who looked at me baffled when I said I was bored – “Don’t you have anything to do?” “Yes, I have lots of things to do” I would retort, “they’re all boring – that’s why I’m bored”.

But I digress. Back to Black – “Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost all the 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.”

As an anarcho-primitivist, Black is playing the long game. Taking a leaf from Marshall Sahlins and not unlike that other anarchist in my top ten, James C. Scott, Black sees the Industrial Revolution as just the tip of the work iceberg that goes all the way down to the Neolithic Revolution.

And when I say Black is playing the long game, I mean literally – “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 the way, that directly leads into that koan I’ve taken for my own – “You may be wondering if I’m joking or serious. I’m joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn’t have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn’t triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I’d like life to be a game — but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.”

And if nothing else, you have to love how he puts the Groucho into Marx, out-manifesting the manifesto – “Workers of the world. . . relax!”

Viva la revolution!

RATING: 4 STARS****

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