Bob Black quotes - page 2

You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. (Bob Black)
A glance at the world confirms that their utopian capitalism just can't compete with the state. With enemies like libertarians, the state doesn't need friends. View quote
Bob Black
They don't denounce what the state does, they just object to who's doing it. View quote
Bob Black
Those on the receiving end of coercion don't quibble over their coercers' credentials. View quote
Bob Black
But freedom means more than the right to change masters. View quote
Bob Black
In other words, given a choice between anarchism and anarchy, most anarchists would go for the anarchism ideology and subculture rather than take a dangerous leap into the unknown, into a world of stateless liberty. View quote
Bob Black
Every organization has more in common with every other organization than it does with any of the unorganized. View quote
Bob Black
Do you have ideas, or do ideas have you? View quote
Bob Black
The history of anarchism is a history of unparalleled defeat and martyrdom, yet anarchists venerate their victimized forebears with a morbid devotion which occasions suspicion that the anarchists, like everybody else, think that the only good anarchist is a dead one. View quote
Bob Black
We need anarchists unencumbered by anarchism. Then, and only then, we can begin to get serious about fomenting anarchy. View quote
Bob Black
They've been mystified by their own metaphors. Like the market, the state is an activity, not an entity. (Bob Black)
What I really want to see is work turned into play. View quote
Bob Black
Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade. View quote
Bob Black
Most work serves the predatory purposes of commerce and coercion and can be abolished outright. The rest can be automated away and/or transformed - by the experts, the workers who do it - into creative, playlike pastimes whose variety and conviviality will make extrinsic inducements like the capitalist carrot and the Communist stick equally obsolete. View quote
Bob Black
I stubbornly persist in my opposition to the state. But not because, as anarchists so often thoughtlessly declaim, the state is not "necessary". Ordinary people dismiss this anarchist assertion as ludicrous, and so they should. Obviously, in an industrialized class society like ours, the state is necessary. View quote
Bob Black
Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it. View quote
Bob Black
Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. View quote
Bob Black
Silly doctrinaire theories which regard the state as a parasitic excrescence on society cannot explain its centuries-long persistence, its ongoing encroachment upon what was previously market terrain, or its acceptance by the overwhelming majority of people including its demonstrable victims. View quote
Bob Black
Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. View quote
Bob Black
People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. View quote
Bob Black
The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. (Bob Black)
Post-leftist anarchists are striking off in many directions. Some may find the way - better yet, the ways - to a free future. View quote
Bob Black
No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. View quote
Bob Black
Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. View quote
Bob Black
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. View quote
Bob Black