Bob Black

(an essay from the Bob Black anthology Friendly Fire)

Bob Black is a revolutionary, smirks David Ramsey Steele, “the way Gene Autry was a cowboy” (“The Abolition of Breathing,” Liberty, March 1989).  A Marxist turned libertarian, Steele is miffed that to me his forward progress is just walking in circles.  Steele’s is the longest harshest review The Abolition of Work and Other Essays has ever received, and while no nit to my discredit is too small to pick [1], my critique of work is the major target.  Steele tries, not merely to refute me, but to make me out to be a gesticulating clown, by turns infantile and wicked (they are probably synonyms for Steele).  “I’m joking and serious,” he quotes me in opening, but if I am a sometimes successful joker I am serious only “in the sense that a child wailing for more candy is serious.”  Steele wants to bomb me back into the Stone age, just where my ideas (he warns) would land the handful of humans who might survive the abolition of work.
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Bob Black

“Wild Justice”

Crime as an Anarchist Source of Social Order

Introduction

We’ve all heard the phrase “law and order” — as if they go together. The slogan assumes that law promotes order, and that crime subverts order. “Anarchists believe the phrase law and order is one of the great deceptions of our age.”[1] I’m going to discuss just one of the reasons why this slogan is a lie. One reason is that law itself may create or perpetuate disorder. This is a familiar anarchist theme[2] which I will not go into here. Another reason, which is not familiar, is that often crime promotes order. Crime can be a source of order — especially where the law isn’t — and this is surprisingly common. If crime is ever a source of social order, it can only be an anarchist source of social order. This will be my thesis here.

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